1. First up, on My Unsung Hero, NPR tells the story of Solitaire Miles (name inspired by the Bond girl), who nearly died at the age of eighteen from medical malpractice. Solitaire’s mother rushed her to the hospital after she had a stroke, and seemingly on account of her hippy-coded name, the doctor promptly accused Solitaire of being on drugs and/or birth control, suggesting the tragic stroke was her fault. Then one of her teachers, a deep-voiced Catholic nun, showed up and
backed that doctor up against the hospital wall, and as I watched from my bed, she grabbed his white coat collar in her hands and made it really clear that her student wouldn’t be abused under her watch. The doctor was speechless … then he left the room. After that moment, the hospital staff suddenly remembered how to behave. I became a patient rather than a suspect. And then Sister Maura did something even more important: she stayed by my bedside while I drifted in and out of consciousness. She saved my life.
It’s depressingly rare to hear these stories of the church as a refuge, coming in when the powers of the world accuse and condemn; when church figures act as a counterweight to the judgment of the world, rather than an intensification of it. Maura in that moment embodied Jesus’ relational intervention to offer grace where the world offers judgment, as well as the Holy Spirit’s work as advocate, with a life-saving outcome.
2. Yesterday at Noema, Jacob Dreyer posted a thoughtful (and to me slightly scandalizing) reflection on the transhumanist movement. It’s easy to write off that stuff as fringe, but in Silicon Valley and international circles, it continues to gain ground.
Technology promises to give us ever more mastery over the material world, to solve every problem that exists, except the moral, relational, spiritual, behavioral, and emotional ones. At the same time, birthrates are in “unprecedented decline,” and far from reversing that trend, belief in a coming material utopia may accelerate it:
At the same moment when technologically driven increases to human lifespans seem to be on the horizon, our species has taken on a kind of suicide mentality: Far fewer people are having children. Research suggests this may be linked to the rise of computation and technology. A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that early smartphone access in the U.S. contributed to lower birthrates. … In China and India, where AI has arrived more rapidly, the birthrates have declined more rapidly, too.
This seems driven by at least three factors: for some, the changing economy makes having kids less feasible; for others, it’s general uncertainty about the future. But for many in the technology world, the future is about optimizing the human collective, whether in a growth direction … or not:
From the labs in Wuxi to the experimental startups in Pudong’s Zhangjiang Science City, there is a sense that biopower is state power. But China’s biotech boom is not driven by Silicon Valley’s libertarian fantasies or metaphysical anxieties. It comes from a socialist-industrial legacy that sees the population as part of a mathematical equation it needs to maximize … As the population rapidly ages — more than a quarter is expected to be over the age of 60 by 2040 — China is approaching the human body as it once approached steel, cement and architectural blueprints: as an ingredient in the next stage of development. […]
In China, I’ve heard casual comments to the effect that it would be fine for the country to revert to a few hundred million or so people — down from the country’s more than 1.4 billion today — if they were the “right” people. A nation of intelligent, rich Chinese with no acne, no mental illnesses, no peasants or poor. In China, transhumanism is a post-socialist industrial theology: the dream of a perfected collective body.
Our historically unparalleled methods of measuring and controlling every aspect of life allows for more and more “optimization,” and AI is a major driver of this. In 30 seconds, you can get ChatGPT to suggest the perfect diet for your body and goals, the perfect laundry routine for your priorities — in short, you can optimize every aspect of your life. For whatever reason, we find that appealing and empowering at the individual level but off-putting and dystopian, to say the least, at the collective level.
Our surprise by or aversion to the technologists’ vision raises the question: “optimization” by what criteria? The American answer mostly seems to be whatever criteria you, the individual, define. And for most of us, if we’re honest, number of kids is one factor to balance against others — time for career, time for hobbies, savings, quality of life — in calibrating our vision of an “optimized” life as the sum of different tradeoffs, each carefully analyzed and chosen. That we’re not good at predicting what will make us happy doesn’t seem to slow us down. In some ways, the techno-futurists’ utopian dreams are outlandish or morally repugnant. But in other ways, they reveal similar assumptions embedded in our culture and ourselves.
Some of that optimization mania is borne of necessity: when one must work, grocery shop, keep up a house, figure out what’s for dinner, do laundry, clean, care for children (or ferry them around), pay bills, do yard work, and manage all the other demands of modern life, every minute saved feels is a genuine gift. On the other hand, at least some of the high bars we’re trying to clear are bars we put there ourselves: not only necessity but also self-justification drive us to exhaustion. Technology functions both as help (allowing us to jump higher) but also accelerant (raising the bar). Inasmuch as technology continues to empower us, we will probably reach for ever more ambitious levels of comfort, capability, and achievement. But to what end?
