Another Week Ends

1. With the NBA and NHL finals kicking off this week, and the Olympics less than two months away, let’s talk about sports! Writing this week for Aeon, Sabrina Little examines whether one must be a bad person to be a good athlete. As a former competitive athlete herself, Little recognizes that the vices that make for better success on the playing field (stubbornness, pride, competitive envy), simultaneously make one a worse person. Perhaps because I just wrote on the limits of willpower, or because I spent countless hours playing sports in high school, but this next article was easily my favorite.

If you spend much time around sports, you will have experienced the vice of pride, or superbia. It is an inordinate desire for one’s own excellence, or an inflated sense of self. Likely, you have experienced pride so much in sports that you fail to notice it anymore. Sport, in broad strokes, has a culture of bragging and self-aggrandisement, which is sometimes called ‘marketing’. Other times, pride hides in plain sight as ‘self-belief’. It sometimes seems that sporting social media is a bunch of people shouting their achievements past each other, bragging in direct or subtle ways. Admittedly, this is probably part of what we enjoy about sports — the self-congratulatory brazenness of it all. It is entertaining. […]

However, pride’s error of valuing is likely to enhance performance. The sportsperson who over-values themself is inclined to inordinately strive for greatness and to be engaged in the activity of reputation protection. And pride’s greatest secret is that it is always under threat. It needs to prove that it is the best. This provides ample motivation to dig deep and fight for glory. […]

We can see why intransigence might be an asset in sports. An intransigent runner will reach more finish lines — certainly more finish lines than an irresolute runner will. The intransigent sportsperson may see more playing time, or persist in practising a drill until they get it right. But intransigence is a vice. It is at odds with a flourishing life because it means we are willing to overstep our limits — our physical limits but also our cultural limits, or the people in our lives to whom we are accountable — in order to accomplish a goal.

In a sporting culture that praises ‘doing hard things’ without specifying which right hard things, or how we do them, it may be worth mentioning that competing at all costs is not admirable. Not all finish lines are good ones. Finish lines are good only insofar as we don’t compromise higher allegiances as we strive to attain them. On these grounds, intransigence is a performance-enhancing vice. It is a trait we praise in a sportsperson and lament in a friend.

Little is careful to not make the broader case that participation in elite competitive sports necessarily corrupts its participants. But it also wouldn’t be difficult to assemble a list of elite athletes who were well known to be … we’ll say, “difficult”: Barry Bonds, Tom Brady, Larry Bird, Andre Agassi, Michael Jordan, Tonya Harding(!),  and, more recently, Novac Djokovic.

Going all the way back to the Greeks right through to 19th century Victorian England, sport has long been viewed as a moral training ground, a way of instilling discipline and self-mastery. It’s even taken up by the Apostle Paul as an analogy for the Christian life (cf. Phil 3:12-14). In this way, the predominance of sports today makes it relatively easy to turn all of life (and Christianity by extension), into a Men’s Health stoicism, where machismo and bravado are passed off as virtues because they get results. But while Paul likened the Christian life to a marathon, he did so with inescapable irony. The race he ran was a “sharing in the sufferings of Jesus,” for whom he “suffered the loss of all things” (Phil 3:10, 8). A kind of endurance race to be sure, but one that has as little to do with the Olympics as Zeus has with a crucified Messiah.

2. Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of D-Day, when Allied forces in WWII invaded German-occupied northern France. Remembrances and ceremonies abounded, but they came at a time when we collectively aren’t sure of what to make of the war itself. While the righteousness of the war hasn’t (yet) fallen victim to the post-modern hermeneutics of suspicion (indeed, Germany is still viewed as unquestionably evil). The motivations of the Allied powers, particularly in America, have become murkier in the popular mind as the decades have passed, most especially on the question of religion. As told by Michael Snape in the Wall Street Journal, faith was at the core of the Allied forces’ motivations.

In an order distributed to the expeditionary force, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower hailed the cross-channel invasion as a “Great Crusade” and invoked “the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.” That language might grate against 21st-century sensibilities. In the intervening decades, a tide of secularization, the growth of multifaith societies, and the bitter legacy of subsequent conflicts have infused such sentiments with a toxicity they didn’t possess in 1944. In many Catholic and mainline Protestant churches, now in thrall to a functional pacifism born of the nuclear age, such militancy seems alien and unsettling, something best forgotten.

