1. Lots of great articles to choose from this week, so I’ll jump right in.
In FIFA World Cup news, Norway is having their moment in the sun. Led by Erling Haaland, aka the world’s best player, the smallest country left in the tournament is punching well above its weight class. You might think the secret to their success is a finely tuned youth soccer program with big budgets, competitive travel teams, and advanced specialization. You know, like every other country in the world. Norway, however, chooses to do the opposite, and it seems to be the secret to their success:
Haaland grew up in a low-cost, high-participation system of youth sports that couldn’t sound any more radical to American ears.
“It was always that everybody should play equally — that everybody should have fun,” said a former teammate. “Winning matches at a young age was not important.” […]
In the environment of Norway, participation matters more than trophies. Norwegians are famously born wearing skis and skates, but two-thirds of the country’s boys are still wearing soccer boots when they’re 11 years old. The nation is so committed to its egalitarian ideals of social enjoyment, proper development and sport-for-all that kids aren’t even sorted by talent until they’re 13. By then, the most precocious Americans are already burning out. […]
As [Haaland’s] youth coach back home in Bryne once put it: “We don’t rate human worth based on whether you are good or bad at kicking a ball.“
This is sheer craziness. From the moment a child is born, we Americans begin sorting kids into stratified hierarchies of class and/or aptitude and/or worth. Gifted, standard, and inclusion classes; travel and recreation teams. Haaland’s youth coach preached the opposite philosophy: “As many as possible, for as long as possible, and as good as possible.” Refreshing, isn’t it?
2. People often think their phones are listening to them all the time. You discuss Botox at a dinner party, and then you’re bombarded with Botox ads for three days. The phones aren’t actually listening to you (it’s probably a coincidence of location data and demographics), but if it were actually recording your every word, what would it find?
As told by Shayla Love in the New Yorker, this is the premise to the massive EAR study (electronically activated recorders), overseen by the social psychologist Matthias Mehl. Recording thousands of people through their phones, scientists get a direct line into everyday life. The findings are revelatory, to say the least. Men and women are equally talkative. And we speak 20% less than we did three decades ago. The dataset has been used by other researchers, to surprising effect. Take meditation:
Raison, who had previously studied meditation, used the EAR to evaluate whether two hundred people who participated in meditation subsequently became kinder, swore less, or engaged in deeper conversations. He saw no effect. “I’d probably still be a meditation researcher if that hadn’t been such a negative study,” he said.
But wait, there’s more!
In 2016, a study that used the EAR found that children’s asthma symptoms, such as wheezing, increased when they fought with their family members — an association that wasn’t as noticeable when families filled out daily diaries. Another study found that romantic partners rarely discussed breast cancer after one of them was diagnosed, except to work through logistical considerations such as appointment times and doctors’ credentials. A third one found that when people with rheumatoid arthritis or cancer swore around others they received less emotional support from friends, and their depression symptoms tended to worsen. Yet another review of EAR audio found that people who sighed frequently were not necessarily burdened by negative emotions.
The app also gives participants the ability to listen back on their conversations, so Love decided to give it a try. She noticed a unique tone to her conversation with her husband, her irritation when speaking with her mother, and her unexpected formality when on work calls.
3. The participants in the EAR study all signed up to be constantly recorded. People will do marvelous things in the name of research. But what about all the ways we are involuntarily filmed when we walk around the neighborhood? Ring doorbell cameras and other similar devices have been around for a few years now, and the research about their effects tells a chilling tale. As summarized by Allie Volpe in Vox:
Research has shown that knowing we’re being watched makes us subconsciously more aware of others, which, in turn, may make us paranoid. Another paper found “the awareness of being watched can intensify existing distrust, paranoia, and fear.” This suspicion colors how we perceive and interact with each other. […]
In a 2022 study, participants were instructed to set up cameras and film themselves in various scenarios in their homes. Knowing they were being recorded, many participants reported feeling self-conscious, which impacted how they acted. They actually held back from showing affection to their partner, or from talking.
