1. Perhaps, as a rule, you don’t answer your phone when an “unknown caller” rings. Which they do, several times a day. Perhaps you don’t respond to Facebook messages from friends you haven’t heard from in a while. Perhaps you’re wary of texts from your bank. Perhaps you’ve found yourself exasperated on the phone with a credit card company, having to explain bizarre charges from other countries. It’s odd, when you think about it, how casually we’ve accepted the scam as part of daily life. But these plots are omnipresent, almost taken for granted. Cue Hannah Zeavin’s article in Harpers, “Gullibility in the Golden Age of Scams,” a must read, especially when you consider just how much “content” these days centers on the exploits con artists, whether that be Lularoe or the Fyre Festival, Inventing Anna or Theranos or even Saul Goodman; the line between entrepreneurship and grift seems perilously thin, and our media reflects that, unsure whether to lionize or demonize the colorful characters who carry it out.
As we sprint from one scammer story to the next, we offer less attention to the growing number of people who fall prey to their schemes. This is truer off-screen — there are too many conned to care, their errors mundane in their similarity. But facing our boredom is a crucial if unpleasant task. Boredom is, as the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips calls it, a “prehesitation.” It arrests us, allowing us to turn away from both the understimulating and the overthreatening. There is always, of course, some consolation close at hand: the thrill of the scam that we did not fall for ourselves. The gulled all but move into the shadows.
This leaves the gullible as props: necessary, but flattened. To keep the many from feeling like part of the growing victim cloud, gullibility is treated as syndrome rather than symptom. But this is a category error. In focusing on the scammers, and in believing their marks to have erred, we separate those who are gullible from those who supposedly are not, and we do what Americans do best: project the demands of a vulnerable age onto its casualties.
Scam victims could be called innocent to the misdeeds of the net, but being deemed gullible is the more disparaging and stubborn charge. Gullibility is typically described as an abnormality: being “too willing to believe or accept,” as one dictionary has it. We are all willing to believe or accept injurious situations under the right circumstances, but those with an excess of faith are marked as superbelievers, oozing irresponsible trust. We have an appropriate level of belief; they have too much. […]
Designating the gullible, however, obscures how ordinary people suffer deception in tiny increments all the time.
Much like weakness, gullibility can be used to pathologize people for understandable mistakes, misplaced bets, and desperate behaviors generated by the very effort to survive modern life.
She’s right about how acceptable it has become to moralize gullibility — and how remarkable that is, considering that we live in a culture in which few charges are more damning than that of “victim-blaming.” Perhaps our fascination with the scam has to do with a desire to separate ourselves from those tax-collectors suckers over there, the wheat from the chaff, a way to valorize cynicism. After all, calling someone gullible essentially functions as a euphemism for calling someone naïve or even daft. But is naïveté really a character flaw? I mean, no one wants to be duped. Yet weaponizing trust in this way should probably be the last thing we encourage, especially those of us (ahem) who happen to espouse faith in God. The alternative, a ruthless sort of anti-humanism, doesn’t seem to be all that great either. I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know that the podcast Scamfluencers is incredibly entertaining.
2. While we’re on the subject of misplaced judgment, it’s worth reconsidering (again!) how we view the internet. I know, I know… But before your eyes glaze over, Laurence Scott’s “Hell is Ourselves” in the New Atlantis warrants your attention, whoever ‘YOU’ may be:
Algorithms, then, have the power to project the secrets — or at least the personal topographies — of our inner lives back at us. […] The feeling of being exposed occurs whenever the Internet addresses us in the second person. TikTok’s “For You” page, for instance, serves up a selection of videos that the algorithm anticipates you will enjoy. “Recommendation systems are all around us,” TikTok’s website explains, cheerily yet with a whiff of fatalism.