World War II, and D-Day in particular, wasn’t the “notably secular affair” historian Paul Fussell once claimed it to be. Operation Overlord was carried out primarily by countries in which Judeo-Christian beliefs and values were normative and unifying. Despite popular misconceptions, the shock of World War I hadn’t made the Lord of Hosts redundant. A generation after the Great War, faced with an apparently existential threat, the Western and historically Christian democracies still sought comfort, definition and inspiration in a faith that set them apart from the neopaganism of Nazi Germany. […]

For our own generation, D-Day may seem to have scant connection with religion, beyond its lingering association with some terminology embarrassing to modern ears. Yet to many contemporaries, it marked a decisive moment in a life-or-death struggle between the Judeo-Christian democracies of the West and the malignant pagan forces of Nazi Germany. The success of D-Day, like that of the Dunkirk evacuation four years earlier, was naturally and widely taken as providential.

Indeed, many today suggest that WWII was fought between two Christian adversaries (forgetting Japan, of course), a half-truth meant to cancel each other out. But if the Allies saw the war as a struggle between good and evil, for its part, Germany took up arms for the glory of the Fatherland. Even if we might today blush at the idea of a holy war, the narrative that takes its place — that “Western liberal values” defeated Nazism — is as disingenuous as it is insidious, a rewriting of history on the part of secularists that foretells of their eventual triumph.

3. What would you do if a missionary suddenly shows up in your living room wanting to talk about Jesus? Well, if you’re in college you might just overlook the awkwardness to hear what they had to say. That’s what happened to Clare Sestanovich, as recounted in her recent essay for the New Yorker. In the midst of the usual college upheavals, a missionary arrived with a “scruffy beard and cutoff jeans.” What ensues is a fascinating story of God, faith, and a messy, unspoken, love triangle:

People with vague longings like mine are often called seekers. They want to find things: purpose, meaning, truth. Finding, in my own brief life, had mostly looked like striving. Empowering, sure, but predictable, solitary. What I really wanted was to be found. That summer, in what seemed to me like a miracle, I sort of was. I’d just moved out of my stately, anonymous dorm and into a run-down house a few blocks away. There were seven or eight other occupants, and the rooms were filled with the belongings of many more, a sedimentary record of all the students who’d come before us. The result was a huge mess, but also a current of excitement: here was a place for excavation — for revelation. […]

One afternoon, I returned home to find a man who had just crossed from our world into the next — that is, a recent graduate — sitting in the kitchen using the Wi-Fi. … But here he was, talking about Jesus. He’d started going to a local church out of curiosity, even though he was against most organized religion, which he said reinforced in-group and out-group distinctions. He’d initially been most impressed by Jesus in an abstract, political sense: he was an exemplary community organizer. But what God meant to him now was deeply, intimately personal. He talked to Jesus every day, and Jesus talked back. […]

[The missionary] told me that, in some sense, God was chasing each of us, trying to bring us into his fold. At church, they went so far as to say that God was jealous for our love, jealous of all the other fleeting objects of our devotion. This was a surprising inversion. Weren’t we the seekers? (Not to mention the coveters.) The missionary shrugged. Couldn’t it be both? In all our conversations, I took care never to sound as zealous as he did, but even in my skepticism there was a thrill to talking in this register. To speak of doubt, after all, was also to speak of desire. If God wanted me, did I simply have to want him back? […]

Faith in unconditional love can seem like the bliss of ignorance — a comforting story to tell ourselves. But I’m not sure that’s right. What the missionary understood, I think, is that this sort of love is in fact the most fearsome kind. If God loves you whether you’re in or out, good or bad, can you be sure he’s really there? The question is not only for the religious. Can we be sure of each other? Can we be sure of ourselves?

4. Many can’t remember a time when there wasn’t any internet. The world has been connected by fiber optics for decades, and it’s now nearly impossible to imagine what all this connectivity has done to us. But one story this week I think helps illuminate the contours of our Wi-Fi world, and it comes from one of its most remote corners: in the thick of the Amazon jungle. You see, Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites have been providing internet to remote Amazonian tribes. The results have been less than utopian:

“When it arrived, everyone was happy,” said Tsainama Marubo, 73, sitting on the dirt floor of her village’s maloca, a 50-foot-tall hut where the Marubo sleep, cook and eat together. The internet brought clear benefits, like video chats with faraway loved ones and calls for help in emergencies. “But now, things have gotten worse,” she said. […]

After only nine months with Starlink, the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years: teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography. […]

Leaders realized they needed limits. The internet would be switched on for only two hours in the morning, five hours in the evening, and all day Sunday.

During those windows, many Marubo are crouched over or reclined in hammocks on their phones. They spend lots of time on WhatsApp. There, leaders coordinate between villages and alert the authorities to health issues and environmental destruction. Marubo teachers share lessons with students in different villages. And everyone is in much closer contact with faraway family and friends. […]

Decades ago, the most respected Marubo shaman had visions of a hand-held device that could connect with the entire world. “It would be for the good of the people,” he said. “But in the end, it wouldn’t be.” “In the end,” he added, “there would be war.”

