1. I’m writing this on Good Friday, and it feels appropriate that before we delve into the meaning of the day, we explore its urgency. That is, we take a quick tour of contemporary sin and dysfunction and the what’s-so-curdled-that-Jesus-had-to-die aspect of it all. What fresh shape is our poisonous propensity for self-aggrandizement taking of late? How is our aversion to repentance and dependence and God making itself known these days? Happy Easter to you too, Dave.
First stop on this stretch of My Way Or The Highway would have to be “All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be ‘High Agency’,” by Sophie Haigney in the New York Times. Silicon Valley may be an admittedly extreme setting, but like all things that take root there, I suspect the trend she identifies will trickle out. Apparently it is no longer enough to be a self-starter or a “real Type A,” not if you truly want to get ahead and ensure your prosperity in the post-AI landscape. Today the goal is to be High Agency, the sort of person who moves fast and breaks things — decisively, confidently, and without deference to anything but motion itself.
In other words, Pilate may have gotten things done in the end, but the Roman system clearly had some latencies that could be optimized going forward.
“High agency” is now being branded as a personality trait. It implies decisiveness, self-assurance and a willingness to take risks, a predilection for thinking “outside the box” and questioning systems. Some people have more agency innately, but you can cultivate it, at least according to the many online guides to cultivating yours. A low-agency person is a cog in the machine, working a regular job, spending too much time answering emails. They’re what in video games might be called a “nonplayer character.” A high-agency person, on the other hand, might start a company young, spend their mornings writing a novel, or get into a prestigious college and decide not to go — time and money that could be spent more efficiently elsewhere, according to the new logic.
The valorization of “high agency” is … an ethos for a gambler’s time, and we’re living in one.
Standing up to Nazi Germany? High-agency behavior, apparently. But it struck me that, in a different time, we would have called that “courage.” That word has fallen out of fashion. And there’s a reason. “Courage” has a moral valence that agency doesn’t. Agency is about action, but it tells us nothing of direction.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but High Agency sounds a lot like the opposite of Low Anthropology. Thankfully, Bono got his mojo back just in time to disrupt the disrupters. His band’s surprise Easter Lily EP abounds with vertically directed/derived uplift, for example:
2. The moral and metaphysical vacuum to which Haigney alludes is spelled out in colorful (if terrifying) detail in the Long Read of the Week: Sam Kriss’s “Child’s Play” in Harpers. Kriss seeks out a handful of these self-described “high agency” tech entrepreneurs and uncovers some unsettling ironies about the whole AI start-up subculture. Kriss has rapidly become today’s canniest narrator of spiritual decay. Its most hilarious too. Oy vey:
AI can’t function without instructions from humans, but an increasing number of humans seem incapable of functioning without AI … until we build an all-powerful but distant God, the agency problem remains. AIs are not capable of directing themselves; most people aren’t either.
It did not seem like a good idea to me that some of the richest people in the world were no longer rewarding people for having any particular skills, but simply for having agency, when agency essentially meant whatever it was that was afflicting Roy Lee [cofounder and CEO of Cluely]. Unlike Eric Zhu or Donald Boat, Roy didn’t really seem to have anything in his life except his own sense of agency. Everything was a means to an end, a way of fortifying his ability to do whatever he wanted in the world. But there was a great sucking void where the end ought to be. All he wanted, he’d said, was to hang out with his friends. I believed him. He wanted not to be alone. For people to pay attention to him.
3. Freddie deBoer examines the other side of the aspirational coin in “Perhaps There Are Options Other Than ‘Toxic Confidence’ and Insecurity-as-Identity.” If young Gen-Z doods are chasing High Agency, perhaps they are doing so in part as a reaction to the previous generation’s Performative Vulnerability, AKA this notion that belonging in the circle of (online) acceptability depends on (and demands) ongoing professions of insecurity and/or inadequacy. I recognize the phenomenon and have engaged in it myself, so guilty as charged. What started out refreshing and humanizing eventually morphed, like all public signifiers, into a form of little-l law (i.e., its own perverse badge of honor):
For roughly fifteen years, Millennial culture ran a remarkable experiment: it rebranded anxiety, self-doubt, and chronic insecurity as virtues … Impostor syndrome ceased to be something to overcome and became a membership card. Everybody started bragging about their social anxiety; “I’m the worst,” said with the right ironic lilt, became fodder for bonding. Vulnerability, performed on cue, was currency. The implicit agreement was powerful and, when you examine it, fairly cruel: if you seemed too assured, too unbothered by your own inadequacy, you were either deluded or dangerous. The rules had been rewritten by indoor kids, the chronic overthinkers, the people who had built entire identities around their relationship with self-doubt, and the rules said confidence was suspect.
