Another Week Ends

Without a doubt, the best thing about Mockingbird is the conferences. Get to one in the next year if you can. As much as our law/gospel cultural commentary connects with you through online essays, podcasts, print magazines, and the occasional social media post, it connects through an extra layer of “real” when it happens unmediated. People, real actual people, with real, tangible lives, actually believe this stuff about grace and mercy and do their best to practice it. I know this because I have met them.

My bold (?) profession comes to you after watching the first batch of promo videos from Google’s Veo 3 AI video generator this week, the first AI product I’ve seen cross the uncanny valley of video. My trust in online content has just about drained itself dry, though Mockingbird is an island of authenticity in a sea of dubious. 

1. Arthur Bouffard gets what I’m getting at. The New York Times profiled Bouffard this week over his new website, Fake My Run. Users of the website can input a run map of their choosing, and the website will spit out a file that will show up on apps and social media sites like Strava. “Think of it, perhaps, as Banksy-style performance art,” explains Scott Cacciola, the writer for the Times. Rather than being an actual money maker, the app is designed to draw attention to the ways that our digital lives can be directed by falsehood.

By his own admission, Arthur Bouffard has always enjoyed dabbling in a healthy bit of mischief that blurs the lines between technology and reality. He found his sweet spot when he unveiled his latest project this month.

As an avid jogger, Mr. Bouffard had become familiar with certain trends in the running community — some more pernicious than others. He had noticed, for example, how often people would run marathons and immediately grab their phones so that they could upload their results to platforms like Strava. Because if a run does not exist on Strava or on social media, it might as well not exist at all.

Even worse, Mr. Bouffard felt, was the trend in which people hire so-called Strava mules to do their runs for them as a way of gaining online clout without putting in any actual effort. (Yes, this is a real thing.)

“It made me think of how this whole hobby has become more and more performative,” Mr. Bouffard said.

What, he wondered, had happened to jogging for the pleasure of it, without the need for outside validation? And in its own deeply subversive way, his website hints at some of the larger challenges that have taken root amid the rapid spread of technology like artificial intelligence: If people are willing to fake something as benign as a weekend run, what can any of us believe to be true anymore? Not much, apparently.

2. Will Leitch is a longtime sports writer, but his insights about “Zombie Arguments” transcend the genre. It’s his turn of phrase to describe arguments that we think are settled, outdated, or irrelevant that inexplicably find new life, as the infamous Pete Rose scandal has found since his posthumous “pardon” earlier this month.

When I founded Deadspin, a once popular, now quite dead sports culture website, back in 2005, I came up with a set of guiding principles that I hoped would help distinguish it from its competitors. One of those tenets: We are not going to talk about Pete Rose.

Yet, here we are, 20 years later, still arguing about whether Pete Rose, barred from baseball for betting on games, belongs in its Hall of Fame. I shouldn’t be surprised: The recycling of decades-old disputes increasingly feels like a constant of modern life. The zombie arguments that we once assumed were long settled keep lurching back into view — half-dead yet somehow still cluttering up the public discourse.

Some of those zombie arguments are political, but Leitch points out that many of them are fodder for entertainment, music, and fan culture. Beatles vs. Stones, Jordan vs. Lebron, “Han shot first,” I’m sure you can name a few. Instead, what was most refreshing was Leitch’s take that the only right response to zombie arguments is humility. All our takes from twenty years ago appear to have solved absolutely nothing.

Of course, I chose this as my profession 20 years ago at Deadspin — writing so-called takes for a living, attempting to sway public opinion through the power of my preternaturally persuasive prose. So to recognize that even the debates that felt tired and settled two decades ago can stagger back into the discourse is, for me, a depressing and deflating admission, since I’m the chump who has been doing this my entire adult life and hasn’t made one whit of progress along the way.

So, sheesh, fine, I’ll take the stand I thought too moldy to take two decades ago: Pete Rose should not be in the Hall of Fame. Perhaps you disagree, though I suppose it doesn’t really matter. We’re apparently going to spend 20 more years arguing about it.

I guess this means my college years essays about predestination, creationism, eschatology, or theonomy didn’t settle the discussion then? A writer’s work, it seems, is never done.

3. Continuing with baseball, Matt Antonelli, former first-round draft pick of the San Diego Padres, confirms that I lack the disposition to be a professional athlete. “I’ve been called a bust so many times, I stopped caring a long time ago,” he wrote in the Athletic this week. I think, in his position, I would care very much. His insights start off as a generic online listicle, “Here are 5 lessons I learned,” but quickly become a crash course in the Theology of the Cross. It starts off slow with insights like “The hard moments teach you what the easy ones never could” and “Your identity must be bigger than your achievements,” but by the time he hits “What feels like a loss can actually be relief in disguise,” he’s cooking with gas.

