Another Week Ends

1. This might seem obvious to those who didn’t grow up with social media, but it’s not the best place to glean deep spiritual insights. It is, however, where the latest trends can be observed. Writing in the New York Times, Jessica Grose was surprised to note how many popular Tiktoks glibly discussed “doing the work” of self-improvement. Oh, the naivety of the youth?

I confess a visceral aversion to “doing the work” used in this particular way. My gut reaction is: I simply decline to do more work. My life is already filled with many kinds of labor. I work full time; I cook dinner every night; I shuttle my children to and fro. I’m not asking for a medal here. This is just what’s in many people’s inboxes. But does tending to my mind and soul have to be framed as yet another job, another box to check, another task to optimize and conquer?

I asked Waldman over email what she made of my aversion. She also finds “doing the work” a “uniquely annoying phrase” and explained that it “can come off as patronizing.” It implies that our big issues in life “are simple and clear-cut, that everyone agrees on what they are and that the only reason a problem hasn’t been solved is because somebody isn’t working hard enough.”

Jessica Calarco, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, had a similar take. “This idea of ‘doing the work,’ is just the latest manifestation of the kind of self-improvement culture that has long permeated American society and that is closely linked to America’s obsessively individualistic bent,” […]

None of this is to say that there’s anything wrong with therapy, mental health days or trying to be a better person. But when we talk about introspection and reflection as work, it cheapens the whole enterprise. Learning, growing and repairing rifts with other humans — and within one’s own soul or psyche — is a messy business, one that transcends the temporal tidiness of a job; you can’t clock in and out of it. It is eternal.

The kind of words we choose to use influence how we think and making self-improvement into just another item on one’s to-do list — alongside “buy groceries” and “go to gym” — reflects the kind of compartmentalized lives we lead. It also seriously underestimates and trivializes the project of moral formation. As if one could become an entirely new person in the same way you might effortlessly change your choice in fashion. Personal agency can only go so far. The “I” who needs to change cannot be the same “I” trying to change.

2. On the subject of self-improvement, teaching and education have largely shifted from the transfer of a specialized knowledge to a more formational or transformational pedagogue. Good teaching not only prepares the student with marketable knowledge and skills, but also shapes his or her views of the world and themselves, educating the whole person, body and soul. Writing for Comment magazine, Douglas Yacek enthusiastically agrees with this approach, yet wonders whether education can really accomplish its holistic aims without a well-defined idea of the good life — a kind of uncharted exploration without a guiding north star. In doing so, educators:

 … suggest to young people that change for its own sake is itself a worthy modus vivendi. We are setting students on a path of perpetual transformation, making them into people who are always searching for experiences that stretch and strain their prior commitments and who, in the last analysis, lack existential purpose. Such continual up-endings can have an addictive quality, luring us toward nowhere in particular, so long as it is shocking and surprising. In the end, transformation becomes valued precisely because it does not fulfill the timeless human longing for greater wisdom, purpose, and character. Rather it “frees” us from the hard work and moral integrity that are required to achieve these fundamental goods.

This teleological prudery — if I may call it that — plays right into the hands of the existential consumerism that the modern world so forcefully peddles to us. Zygmunt Bauman argues that the practices and ideals of consumption have infiltrated not only our purchasing habits but also our notions of who we are and what we strive for. We now expect to be able to “shop around” for new life opportunities, moving freely from one to the next, settling on none in particular, and permanently keeping our options open.

Now, Yacek’s overall point is well taken, particularly his counter thesis that, “Transformative education is not merely about increasing life options; it should help students wholeheartedly commit to those that are deeply worthwhile.” But the crime of limitless self-exploration is a lot to lay at the feet of pedagogical theory — and far more difficult in practice. Self-transformation that is occasioned by, say, an ancient religious book will always be conditioned by its subject matter. And if that good book is good enough, it might just be something to which you devote your life. Or in theological terms, an emphasis on one’s openness (to God and the Spirit) does not devolve into antinomianism (see below).