There’s a particular vanity in the person who cannot stop telling you how much they doubt themselves. The theatrically insecure, the performative self-deprecator, the ones who preface every opinion with elaborate disclaimers, those who catastrophize publicly … Such people have simply found a more socially acceptable route to the same destination as the narcissist: all the attention still flows toward them. The room still organizes itself around their needs. The difference is that they’ve disguised bragging as confession.
The performance of insecurity colonizes the moral high ground while doing the same work as ego — dominating the social space, crowding out other people, demanding accommodation, making the conversation endlessly about the self. Arrogance announces itself, so you can resent it. Performed insecurity demands that you feel sorry for it, which is, when you think about it, a far more shameless ask.
4. Good Friday is a day for sinners, and one of the unlikelier additions to that club in recent years would have to be Dave Grohl, AKA Mr. Nice Guy Rock Star, who fell from (into?) grace last year with the surprise announcement that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. The crisis clearly threw the affable musician for a spiritually beneficial loop, which he detailed in a recent interview with the Guardian. I’ll be interested to hear how it informs the new Foo Fighters record, which is out later this month.
“There were years where I was so overly ambitious with things, like a documentary series on HBO, writing a book, whatever. I think having grown up in suburban Virginia with a public-school teacher as a mother, any opportunity you got, you would take. But over time, you spread yourself so thin. And so I look back and I’m like, God, what was I trying to prove? There is such a thing as addiction to achievement, and it’s dangerous. You’ll set a goal for yourself and you put everything you have into it; the world disappears. Then you achieve that finish line, and it feels good for 24 f—ing hours, and that feeling immediately goes away. And there’s that hole again, there’s that emptiness, and you’re like, shit, I need to fill it up with something else.”
“It’s like this hungry ghost, an insatiable monster that you do your best to fill. But if you finally sit with yourself and consider humility and gratitude and empathy … you can strip away all the other bullshit and find those few things that are most important. But that takes turning off the world and stopping and sitting in silence with yourself.”
5. Cue “The Ladder of Your Daily Life” by Stephen Freeman, which expounds on (and gestures at an answer to) the emptiness Grohl articulates. Of course, Freeman’s words speak just as loudly to those stuck on the ladders of High Agency and Performative Vulnerability as those spinning their wheels on the ladder of garden-variety achievement.
There is something buried deep in the human soul surrounding the image of climbing and God … Mountains have always played a major role in the meeting place of God and humanity. Our instinct is that we “go up” to meet God.
The Tradition clearly indicates that this instinct has value. But like all human instincts, it has its dark side as well. Our culture’s notion of the “pinnacle of success” is a prime example of this darkness. By its very name, this peak experience is held out as a desirable goal. But we have the strange reality that those at the top are rarely personalities that we would want to nurture in our children. There is nothing that the pinnacle offers other than money and power, neither of which is beneficial to the soul.
This distorted “ladder” often gets translated into the moral life in what is little more than an exercise in Pelagianism [the notion that we are saved by our own efforts]. Our struggles for moral improvement frequently have more to do with our inability to bear the shame of moral failure than with any desire for goodness. As such, our struggles represent a neurosis rather than a morality.
If you, like me, are in need of something positive about the human race at this point, look no further (Kleenex in hand):
6. Expanding on Freeman’s warning about the religious life becoming its own ladder, Alan Jacobs highlighted an incisive Substack from Francis Young, “Be Perfect, Therefore.” Needless to say, this time of year is particularly susceptible to religious perfectionism:
As we enter Holy Week and Lent draws to a close, I feel a certain relief; not just because I have given something up for Lent that I rather miss (in my case, beer), but because I find that Lent can quite easily become spiritually toxic – at least for me. It can turn into a purely human striving for perfection, of the kind that once became quite dangerous for me; it was, in fact, the scourge of performative spiritual perfection that was probably the single most dangerous thing I was exposed to at university. It was the one thing that nearly took me off the rails and risked turning me into something less than human, and I am thankful every day that I ultimately escaped it. Performative perfection is the besetting sin of people who define themselves, collectively or individually, as self-consciously devout; because once you make it part of your identity, you are socially locked into maintaining devout behaviour – or at least the appearance of devout behaviour, and that’s where the danger starts.