The Internet adores this second-person voice. There it is, at every cyber–street corner: Recommended for You, Suggestions for You, Here Is Something You Might Like. Behind each of these You’s, an algorithm sits at an easel, squinting, trying to catch Your likeness. But these algorithms are true Renaissance practitioners. Not only portraitists, they’re also psychologists, data-crunchers, and private detectives, extrapolating personality from the evidence of our past actions: from our online histories and, increasingly, from what they can eavesdrop, without any meaningful warrant, in the physical world. From all those toothsome bytes of behavior, they create an image of You. […]
As the eyes of non-sentient machine-learning systems open wider, for me the claustrophobia increasingly comes not from being unable to unhook myself from the online judgments of others (“You’re lovely!”) but from being locked in with algorithmically produced images of myself. On the bespoke Internet, hell is — ourselves!
For all the hand-wringing about how terrible the internet can be, perhaps, as Scott suggests, we’ve all been projecting? Maybe we don’t get the internet we want, or the internet we design, but the internet we deserve. Or, as CJ Green recently put it , “The demons are not what you think they are.”
Scott goes on to note something more sinister, too. Our YouTube (YOU tube) scroll or TikTok feed is not just a digital reflection, but a feedback loop. It seems online life does not just change how we view the world — another point routinely made — but it distorts the viewer (i.e., us) in the process.
Unlike humans, algorithms often don’t withhold or disguise the conclusions they have drawn about us. Their judgments are unmasked, and yet they lack the x-ray’s objective gaze. … In some contexts, they consolidate a self-image we are pleased to possess, entrenching our cherished habits by nudging us toward the same kind of content again and again. But at other times the algorithms warp our reflection, as in a hall of mirrors, pulling our self-image into grotesque configurations. Much of the hellishness is the uncanny quality of these algorithmic portraits. Beyond the impertinence of their presumptions, we are forced to negotiate with the way they represent us.
3. Next up, and a bit more hopefully, Oliver Burkeman hits the low-anthropology ball out of the park in the latest installment of the Imperfectionist, extolling the virtues of asking “What if this situation is even worse than I thought?”
We often make ourselves miserable — and hold ourselves back from what we might be capable of achieving — not because we’re too pessimistic, but because, in a sense, we’re not pessimistic enough.
We think of certain kinds of challenges as really hard when they are, in fact, completely impossible. And then we drive ourselves crazy trying to deal with them – thereby distracting and disempowering ourselves from tackling the real really hard things that make life worth living.
[…] When you grasp the sense in which your situation is completely hopeless, instead of just very challenging, you can unclench. You get to exhale. You no longer have to go through life adopting the brace position, because you see that the plane has already crashed. You’re already stranded on the desert island, making what you can of life with your fellow survivors, and with nothing but airplane food to subsist on. And you come to appreciate how much of your distress arose not from the situation itself, but from your efforts to hold yourself back from it, to keep alive the hope that it might not be as it really was.
And then, crucially – because some people tend to mistake this for an argument for nihilism, or a life of mediocrity, when it’s really the opposite – that’s precisely when you can throw yourself at life’s real hard challenges: the impressive accomplishments, bold life choices, and deeply fulfilling relationships.
In short: we can’t ever get free from the limited and vulnerable and uncertain situation in which we find ourselves. But when you grasp that you’ll never get free from it, that’s when you’re finally free in it – free to focus on the hard things, instead of the impossible ones, and to give this somewhat preposterous business of being a human everything you’ve got.
Burkeman is pointing at the same counterintuitive yet uplifting truth one sometimes feels in the act of confession. Admitting that we haven’t simply done a bad thing, but that “there is no health in us” can feel like relief. A true unburdening, maybe even a hopeful starting point.
4. Enough heaviness! Time for a respite via a pair of beautiful Grace in Practice stories. First, the New Yorker profiled Jaime and Marcela Cabralez, The Husband-and-Wife Pastors Trying to Inspire an Awakening in Uvalde. Not really something excerpt-able, but their witness is remarkable in every way, and I praise God for it. Second, the Washington Post ran a Father’s Day feature on William Dunn, who founded a non-profit (ministry!) taking kids fishing — most of whom do not have fathers. Amen to that.