3. If all that optimization talk makes you want to run for the hills, then lace up your running shoes, strap on your biometric watch, and sign in to Strava. Over at Compact Magazine, Felice Basbøll has been training for her first half-marathon and takes a dive into running culture:
Suddenly, even recreational exercisers are acting like athletes. […]
Even professional athletes didn’t use to be this neurotic. Suzanne Lenglen had cognac in the middle of her 1919 Wimbledon final to soothe her nerves. My old figure skating coach used to reminisce about the wild parties that were thrown on the Friday night before a competition. … Now, professional athletes get their bloodwork done, test their VO2 max on fancy machines, and tailor their schedules to eliminate all inefficiencies. The amateurs go as far as they can with wearables and AI-driven personal training plans.
Gen Z might be getting into running, but we are still bored, lonely, and anxious. Perhaps it is no accident that we neurotics are drawn to running, a uniquely trackable sport, where every minor improvement incrementally increases your predicted race times on Strava. Every element of your diet, sleep schedule, and social life can be adapted to it. “Healthy is beautiful” is repeated ad nauseam and we become walking public health campaigns. We are slowly outsourcing intuition to optimizable metrics. Every unforeseen life event or ingested substance can throw off the regimen; complete lack of resilience to any outside stimulus is reframed as health. “Holistic” just means adapting everything to fit your workout routine.
Decades ago, feminists imagined a utopia where women have no scruples about our looks. But the aesthetic approach at least had a vision of a life to look good for. Instead of exercising in order to be able to eat, drink, and enjoy life, “health” has become the whole lifestyle.
That last line hits it: is health an ultimate end in itself, or is the point of good health being able to enjoy something better — friends, family, nature, making a positive impact on the world, prayer, etc.?
A friend who studied in a far-away country recalled English being viewed as the great enabler. If you wanted to be a great doctor, study English; a great teacher, study English. It opened opportunities to the world. But he recalled that some students who entered with a very definite idea of what they wanted to do got sidetracked — they became so invested in the means to the end (fluency in English) that they lost interest in the end itself. They became professional translators.
Something like that seems to have pervaded modern society. We don’t have a coherent vision of the good life, so we invest in different enablers of the good life — health, money, education — obsessively. We tend to forget (or simply never decide) what we’re optimizing for.
4. We’ve talked before about play as the space of human living beyond the realms of necessity and of self-justification. And the World Cup this year has been a true gift: wildly popular, shattering previous attendance records. There’s something captivating about it, like worldwide festal days, and the spirit of celebration is infectious.
Three good articles on the Cup this week: a general writeup from Jonathan Wilson at the Paris Review, our own Will Fagan’s piece on the freedom of playing with nothing to lose, and Jay Kaspian Kang’s at the New Yorker on V.A.R. On the last,
The supposed precision of V.A.R., which purportedly can tell when a Croatian player’s hair has touched a ball (but apparently not when a ball hits a camera wire suspended in the air) or when half a kneecap pokes itself offside, makes everything worse, because these tiny infractions feel like violations of the spirit of the world’s beautiful game. […]
The complaint against V.A.R., then, operates on two levels. There is rage at the machines for turning what should be a spiritual game into the strictest and most tedious rule-following exercise possible. And then there is a separate anger, because this mechanistic objectivity is not applied evenly.
As an avid watcher of American football, my quadrennial love affair with soccer is driven mainly by the freer, more fluid nature of it. The clock keeps going, players keep playing, and referees are constantly making semi-subjective decisions about such things as how much stoppage time to add or exactly when to blow the whistle to end the game. Fans and even the players gripe loudly at almost every decision, then move on — life, after all, is messy and imperfect, and it all (mostly) comes out in the wash. Sometimes it feels like in American football, we get just as much griping and subjectivity at critical moments; they just come at the end of cumbersome review processes designed to prevent them.
Kang asks why tennis’ automated line calls are widely accepted, but soccer’s V.A.R. seems despised. His answer? Soccer by its nature is chock-full of judgment calls:
Did the hand that was placed on the chest of the defender actually cause them to fall back or was that just more theatrics? Was the defender whose elbow blocked the shot in the box making a natural motion or was he sticking his arm out to purposefully make his body bigger? How do you automate such determinations without coming up with an entire new rule book that would dictate, for example, the length of a “build up” to a goal? Do you put little gauges in the shirts and socks of players to tell how hard they actually got hit?
One answer, it seems, is just to enjoy the play, accept that close calls are hard to get exactly right, and keep playing. Fans’ appetite for the game itself, rather than the cumbersome processes that try and fail to eliminate imperfections of human referees, is a true encouragement, as is the play itself.