7. Last but not least, one of my new favorite Substacks is Josh Bascom’s Cross Street, in which the recent Mbird speaker surveys the world of “leadership” (and self-help) literature for nuggets of grace — and its absence. His Good Friday installment is called “The Ruthless Elimination of the Cross,” and it takes a look at one of the more popular ways in which the spiritual perfectionism that Young describes above is currently being smuggled into the church. Josh is characteristically charitable with the bestseller in question (IYKYK), yet without muting the pastoral implications of reducing Jesus to Teacher (and us to his apprentices). Namely, we risk losing the precious Goodness of this Friday of ours:
There’s something deeply appealing about [the solution on offer]: To sit at the feet of Jesus like Mary. To pay attention and simply listen. To live an unhurried life. To live inside a Wendell Berry poem. Yes, please.
But somewhere along the way, something subtle happens. Without meaning to, the solution slowly begins to sound a lot like the problem. Because now the question becomes: Am I doing this right? Am I practicing enough silence? Am I observing Sabbath correctly? Am I becoming the kind of person who is unhurried, present, and at peace? Why am I still impatient, anxious and dissatisfied? And before long, this vision of the Christian life starts to feel like just another hurried performance. A more spiritual version of: “Busy, but in a good way…”
Not to mention, bring on a bad diagnosis, “The doctor called. They want to do more tests …” and you’ll be clambering for something more than a rule of life […]
Yes, we can, and we should, slow down our hurried souls and sit at the feet of Jesus, but life has a way of slowing you down, whether you like it or not. Unfortunately, it tends to be painful. It tends to involve sin and suffering and failure and even death itself. But what you’ll find as you sit there, at the foot of the Cross, humbled by your inability to fix yourself, is simply … Jesus. Jesus is truly enough to save you.
You don’t become a better friend, a less hurried husband, or a more patient boss because you’ve decided to ruthlessly eliminate those shortcomings from your life. You don’t become a better parent simply by choosing to become one. You become a better parent when you are met with mercy in the prison of failures that you and your father and your father’s father have built. Mercy from the only Father who actually has a leg to stand on when it comes to giving you advice.
And here’s the best part. He doesn’t even give you advice. He gives you His life. He gives you grace. He gives you forgiveness and hope, a future that isn’t dependent on your successful discipleship, but is instead secured by His promise that you are marked as His own forever.
That’ll preach! Amen. I’ll close with my big Holy Week Discovery this year, Bob Chilcott’s sublime St John Passion, which our church choir introduced me to. Stunning:
Strays:
- Further Holy Week reading: “Jesus or Barabbas? We know who the crowds chose — are we certain we wouldn’t do the same?” by
- The Mockingcast is back on Monday, and one of the articles we discuss is “Start a Band, Even If You’re Terrible” by Hugo Lindgren.
- Great piece over at Plough from upcoming NYC Conference speaker Graham Tomlin, “Blaise Pascal’s Night of Fire.” And speaking of the conference, we are three weeks away (4/23–25)!! Which means if you’re planning on attending but haven’t registered yet … please please please do so ASAP.
- Along those lines, we’ve been blessed with some scholarship funds. So if you’re on the fence for $$ reasons, please email Deanna Roche at info@mbird.com, and we’ll try to help.
- While you’re waiting for the new Mcast, my top listening rec would be the jaw-dropping two-parter that Malcolm Gladwell released on Revisionist History recently, investigating the remarkable story behind Zootopia 2. Just be sure to listen through to the end.
- Finally, I can’t let Good Friday pass without sharing the Leonard Cohen-themed, Theology-of-the-Cross-inspired talk I had the privilege of delivering at the Fallen and Free Conference in February:
