1. At Mockingbird we’re big believers in surrender, calling it quits, and admitting you’re desperate for help. (Mk 10:28-31) In a recent piece for The Baffler, Sam Adler Bell discusses a new book by British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips entitled On Giving Up, in which Phillips contends that giving up has gotten a bad rap, and he asks why, if it’s self-evidently a bad thing, must we be so vigilant about discouraging it?
It’s not surprising that a society dependent upon our productive labor would cultivate powerful injunctions against idleness, sloth, and capitulation. (Thus our pervasive social fear of “dropouts” and “freeloaders.”) But giving up, Phillips insists, is not always and only an incremental step toward self-annihilation. Nor is refusing to give up always admirable or life-affirming. Tragic heroes, like Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, he points out, are our catastrophic examples of the inability to give up. They suffer precisely for their refusal to change their minds or change course; they are monomaniacs.
Giving up, like being helped, reminds us of our dependence, which, for Phillips, is both our permanent condition and one of things we’d rather forget. When we can only conceive of giving up as failure, as a little death-in-life, we are being tyrannized by our ego ideals: our notions of ourselves, what we take ourselves to be, to need and not need, to be capable and incapable of.
As Bell asks, what if giving up was just another maneuver in a repertoire of viable options — a precondition for starting anew? Don’t we know this is how things go anyhow? Denying that death is necessary for new life makes us feel strong, like we control our destinies, but no one can escape life’s little endings or their final breath.
2. Gaslighting isn’t the first niche clinical concept to become a ubiquitous cultural diagnosis, but around the Substack set it’s parlance is on fire (pun intended)! In 2022, gaslighting was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year, on the basis of a seventeen-hundred-and- forty-per-cent increase in searches for the term, made even more popular by a best-selling album by The Chicks and a tv show about the Watergate scandal starring Julia Roberts. Over at the New Yorker, Leslie Jamison susses out why and what it might mean for our self-conception.
The popularity of the term testifies to a widespread hunger to name a certain kind of harm. But what are the implications of diagnosing it everywhere? When I put out a call on X (formerly known as Twitter) … the stories offered proof of the term’s broad resonance, but they also suggested the ways in which it has effectively become an umbrella that shelters a wide variety of experiences under the same name.
According to clinicians, gaslighting is more and less pervasive than we think, though we may be identifying it in the wrong places, and that’s because of a tendency that is true or us all: denial. Until reality forces us to believe otherwise, we tend to think that we are better than we are, and accordingly, we tend to believe others are better than they are.
to understand the phenomenon exclusively in light of these dire examples allows us to avoid the more uncomfortable notion that something similar takes place in many intimate relationships. One doesn’t have to dilute the definition of gaslighting to recognize that it happens on many scales, from extremely toxic to undeniably commonplace … one of the key insights of psychoanalysis is that people respond to anxiety by dividing the world into good and bad, a tendency known as ‘splitting.’ It strikes me that some version of this splitting is at play not only in gaslighting itself — taking an undesirable “bad” emotion or quality and projecting it onto someone else, so that the self can remain ‘good’ — but also in the widespread invocation of the term, the impulse to split the world into innocent and culpable parties. If the capacity to gaslight is more widely distributed than its most extreme iterations would lead us to believe, perhaps we’ve all done more of it than we care to admit.
There’s no refuting the genuine hurt, self doubt, and trauma (I know, another ubiquitous therapy term that has become a mainstay) caused by a victimizer who makes a victim feel he or she is going crazy. I’m not minimizing that at all; I’ve been there (the church us rife with this stuff!), but maybe, in some sense, we’re all a little bit capable of gaslighting? We have all, at one time or another, been the powerful or the powerless, the controlling or the controlled. Fessing up to this reality makes way for grace (1 Jn 1:5-10).
3. “The accusation that people on the other side of the political divide have abandoned critical thinking and moral reasoning is now commonplace in American political discourse,” says Dr. Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at Colby College who studies the social aspects of intellectual life. But how often are we really thinking for ourselves? Gross would argue that a variety of external factors are predictors of belief — powerful enough that elections have become as much a turnout game as an exercise in persuasion.
If nothing else, reflecting on the social roots of your political opinions and behavior should prompt some humility. Even if you hold the “correct” political beliefs, you may not deserve to congratulate yourself for them; your moral righteousness could be an accident of birth or a product of good social fortune. So on what grounds are you permitted to feel snidely superior to your peers who — simply because of their different life circumstances — wound up on the other side of the political aisle?
This doesn’t imply moral relativism, but it does suggest that we should take greater care when assigning praise or blame. The contingency of our own positions also raises the distinct possibility that others’ opinions contain overlooked elements of truth.
Our group identities, attitudes, and habits inform our political and cultural alliances as much as our self-realized convictions do. Might this reality make our public discourse a little gentler, a little more patient, and little less vitriolic, for everyone’s sake?
If we could bear in mind that we sometimes stumble into our most passionately held beliefs, the tenor of our discourse might be a bit saner and more cordial. The fact that we are all deeply social creatures, in politics and otherwise, underscores our shared humanity — something that we would be wise to never lose sight of.
4. A bit of sad news, followed by some good news in the next entry. (Keep reading!) This year, the Pew Research Center reported that religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their community and social life, and more likely to say they feel lonely. Because the church is “beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics,” Atlantic writer Derek Thompson “spent most of [his] life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms.” But in a recent article he says he has come around to a different view about the true cost of the churchgoing bust.
“Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.” Religion, Thompson says:
provided many things at once: not only a connection to the divine, but also a historical narrative of identity, a set of rituals to organize the week and year, and a community of families. PRRI found that the most important feature of religion for the dwindling number of Americans who still attend services a few times a year included “experiencing religion in a community” and ‘instilling values in their children.’