5. Nick Cave at it yet again on Red Hand Files, this time in response to two letters, one asking him to clarify his thoughts on free speech and the other imploring him to drop all the Jesus talk already. Needless to say, the man doubles down:
Jesus roamed the land expressing what were, at the time, considered dangerous and heretical ideas. He was literally the embodiment of the terrifying idea. He was followed around by a nervous coterie of muttering scribes and Sadducees whose purpose was to catch him out — expose not just His dangerous ideas, but to lay bare and persecute his uniqueness. They, of course, succeeded and Christ was cancelled upon the Cross. These impossible, dangerous ideas — to love your enemy, to love the poor, to forgive others — were terrifying and unconscionable and forbidden in His day, but became, in time, the better ideas that underpin the society in which many of us are lucky enough to live today. It is worth remembering that.
6. In humor, not a terribly funny week but “Air Fryer latest appliance to fail to save marriage,” elicited a cringe-laugh. And the Hard Times offered some seasonal advice with “Wish It Was Cooler in Your House but Also That It Had More Bugs? Open a Window.” And then there’s Babylon Bee’s “Calvinist Overwhelmed By Number Of Choices At Sizzler Buffet.” Ha.
7. Speaking of summer, writing in Christianity Today, Hannah Anderson looks at what the Summer Solstice can tell us about God. No, she’s not advocating for pilgrimages to Stonehenge or the worship of Sol Invictus. The midsummer reflects something far more profound. The increased sunlight doesn’t just illuminate; it serves as a reminder of the generosity baked into creation by a gracious creator:
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus appeals to the sun’s orbit to teach a new ethic of the kingdom of heaven. As children of our Father, he says, we must love not only our neighbors but also our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. And we must do this because this is what our Father does.
Our Father “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt. 5:45). He doesn’t differentiate between those who deserve the warming rays of the sun and those who don’t; he extends the grace of life to all — even to those who resist or hate him.
8. Finally, a stunning reflection from Mike Cosper, host of Christianity Today’s The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill entitled “The Last Gift My Father Gave Me” in which a chance Seinfeld association in a barber’s chair unleashes a flood of grief.
There’s a finality to the death of a loved one that cuts through abstraction. Life is unalterably different. In accepting the loss of my dad and the disorienting way it came about, I found an understanding of grief that cascaded backwards into my memory.
This incredible sense of loss — loss of a shared dream, of a community, of friendships — had finally found a place to settle in my heart. It was worthy of tears, but it is also held in tension as I wait for the making-new of all things Christ has promised.
As I grieved my father, I learned to grieve other things I’d failed to grieve in the past — and somehow that grief made me feel whole.
Strays:
- In an NY Times op-ed on the ever-freighted topic of cancellation, Agnes Callard made what struck me as an important distinction, claiming that, when the chips are down, “I want friends, not allies.” And then there’s her eerily Christlike invitation to “Let my reputation die.” Christlike in both its unassailability and its loftiness.
- Tara Isabella Burton’s penned a wide-ranging essay for Comment, “Beyond Sexual Capitalism” which contains more than its fair share of incisive observations about the ways ideologically opposed Christians steer into similar ditches when it comes to the bedroom. This paragraph grabbed me especially:
- “Both the hunger for God and the mechanisms of capitalistic desire seem to be by nature unquenchable. They are both desires that this world alone cannot, can never, fulfill. But there is one vital distinction. As Christians, we are called to believe that our hunger for God — as impossible as it may seem — will be fulfilled, that God’s grace and God’s love for us and the promise of the literal, impossible-meaning resurrection all point to a future where we are one with God, where all is reconciled; where we are no longer strangers to one another or to ourselves; where we see ourselves — and all of God’s creation — as it fully is.”
- Cannot tell you how proud I am of my colleagues for putting together the stellar first season of our new Terrible Parables podcast. It’s IDEAL listening for those vacation road trips. If you’ve had a second to indulge, please leave the show a rating on Apple Podcasts — means the world.
- Oh, we’re about two weeks out from the second season of The Brothers Zahl. Look for it the first week of July.
COMMENTS
5 responses to “June 18-24”
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That Burkeman quote though…
Hell is ourselves: This was largely C.S. Lewis’s contention in _The Great Divorce_.
Cannot wait for season 2 of The Brothers Zahl!
His latest, the one they quote, was to me maybe one of the most impactful newsletters he’s ever sent. The idea that you can’t be free from your situation, you can only be free in it, really strikes a chord.
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