Other research has found that when people know they’re being watched, they’re able to detect human faces on a computer quicker than people who aren’t under surveillance. “It suggests that our brain might be in this hyper-alert state when we’re being surveilled to detect others in our environment and possibly threat in our environment,” Kiley Seymour, an associate professor of neuroscience and behavior at the University of Technology Sydney and the study’s lead author, told Vox. And participants weren’t even aware of how being on camera affected their response time. “They were like, ‘Oh no, we forgot the cameras were even there.’ … And, despite that, it’s really influencing how they respond to the stimuli that are put in front of them,” Seymour said.
People withhold love when they know they’re being judged? It puts people on high alert when they’re scrutinized? Shocking … But I also find it deeply ironic that traffic cameras have been so controversial, yet 62% of Americans have voluntarily put up cameras of their own. I guess we only like spying when we are the ones doing it. Which is the exact kind of hypocrisy you’d expect when it comes to the law.
4. This next article from historian Alec Ryrie builds upon one of my favorite theories of his about secular liberalism in the twentieth century: the moral consensus in the decades after WWII around universal human rights was itself the photographic negative of Nazism. If our moral compass had pointed to Jesus, it now points away from Hitler. Ryrie, however, sees that moral consensus fragmenting into new culture wars that reveal the weaknesses of postwar humanism. So what lies beyond anti-Nazism? Here, Ryrie offers some decidedly nonpartisan hopes/advice. To conservatives, he says:
Your traditions have far more to them than thou-shalt-nots. Of course they do; otherwise you would never have embraced them yourself. You don’t need to browbeat people. You can seduce them. Your traditions — and I am thinking especially of religious traditions here, but not only of them — have depth, flourishing, satisfaction, clarity, peace, and joy to offer. The problem with post-Nazi values is not that they are wrong but that they are insufficient: thin, grey gruel compared to the taste, colour, and richness of our rooted traditions. Ours is a culture that knows only what it hates. You can show it something worth loving.
But his picture analysis of what’s needed now by either side of our culture war is most substantial:
Our anti-Nazi values are great at separating the world into the black and white of good and evil. If we’re sophisticated, we might think about shades of grey instead. But it’s those deeper traditions that show us full colour. With their help, we can see beauty instead of just passing judgment. … Those deeper traditions teach some of the virtues that we will most need in order to navigate this century, and which our anti-Nazi values conspicuously lack: humility, repentance, and forgiveness.
I couldn’t have said it better myself (actually, I did say this six years ago…).
5. On the subject of reaching back to older traditions, Alan Kreider’s “The Church That Grew Without Trying” in Plough is the kind of historical inquiry I find particularly refreshing. Because while churches today are desperately trying to grow in the face of institutional decline, it turns out the second-century church had no such concerns.
According to the evidence at our disposal, the expansion of the churches was not organized, the product of a mission program; it simply happened. Further, the growth was not carefully thought through. Early Christian leaders did not engage in debates between rival “mission strategies.” […]
Most improbable of all, the churches did not use their worship services to attract new people. In the aftermath of the persecution of Nero in AD 68, churches around the empire – at varying speeds in varying places – closed their doors to outsiders. By the end of the second century, most of them had instituted what liturgical scholars have called the disciplina arcani, the “discipline of the secret,” which barred outsiders from entering “private” Christian worship services and ordered believers not to talk to outsiders about what went on behind the closed doors.
Fear motivated this closing – fear of people who might disrupt their gatherings or spy on them. By the third century, some churches assigned deacons to stand at the doors, monitoring the people as they arrived. It is not surprising that pagans responded to their exclusion from Christian worship by speculation and gossip. The baptized Christians, on the other hand, knew how powerful the worship services were in their own lives – early fourth-century North African believers said simply, “We cannot go without the Lord’s Supper.” They knew that worship services were to glorify God and edify the faithful, not to evangelize outsiders.
The churches grew because the faith … was attractive to people who were dissatisfied with their old cultural and religious habits, who felt pushed to explore new possibilities, and who then encountered Christians who embodied a new manner of life that pulled them toward what the Christians called “rebirth” into a new life.
