Another Week Ends

The entire column this week could simply be a hyperlink to the New York Times‘ feature titled “Don’t Tell My Friends, But …” The Times editorial staff were asked to compose a reflection on a firmly held belief that, if shared publicly, would put them at odds with their social circles. The result is a series of contrarian essays and unpopular opinions that challenge conventional wisdom on the left and the right. 

Examples include a class-infused ode to the democratic values of the DMV, which invites readers to “Celebrate the place where you can watch a celebrity fill out the same forms that you do.” Or David Brooks, whom we cite often on the site, downplaying the risks of AI. Zeynep Tufekci reminds us that no, historically speaking, our levels of political division in America are not unique — the 60s and 70s were much worse.

1. A couple of my favorite quips include this observation from Michelle Goldberg, who writes about the less-than-helpful trendiness of natural childbirth:

The natural-parenting movement, like the anti-vaccine movement, relies on our forgetfulness about what life was like before the innovations that it denounces. Having a baby without medical help may be natural, but so is obstetric fistula and hemorrhaging to death. It’s a miracle of modern medicine that over the course of the 20th century, America’s maternal mortality rate declined by almost 99 percent. There has never been a time when all mothers could breastfeed, and before the advent of baby formula, as the scholar Carla Cevasco wrote, “many families had to endure the agony of losing a baby to starvation, malnutrition, or related disease.” When it comes to human reproduction, nature is neither kind nor efficient.

2. Also in the mix, David French offers his take on having the right belief of Christianity without the right practice of it, referencing not only the political scene but a sort of intergenerational golden age fallacy that drives that hypocrisy. His observation is straight out of the Gospels, of course: One of Jesus’s frequent criticisms of his Pharisee opponents was that they valued tradition, community, and right belief over tangible acts of neighborly love. The twist, however, is his application of the principle to the very people who theoretically should know better.

In the fundamentalist tradition of my youth in rural Kentucky, there was an enormous longing for the alleged better days of the past. I can’t count the number of times I heard an older member of my congregation shake his or her head at a news report about sex or crime and say, “We didn’t have those problems when there was prayer and Bible reading in schools.”

But history teaches a different lesson. I recently had the privilege of hearing Sybil Jordan Hampton tell the story of what it was like to be one of only five Black children in her high school in Little Rock, Ark., in 1959, deep in the heart of the Bible Belt. It’s a truly harrowing tale. Classmates wouldn’t speak to her, and when they did, they’d sometimes hiss the n-word at her. 

The atmosphere was frightening enough that the only time she spoke was when it was her turn to read the Bible in class. She always chose Psalm 121, repeating its cry for God’s help in times of distress: “I lift my eyes toward the mountains. Where will my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.”

Her classmates were unmoved. Orthodoxy didn’t inculcate orthopraxy. Instead, their public religiosity blinded them to their own sin.

3. In a somewhat opposite slant to her fellow columnist, Lydia Polgreen suggests we simply become more comfortable with the fact that people’s professed beliefs and actions don’t always line up. 

I have never been especially impressed by the accusation of hypocrisy, in no small part because this is the human condition: We are a collection of aspirations and failings, from which we try to be who we think we should be but constantly fall short. But I understand the appeal of calling out what looks like hypocrisy when we see it, especially now. We live under a penumbra of impotence, even as we face wall-to-wall crises: the heating planet; wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan; the migrant crisis. In place of action and solutions, which seem totally out of reach, we substitute judgment. And what is more satisfying to adjudicate than the charge of hypocrisy?

There is a temptation to police small hypocrisies to buttress our principles — lecture an environmentalist who uses plastic straws, for example. To give hypocrisy a pass, one might argue, is to slide down a slope toward having no principles at all. A better question is: How do you decide which principles you should hold with an iron grip and which you can grasp more loosely, or even ignore, when good might come of doing so? One does not need to sign up for a conspiracy of meaninglessness or embrace a binary choice between principle and expediency.

A manichean devotion to principle brings its own peril. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his best-known essay, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” But it is a less famous line from that essay, “Self-Reliance,” that has always stuck with me. It suggests that finding yourself abandoning a principle may well be a necessary precursor to changing your mind based on something new. It is, Emerson wrote, “a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present.”

Whether the topic is market economics or the perennial fight between cats and dogs, the common thread in many of these reflections is a gentle reminder of history and anthropology. The past is not as rosy as many remember it to be — our short term memories operating in this imminent frame don’t understand how much better things are now. Human beings aren’t as capable as we claim to be, either, whether that’s our brains, our memories, or our propensity to self-justify. A more sobering understanding of history and human frailty might actually lead us to proper social and cultural improvement. If, that is, our friends don’t kick us to the curb first.

4. Over at the Atlantic this week, Cheryl Mendelson implores couples to stop writing their own wedding vows. Besides the unexpected shout out to the timeless Anglican and Episcopal wedding vow (in sickness and in health…), it’s worth a read for Mendelson’s argument that historic vows don’t squash the uniqueness of a couple’s love, but instead empowers, honors, and publicly affirms it.

Many couples write their own vows because they want to express the unique and wonderful nature of their bond. No rote formula, they feel, no words recited for centuries by millions of others, could do this job. But the traditional vows have a unique power that comes from the very fact that millions of others, over the centuries, have recited them.

All wedding traditions — Jewish, Muslim, Shinto, and more — strengthen marriages with words that carry the weight of long usage. Those that survive longest are those flexible enough to change for the better. Way back in the 1920s, the Episcopal Church voted to remove the woman’s vow of obedience. Jewish grooms traditionally said, as they put the ring on their bride’s finger, “With this ring, you are consecrated unto me in accordance with the law of Moses and Israel.” Now many brides also say these words, continuing and bending the tradition. Tradition doesn’t ignore the unique good in each couple’s love; it honors it.