His son sat on the log across from him, listening. “I think the internet will bring us much more benefit than harm,” Enoque said, “at least for now.” Regardless, he added, going back was no longer an option. “The leaders have been clear,” he said. “We can’t live without the internet.”

Now, writing on the internet about its dangers is rife with irony, but two things here stand out. The first, that exposing a remote tribe to this tool of modernity created many of the same problems experienced within modernity suggests to me that the internet is far more than a simple “tool.” Use of the internet changes the user. Secondly, the categorization of the internet as simultaneously harmful and essential is perhaps unsurprising, but it’s fascinating that putting limitations on use of the internet seems to be the best way to deal with this ambiguity — not unlike how we might think of alcohol consumption.

5. Turning now to the comedic side of the internet, dark humor seems to be this week’s theme. Reductress has some fun with, “Scary! This Woman’s Estimated Travel Time Is Based on Everything Going Exactly Right.” Along similar lines there’s the Hard Times’ “How I Eliminated Negativity From My Life by Refusing to Check My Account Balance.”

And over at the New Yorker, “The Millennial’s Lament” is on-the-nose hilarious, and for those of a certain age, a bit depressing:

He walks. I am no longer young, he thinks. Being young was my identity — my whole generation’s identity. Now what do we have? He ponders the phrase “O.K., boomer.” Soon, he knows, young people will make up a similar expression for millennials. Something like “Sure thing, millennial,” he muses, but said in a mean, sarcastic way. The thought unsettles him. Pants are becoming wider, and he doesn’t know how to cope with that. […]

He thinks more about fatherhood and, more generally, about the future his children will inherit. This is unimaginably scary, so he stops. He walks to the refrigerator. He pulls out the leftover roast chicken from when he cooked a few days ago. It’s the one impressive recipe he knows. If he were to throw a dinner party, this is absolutely what he would make. But he does not throw dinner parties. Nor does he attend many. He vaguely assumed that, as he grew older, and participated in fewer all-night benders, he would begin to take part in more sophisticated, grownup gatherings. With a few exceptions, this has not happened. Is it because he’s too busy with parenthood? Or simply because he is no longer a fun or interesting person to spend time with socially? “Was I ever?” he says to himself. Oh, God. He goes back to thinking about his children’s future.

The sun sets. Whatever comes with its next rising, the Millennial will face it with the blank, unflinching gaze of a man who is beyond feeling. A man whose generation no longer fits into the story society tells itself. A man whose laptop has a folder titled “million-dollar app ideas $$” that he has not opened since 2014.

6. Closing out this week, we turn to remember the life and thought of Jürgen Moltmann. For those who don’t know, Moltmann has been a formative luminary for many here at Mbird over the years. His book, The Crucified God remains a classic must-read. Moltmann has been a constant reference for me over the years. While his writings covered a wide variety of topics, at the heart of his inquiry was always a concern for how Christianity and the gospel might be heard by those who suffered, how hope can be found in the ruins of life. Below is an account of Moltmann’s WWII conversion, from a thoughtful and comprehensive obituary in the Church Times:

As for many of his generation, the arrival of war interrupted his plans, and the formative years of his life were spent first as a soldier in a meaningless and brutal war and then as a captive and prisoner of war. Called up out of school at age 16, he experienced the bombing of Hamburg and the death of a close friend through a bomb that narrowly spared Moltmann himself. “That night was the first time I cried out to God.” “Why him? Why not me?”

In his kitbag, he carried the writings of Nietzsche and Goethe’s poems. In 1945, as his unit was dispersing in the face of the impending end of the war, Moltmann surrendered to a British-Canadian unit and was taken prisoner, a moment that he later often described as the beginning of a new life.

After initial confinement in Belgium, the prisoners were taken to Kilmarnock in Scotland, where they would be employed in reconstruction and repair of war damaged roads. Moltmann and his fellow prisoners experienced a profound sense of disillusionment and forsakenness in the face of the lost war, of shame at the realisation of the atrocities of the Nazi dictatorship, and the loss of anything that might have held the promise of a meaningful future or, indeed, hope.

In the POW camp in Belgium, Moltmann had been given a pocket edition of the New Testament, which he now began to read. “Here was someone who understood me, who had experienced what I experienced.” He never used the word conversion to describe his experience, instead: “I did not find him; he found me.” Hope and the God who suffers on the cross with his people would become the central moments of his theology.

Strays:

• Mbird contributor Joshua Retterer, over at Faith+Lead: “Say The Thing, Not Anything.”
• They Spent Their Life Savings on Life Coaching.
• How the self-care industry made us so lonely.
• The Obese Police.
• The Rise of Hyperpleasures.