This seems like the exact opposite of how we think about the church today. Yes, early Christians sent out missionaries (something Kreider only elusively mentions), but this is a far cry from seeker-sensitive worship. How much did the church grow? By the end of the first century, it is estimated that there were 1,000 Christians in the empire. By the end of the second century, there were around 200,000. By 300 A.D., there were 5 to 6 million Christians.
6. On the less serious side of the internet, there’s “Male Loneliness Crisis Temporarily Solved by World Cup” from Beaverton. And Slackjaw’s “Thanks! It’s Anxiety” is for all the over-functioning type-As of the world:
I’m glad you like the meal — I made it from scratch over the last three days. Can you guess the secret ingredient? It’s Anxiety! You once off-handedly mentioned that the coq au vin you had at a Michelin star restaurant was the best thing you’d ever eaten, so I’ve practiced it with varying degrees of success fifteen times in the last three months.
In church humor, the Babylon Bee takes aim at kids vacation Bible school with their “Kids Sentenced To Another Week At Different VBS.” This line was particularly good:
“You do the crime, you do the time,” said Mrs. Maxwell. “They spend all week learning about Jesus and come out still fighting like animals. The rate of instant recidivism into abject sin still stands at one hundred percent. They’ll keep going back until it sticks, and if that gives me more time to shop at Target, that’s the Lord’s providence.”
But my favorite church-adjacent laugh this week came from the Daily Mash’s “Tarot reader knows woman’s life is a mess because she’s getting a tarot reading.” Let the reader understand…
7. This next one isn’t humor, but it might as well be. For all the hot takes about blue zones of people who live well into their hundreds — and the products subsequently sold that promise you a longer and happier life — the viral trend seems to be the product of bookkeeping errors.
An exceptionally long life, in Newman’s telling, is not necessarily a function of good genes, good behaviors, or good luck. It’s evidence of bad record-keeping. The world’s oldest people, he quips, have “birth certificate allergies.”
8. To close out this week, we turn to Richard Beck’s look at what happens when Christianity becomes just another thing to maxx-out. At face value, it might seem that maxxing is what Christianity is all about. It was Jesus who said, “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Mt 16:25). Well, not quite. As Beck notes, maxxing has a way of turning Christianity into its opposite, namely self-righteous piety.
When it comes to Christianity, tradition becomes another thing to maxx. There is always another Church Father to read, another saint to venerate, another fasting rule to adopt, or another vigil to observe. The theology can always be deepened, the ascetical practices made more rigorous and severe, and the apologetical posture sharpened and made more combative. And most importantly, there is a more “authentic” and authoritative tradition to convert to and join. Everything in the tradition — theology, authority, asceticism — can be maxxed. […]
The tradition-maxxers are those for whom religious striving is neurotic and egoistic. The tradition-maxxer experiences the tradition as a mountain to climb. The tradition becomes an arena for distinction, similar in function to educational credentials, fitness, wealth, or cultural sophistication. The tradition becomes an accomplishment that differentiates me from the masses. The religious quest is no longer about formation but status: What does this say about me compared to others? […]
Instead of simply going to church you imagine yourself praying the Hours in a monastery, reading the Fathers by candlelight, making pilgrimages, keeping rigorous fasts, and escaping the thinness and superficiality of modern life and low-brow evangelical culture. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with these longings. The desire for God is holy. But the danger with this sort of tradition-maxxing is that the fantasy, a sort of monastic cosplay, becomes more compelling than the reality. The imagined world becomes more captivating than the ordinary church filled with ordinary people.
After the initial excitement of a conversion fades, or when the fantasy meets reality, one discovers that the “long obedience in the same direction” is stubbornly mundane. No amount of tradition-maxxing can escape the boring and ordinary nature of Christian faithfulness, the quiet, undramatic work of becoming like Christ alongside a group of broken people. Day after day and year after year. And yet, it’s precisely there, in the midst of the ordinary, if we have the eyes to see it, where God encounters us with gifts of peace and joy.
Strays:
- “Karmic Beef“: on the second season of the hit show.
- “Let’s Avoid the Language-Policing Fingertrap In the Future, OK?“
- “The Wisdom of Holden Caulfield“
- “Bonhoeffer, Luther, and the Problem of Self-Justification“