Self-written vows, however, seem to me only to diminish a couple’s special feelings, and risk turning them into entertainment. Contemporary weddings increasingly resemble shows starring a bride and a groom, featuring intimate dialogue about their relationship, as though the couple were on stage enacting themselves. Guests applaud and laugh — an audience, not witnesses whose presence validates the couple’s bond. When guests can leave a wedding uncertain whether the marriage is open or monogamous, or whether the partners don’t know if they will stay together forever or simply aren’t saying, the whole ritual ceases to make sense.

5. At the Hedgehog Review, Derek King gives us a crash course in the moral philosophy of attention from Iris Murdoch, who borrows heavily from Catholic thinker Simone Weil. Beyond the idea that giving our attention to something is a moral choice — short form videos vs. our kids, supermarket tabloids vs. literature, etc. — Murdoch articulates that giving attention is also moral formation itself, because it forces us outside of our imminent frames. In this way, says King, she echoes C. S. Lewis, whose injunction to “get out of our own way” when reading brings us into a sort of “attentional humility.”

Proper attention thus requires what Murdoch calls an “unselfing” — the “self,” she says, is the real “place of illusion,” so what we need is to “attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness.” To illustrate what she has in mind, Murdoch recounts an experience she had on an afternoon stroll. After an event that hurt her pride, she is walking along a path, brooding, when she is struck by the sight of a hovering kestrel. At that moment, her attention to the bird pierces her pride and shakes her from self-absorption. She feels herself physically released of the aggression and frustration. But this experience is possible only because of attention. While attention can be aimed at a person or, as in the kestrel example, nature, Murdoch is especially keen to emphasize attending to art. The same moral training we begin as children — “Look! Don’t touch!” — is extended to the museum, where we must only observe, contemplate, and receive.

In her injunction to attend well to art, Murdoch shares much in common with the Christian Platonist philosopher and writer of fiction, C.S. Lewis. In his 1961 book An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis argues there are good and bad ways to read, especially when we read a novel or poem. Works of art such as these are “not merely logos (something said) but poiema (something made) … They are complex and carefully made objects. Attention to the very objects they are is our first step.” To read a novel is, at least, to recognize in it something more than merely words we extract, make meaning of, and discard. If we approach any writing only from the morals we might “take away” or look only for what is “practical,” we rather miss the point. This, for Lewis, is “a flagrant instance of ‘using’ instead of ‘receiving.’”

Lewis distinguishes between the act of using and receiving. “When we ‘receive’ [a work of art],” he writes, “we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist. When we ‘use’ it we treat it as assistance for our own activities.” Murdoch would surely have agreed. The posture of attention is, necessarily, one of reception.

6. In humor this week, the Olympics are giving us a great opportunity to laugh at ourselves. “Man Takes Credit For Wiffen Gold After Screaming ‘Swim Faster’ At Television” and “Olympics viewer fully equipped to tear apart athlete’s performance after watching sport for ten minutes” are both true in my household (ask me about Men’s Rugby). Big laughs too from “Olympic Gymnast or Me, a Middle-Aged Woman?” at McSweeney’s, and the good old fashion “Olympians Make Funny Faces” listicles are always good for a chuckle (see above).

Perhaps the funniest bit of the week belongs to New York’s own Cheeseball Man (below), who revealed himself to be a YouTuber today. Come for the absurd performance art, stay for the revelations of clinical depression and the end of a goofy era of internet meme history.

7. For the last word this week, let’s talk about Calvin & Hobbes and Thomas Hobbes and Elon Musk. At Christian Century, Trevor Sutton looks to temper Elon Musk’s techno futurism with a bit of the famed political philosopher and his eponymous cartoon tiger. His concluding thoughts offer the hopes of providence to all of us, as communicated through the masterful pen of Bill Watterson.

The time machines and transmogrifiers that the cartoon Calvin devised were cute because they were impossible. The neural implants and interplanetary habitation that Musk proposes are unsettling because they are both possible and imminent. While a dose of Hobbesian pessimism may be helpful, something more is needed. The future will be very bleak as long as humanity understands itself as being a law unto itself. If we are the only higher authority — or higher hope — then we are in trouble.

This insight is hardly novel. Decades ago, Watterson sketched a Sunday cartoon strip that depicts Calvin imagining himself to be God. It begins with, “First there was nothing . . . then there was Calvin!” Exercising absolute power, Calvin “creates the universe with pure will” and brings about life and order from the void. Before long, however, it takes an ominous turn: Calvin uses his godlike power to doom humanity to writhe in agony.

Still, Watterson offers a glimmer of hope. In the end, it’s all just Tinkertoys in the living room of Calvin’s house. Calvin thinks he is God, but thankfully he is not. He believes he has absolute self-sufficiency and autonomy, but he is deluding himself. He thinks that the fate and hope of human life rest on him, but they don’t. Musk — and all of us in this brave new world of war, neural implants, and interplanetary habitation — would do well to learn this. 

Strays:

• “As a family, they decided a long time ago that space and normalcy would allow their kid to be … well, a kid.” Vikings rookie quarterback J.J. McCarthy’s parents and their commitment to just be parents.
• “My Mom Says She Loves Me. AI Says She’s Lying.” The (unsuccessful) Silicon Valley Quest to develop an AI lie detector.
• As governments try to boost their birthrates with financial incentives and public messaging, Christine Emba observes: “No amount of money or social support will inspire people to have children — not unless there is some deeper certainty that doing so makes sense.”
• “There is a fundamental limit on our ability to foretell the complexities of life.” One scientific attempt to predict life outcomes for kids reveals how the task is empirically impossible.