5. Also against the grain of optimization: a farmer who wastes seed on rocky and thorny soil. Nadia Bolz-Weber continues what’s been a run of good sermons, applying the Parable of the Sower to different phases of our lives: there are phases where we’re saturated by the cares of the world or blocked up by the rocks of past hurts. But God just keeps on scattering the Word, keeps on giving grace to us, even when we’re not (consciously) receiving it. I won’t spoil more, but it’s well worth a read.
6. In humor, the Onion goes dark with “Newborn Baby Can Already Tell Parents’ Genetics Not Going To Do Him Any Favors” and channels a Lutheran view of the effects of exhortation with “Insisting Coworker Get to the Point Somehow Slows Him Down.” These people are incorrigible! My favorite, though, was Babylon Bee’s “Man Informs Wife He Can’t Mow the Lawn Today as He Is Busy Playing Lawn Mowing Simulator”:
Despite his wife’s pleas that the grass was now taller than their toddler, who had been missing for hours in the backyard, Callahan explained that he was completely slammed with virtual lawns to mow in MowSim Elite.
“Business is really taking off. I’m getting mower upgrades left and right. There’s simply no way I can stop right now,” said Callahan. “The diagonal lines I’m getting on the lawns in the simulator, they’re ridiculous, babe. I’m an artist, and grass is my medium. Well, virtual grass. I can maybe work our lawn in tomorrow, but it’s going to be tight.”
7. At Christianity Today, our friend Ross Byrd considers the mounting tiredness in many of the evangelical nondenominational churches started from the late ’90s on, many of which experienced massive growth but now face incipient fatigue:
Churches that adopted the forms of the internet were duly rewarded with rapidly growing congregations, buildings, and bank accounts. Now, it seems, they may have received their reward in full. […]
Our megachurch parking lots are still mostly full on Sunday mornings. But the lots remain full of cars in much the same way that our Instagram feeds remain full of content: The people are still coming, but they aren’t exactly thrilled to be there. Exhaustion has set in.
A certain subtle odor, resembling the beginning of mainline decline, can now be sensed in the nondenominational evangelical corner of the world. The growing cracks in the empire appear to be coinciding with a new and widespread interest in more traditional forms of Christianity. I can’t even count the number of conversations I’ve had recently with young evangelicals pondering conversion to Catholicism or the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Ross helpfully diagnoses churches’ focus on programming, marketing, and seeking ever new forms of engagement as a species of worldliness; these churches adapted, in some ways, to a marketing, consumer-first model. And the fatigue he describes matches not only that of many exvangelicals but increasingly that of everyone in today’s over-inundated world. His prescription?
“His yoke is easy, and his burden is light,” we declare, just after drumming up a new wave of volunteers for various ministry teams. Maybe we have forgotten our call to give rest to the weary.
Our churches should be beautiful, restful places of prayer and silence, feasting and fasting, joy and grief. The infrastructure for this may certainly require careful planning and execution, but it does not require programs and advertisements, busy pastors and busier volunteers — expending themselves toward the end of an ever-increasing number of consumer offerings for parishioners who are already too busy to keep coming. The church should not compete with or imitate the rhythms of the secular world but should rather become a kind of holy refuge. […]
We need our ministers to move at the pace of prayer and devotion, so that we can move at the pace of God. When they don’t, the congregation doesn’t either, and we all pay the price. … Our priests and ministers must be given permission to be unbusy, holy people who are daily present in the sanctuary to pray with those who need prayer, to mourn with those who mourn, and to walk alongside the body of believers. … If they do — and if we do — the harried world around us will flee to us rather than the other way around.
Strays:
- For the medieval nerds among us, LARB reviews a book on the seven deadly sins — unpromisingly titled Self-Help from the Middle Ages — which doubles as an interesting window into our culture’s recent dalliance with all things medieval. Is it the texture? The considerable “friction”? In some circles, I suspect, it’s because the medieval depressingly represents a hitherto unexplored vector of self-help: maybe this paradigm, unlike all the others, will work. The author and reviewer are well qualified, but I could imagine th’angelic doctor groaning from the fourth sphere at the reviewer’s suggestion that “when the system worked as it was meant to work, year after year, penitents learned to recognise their worst tendencies and replace them – or at least offset them – with their opposing virtues.” To quote the Coens, “Would that it were so simple.”
- At the Dispatch, Alan Jacobs muses on the interest — especially among men — in the Second World War and its place in history.
- Tom Holland (of Dominion fame) interviewed Tom Holland (of Spider-Man / Gregory Cromwell / Telemachus fame) about The Odyssey. It’s a good chat (below). For those heading to the theater this weekend who want an Odyssey refresher, I was recently introduced to Natalie Haynes, h/t JL, whose rundown of Homer’s Odyssey is both informative and highly entertaining.