Shifts in values, ethics, and allegiances aside, Thompson is most concerned about the decline in face-to-face socializing, explaining that social collapse is steepest for some of the groups with the largest declines in religiosity. People are spending most of their time alone, even if they don’t feel alone because their engagement is happening online. While it would be easy to blame religious institutions for the ways in which they’ve failed people in very trying times, church decline is likely emblematic of an accumulation of other trends, and soon other gathering spots like sit-down restaurants will succumb these forces. We’ve cited Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone many times on this site, and now Palaces for the People describes a age in which collective life is facilitated through parasocial web-based relationships instead of public spaces.
Thompson isn’t asking everyone to go back to church. Rather he’s asking for slow, deliberate reflection about the disheartening losses associated with a decline in religiosity.
I’m not advocating that every atheist and agnostic in America immediately choose a world religion and commit themselves to weekly church (or synagogue, or mosque) attendance. But I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it. Making friends as an adult can be hard; it’s especially hard without a scheduled weekly reunion of congregants. Finding meaning in the world is hard too; it’s especially difficult if the oldest systems of meaning-making hold less and less appeal. It took decades for Americans to lose religion.
I’ve tended to feel sad about the decline in church attendance from the inside looking out, sort of like, “Where did everyone go? When did we all decide not to do this anymore? The pews are empty.” But this reporting made me feel sad about the loneliness, isolation, and despair that has become a mainstay for so many of my peers. These are feelings that none of us escape but which might be consoled by a white haired church lady few rows up, an elder who has lived many lives and suffered many losses, her elegant wisdom and warmth imparted when she passes the peace.
5. In humor this week:
- McSweeney’s got ahold of the voice message God left for Jesus on Holy Saturday. “Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t forsaken you. You think I’d forsake you? I seem like a forsaker to you? What do you want me to do? I was on another line, that’s it.”
- Feeling an unfamiliar tinge of emptiness midway through his 117-nation excursion, Indiana resident Larry Hough reported Wednesday that abandoning his family back in Fort Wayne in order to visit a McDonald’s in every foreign country was not as satisfying an endeavor as he had imagined.
- In an exciting turn of events, 26-year-old Dalia Raymond used to be considered the “smart” sibling, but after graduating college, she has become firmly established as the “poor one.” Mockingbirds: relate?
- A man has finally reached page 50 of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s seminal masterpiece One Hundred Years Of Solitude, 234 days after first embarking on the novel. Of the slog he says, “At first, the smug satisfaction I got from looking down my nose at the other commuters clutching their copies of the Metro was enough to sustain me, but then I lost the book jacket, so no one even knows what I am reading now.”
- He obviously didn’t read the New Yorker’s signs you should give up on a book: “you can’t stop thinking about the characters and how you’d like to rewrite them as characters from books you’ve actually enjoyed reading.”
6. A different story about church is unfolding across the pond. Could a Christian revival be underway in Britain, asks Justin Brierley, author of The Surprising Rebirth of Belief In God. Brierly tells the story of attending an Evensong service with self-professed agnostic Tom Holland, who despite his unbelief, regularly attends London’s St. Bartholomew the Great. Brierly suggests that Holland’s church attendance is indicative of a growing trend among British young professionals, politicians, and rock stars.
Holland is not alone as an agnostic trying out church again. In contrast to the usual ageing demographic of many Anglican churches, the congregation of St. Bart’s seems to mainly consist of young professionals, both male and female. I noticed a famous politician among the gathered faithful, and was told that a well-known melancholy rock star has also been frequenting the church of late.
While many of the New Atheists acknowledge Christianity as a “useful fiction” with its morals, cathedrals, shared songs, and charities, Brierly stresses that it’s not enough to simply benefit from religion.
Christianity is not just a useful lifeboat for stranded intellectuals. If it isn’t literally true, it isn’t valuable. Whether Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead matters. It mattered to St Paul. ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.’ And it should matter to us.
If conservative-leaning intellectuals only ‘cosplay’ at Christianity (Tom Holland’s phrase) without really believing it, then this ‘New Theist’ movement will inevitably fade away. Co-opting Christianity in the cause of an anti-woke agenda or in order to fend off radical Islam turns it into a useful political tool, but drains it of any life-giving power.
Who knows where the church is headed and whether new, surprising forms of belief are taking root among folks like Tom Holland, but Christians believe that things that are dead and in decline can come back to life — that’s the whole point after all.
Strays:
- The last eight episodes of the Rest is History podcast have been all about Martin Luther, “a man who changed the world,” says Tom Holland.
- St. Andrews has created a free, online Encyclopedia of Theology from theologians across the globe.
- Important moments in Church history as portrayed by the cast of Friends.
- Vampire Weekend’s new album, “Only God Was Above Us,” is a treatise on inheritance, decay, generational dissonance, and the delicate idea of choosing optimism, and in it, the band’s lead singer Ezra Koenig continues his recurring lyrical motifs, one of which is a vague religiosity — a deep and persistent curiosity about faith and the divine.
- Marilynne Robinson picked her five best books on faith for the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, none of her selections were written after 1563. I was most excited to see Piers Plowman (c.1380), a book that Robinson describes as a “meditation on a Christian humility that inverts the social order, Christ himself present in the exalted and lowly figure of the plowman.”
- Congrats to our friends at Sea Dog theater for the positive review of their production Tuesdays with Morie in the New York Times.
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I feel similarly about #4. I think of all the people I grew up with, so many of whom I forged deep and lasting friendships with at church, and vanishingly few of them have any religious practice today. But I hold out hope that there is a seed buried there that might germinate again, given the right conditions. I think our role in the church today might be to nurture and nourish those seeds by preaching the Gospel and pointing to it always in our ordinary lives, to whatever muddled extent we can. That’s the most nourishing thing we can do!