3. While we’re on the subject of old books, in the Atlantic Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote a rebuttal to the current trend to censor offensive content. The dangers of such an approach were recently brought home to him when some astute viewers noticed that someone had edited the streaming versions of the 1971 film, The French Connection. A racial slur, spoken by a NYC police officer, was deleted. This change smooths over the offense of the past in a way that, inadvertently, makes the racist police officer look more virtuous.

James Baldwin famously argued that “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Axiomatically, a history of racism that is not preserved cannot be faced. The people and institutions who attempt to wash away all past ugliness are condescending to audiences, and the audiences who accept these erasures are self-infantilizing. In the most extreme instance, we all grasp why Holocaust denialism, what the French call négationnisme, is morally reprehensible. Society is duty-bound to remember certain ideas and experiences, attitudes and perversions. Such negationism is obviously insidious because it ignores hatred in order to preserve it. But what we might call “positive negationism” is nearly as disturbing. We cannot accurately gauge how far we’ve progressed as a culture since 1845 or 1971, or even the beginning of the 21st century, when epithets against minorities disappeared from common utterance, without an honest record of that cultural progress.

For that reason, in moments of cynicism I wonder if this is the actual motivation behind all of the catastrophizing and revisionism. There is a strange comfort in believing that the world does not change and that the struggle against racism and other forms of oppression is never-ending. The depravity of previous eras is wiped away and, with nothing to compare it to, we proceed to believe that our contemporary traumas are equally significant.

Talk about the law of unintended consequences! I’d say a similar phenomenon could be noted for our personal narratives as well. Whitewashing the past — which humans are largely given to do — makes the strife of the present appear insurmountable by comparison, whether it be work, parenting, sobriety, marriage, or faith.

4. It turns out, there’s a good reason why pastors might be underpaid compared to their secular counterparts. The same goes for any number helping professions. Writing for the NY Times, Simone Stolzoff argues that the more virtuous your job is, the less money you’ll make doing it.

In a 2018 paper, Fobazi Ettarh, who at the time was a librarian, coined a term for how the perceived righteousness of her industry obscured the issues that existed within it. Ms. Ettarh called the phenomenon vocational awe, which she defined as the belief that as a workplace, libraries were inherently good, and therefore supposedly beyond critique. When a workplace is seen as virtuous, she claimed, it’s easier for workers to be exploited. “In the face of grand missions of literacy and freedom, advocating for your full lunch break feels petty,” she wrote. […]

During the pandemic, vocational awe was on full display from educators who were told that they were doing God’s work but also to make do with what they had to health care professionals who were deemed essential yet often not given compensation or protection commensurate with the severity of their work. The perceived righteousness of honorable industries covered up poor conditions like frosting on a burned cake.

While vocational awe is common in do-gooder professions, it can exist in any field that relies on the strength of its brand to distract from the reality of workers’ experiences. Take zookeeping, a profession where the average pay is $16.51 per hour, according to Indeed. Zookeeping is romanticized — you get to spend time with animals! — but also characterized by long hours, hard labor and cleaning up feces.

In a study, the organizational behavior researchers Jeffery A. Thompson and J. Stuart Bunderson found that following the calling to be a zookeeper led to trade-offs. “Fostering a sense of occupational identification, transcendent meaning and occupational importance on the one hand,” they wrote, offset “unbending duty, personal sacrifice and heightened vigilance on the other.” The researchers concluded that low pay, unfavorable benefits and poor working conditions are often the sacrifices workers make for the privilege of doing what they love.

This isn’t strictly a story of employer exploitation, but reflects in financial terms the actual dollar value of righteousness. The corporate lawyer who quits their job to work for less money at an environmental non-profit gladly trades hundreds of thousands of dollars for the equivalent moral worth.

That said, I’d like to offer a shameless plug for you to donate to Mbird. We don’t do it for the money, but …

5. If you’re looking for someone who isn’t impressed that you’re “doing the work,” look no further than the four-legged friend who drinks from the toilet. The one who physically can’t watch your Instagram reels because the frame rate is too slow. The love of dogs is an evergreen theme for those interested in the subject of unconditional love, but Tara Isabella Burton’s recent article, “On (Unironically) Loving Dogs,” added a fresh take to the discussion:

I am often curious whether our ever-increasing cultural appreciation of dogs — our willingness to call them “fur-babies” or “surrogate children” or otherwise to understand our relationships with them as primary to our social being more broadly — isn’t simply about the atomization of urban life or liberal alienation or the declining cultural interest in parenthood, but rather about the fact that, in the Internet Age, more and more of our lives and social relationships are thoroughly mediated. We construct personae online; we carefully calibrate paraprofessional brands that collapse the difference between social capital, sexual capital, and just plain capital. Our self-conceptions involve layers not just of language or imagistic speculation but of performance. This is not unique to the age of the Internet, of course, but the Internet has at once normalized and intensified this practice: the idea that we would not consciously curate our own selves, even as an unreachable ideal, is as laughable now as it is implausible.

It’s different with dogs. We cannot perform in front of them; we cannot establish a relationship with them based on anything but our own social animality. They are vulnerable to us; we must care for them with wholeheartedness, whether or not we live the rest of our lives mired in irony. We must receive their love with equal wholeheartedness. […]

At it’s best, the relationship between humans and the animals we love can be an anchor to a version of ourselves in which we are as immediate, as fully ourselves, in being and action alike, as they are what they are.

6. For some laughs this week, there were an abundance of articles on handling judgment from others. Reductress had, “Woman Hopes to Leave Behind Beautiful Legacy of No One Being Mad at Her When She Dies,” while the Hard Times ran, “Quiet Confidence Has Nothing on Loud Insecurity.” And McSweeney’s listed some ready-made responses to your dentist’s query about your flossing habits. My favorite this week, however, was the “Highly Specialized Apology Templates to Keep in Your Notes App” from the New Yorker:

For the restaurant owner caught vandalizing a competitor’s establishment.

“As you may know, I had a terrible lapse in judgment last night, when I went to the nearby pizza joint and spray-painted ‘Get better Parmesan shakers, you phonies!’ on its front window. I had consumed one too many cups of coffee that evening, and I didn’t know what to do with the extra energy.

I accept full responsibility for my actions. My behavior affected not only my reputation but also that of the supplier of the original Sal’s Parmesan shakers. I will spend the next few days getting rid of all my spray-paint cans and reflecting. I will also limit myself to one cup of coffee per day, and it will be consumed before 2 p.m. Stay safe.”

7. Mild apologies in advance for the more technical tone of this next article, but it’s too good to pass up. Published in the International Journal of Systematic Theology, Simeon Zahl offers a follow-up essay to his book The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience titled “Play and Freedom: Patterns of Life in the Spirit.” For Zahl, the Christian life, inspired by and drawing from the creative activity of the Spirit, is best understood as a kind of playfulness and creativity — as opposed to “doing the work” i.e. patterning one’s life upon some ideal. The whole article is worth reading (and re-reading), but here are some choice quotes:

The Holy Spirit often works in human lives through experiences of disruption, of being unsettled, of finding human plans thwarted. It also has attitudinal implications, at least aspirationally: a posture of listening, openness, and ongoing discernment, as well as a kind of epistemic humility. We know that the Spirit is always moving and always working, and indeed always working for the good of God’s Kingdom. But we also know that the form this takes will often be surprising and unexpected, and indeed unsettling, from the perspective of Christian experience. […]

Romans 8:15 is particularly important for understanding this Spirit-given freedom because it makes clear that for Paul freedom from the law’s slavery is not just a concept or a theological principle—Christian freedom is not just a description of the soul’s status before God. It is also something that we experience emotionally, especially as freedom from fear: those who fall back under the spirit of slavery ‘fall back into fear’. […]

The particular power of the category of ‘play’ is that it helps articulate why the shape and character of Christian life, filled with the Spirit and free from the law’s tyranny, is neither a cynical embrace of moral license nor a solipsistic wallowing in the hopelessness of sin.

Strays:

• A moving, grace-in-practice story of an inmate advocating for the release of terminally ill prisoners.
• The politics of love (as told by the 14th century poem, Piers Plowman)
• I Joined a Fancy Gym and Gained Nothing But Immense Shame.
• The Reddit church of Ted Lasso.