For years, every decision that I made, from what I ate to how I trained, was dedicated to being what I thought I was supposed to become. When I started to struggle — when the injuries came and I had multiple surgeries, when my numbers fell and my confidence eroded — I fought to try to fix it all. But eventually I couldn’t.

The thing I had structured my entire life around disappeared. I lost a version of myself I had been building since I was 15 years old. But on the other side of heartbreak was something unexpected: freedom. Once my playing career ended, I felt an unexpected calmness for the first time in a long time. I was able to sit down and ask myself, “What else am I good at? What do I care about? What do I really want to do?”

Chasing the dream of playing Major League Baseball gave my life direction for many years, but losing that dream gave me depth. I was able to build a new identity beyond just being “a baseball player.” The experiences I had, the lessons I learned, those things don’t expire. I still pass those lessons on to young players chasing the same dream. I tell them: “You don’t need to be perfect. You don’t need to be great at baseball every day. It’s OK to struggle. It’s not always about the results. It’s about the process, the lessons you learn. You will be OK if you don’t go 4-for-4. You’ll be OK if you give up the game-winning run. You’re going to be OK because you are more than what you do or how you perform on the field.”

The impact I have now, helping others navigate the same path I walked, is more meaningful and fulfilling than anything I did as a player.

4. In the Atlantic, Stephanie H. Murray wonders if we should be open to bringing back communal discipline for kiddos.

On a trip to Prague a couple of years ago, my family piled into a rapidly filling metro car, and I wound up sitting next to my 6-year-old daughter, while her 4-year-old sister sat directly across from us, on her own. At one point, my youngest pulled a knee up to her chest and rested her foot on the seat. Almost immediately, a woman sitting next to her, who looked to be about 70, reached out and gently touched my daughter’s foot, signaling her to put it down. My daughter was surprised, maybe a little embarrassed. But she understood and quickly obeyed.

For a split second, I wondered if I ought to feel chastised: Perhaps the woman was judging me for having failed at some basic parental duty. But something about the matter-of-fact, almost automatic way the woman had intervened reassured me that she wasn’t thinking much about me at all. She was just going through the motions of an ordinary day on the train, in which reminding a child not to put her foot on the seat was a perfectly natural gesture.

Ultimately, I was grateful for the woman’s tap on my daughter’s foot. But the exchange also felt foreign. In my experience, that sort of instruction, from a random adult to a stranger’s child, isn’t much of a thing in America (or, for what it’s worth, in the United Kingdom, where I currently live). Many people don’t seem to think they have the authority to instruct, let alone touch, a kid who isn’t theirs. They tend to leave it to the parent to manage a child’s behavior—or they may silently fume when the parent doesn’t step up.

Her arguments are compelling. The discipline of the community offers some relief for already exhausted hypervigilant parents. Community discipline augments the discipline at home, lending some external authority to what a parent is trying to teach. Kids are better behaved when they know that their mischief is witnessed by the eyes of the community. My kids are five and two, so I understand the kind of pragmatic help and relief Murray is longing for.

And yet, what I would add to Murray’s insight is that behavior correction is only effective when it comes from a place of genuine affection and goodwill, which is what we see in Murray’s train story. If a community is going to invest in the discipline of its kids, it’s going to have to actually love them first. Murray is right to recognize how the dissolution of tight-knit neighborhoods and communities have made community discipline an antique of past generations, but also, it has dissolved the obligation of community love. Which is to say, we have lost more than a mere surveillance network.

4. Last month it was the right way to load dishwashers; this month, according to NewsThump it’s taking out the garbage.

Bin owner Patricia Williams said, “My husband must be the only person on the planet who, when faced with a full bin, precariously balances a pizza box on the top. He must think there’s a bin fairy who sorts it out.

“I shouldn’t be surprised as cleaning isn’t really his forte. Still, I’ve managed to train him to flush the toilet – surely bin emptying is within his grasp.”

Patricia’s husband Simon said, “My wife likes a clean house, but she has a real blind-spot when it comes to the kitchen bin.

“Every couple of days I have to wrestle out an overflowing sack, cutting myself on tin can lids and getting leftover cottage pie wedged under my fingernails…

Meanwhile, their son Ben said, “I’m three years old – putting my own shoes on is a hit-and-miss affair. Yet, for some reason, I’m always the one who empties the bin. I wouldn’t bother, but if I don’t, it creates a really unpleasant smell and guess who’ll get the blame for that?”

My wife and I both are taking this one personally. For more laughs, there’s “Everything My iPhoto Memories Has Chosen to Resurface” from the New Yorker. And this review of Tom Cruise’s stunts in the new Mission Impossible movie. “It’s hard to suspend disbelief watching a picture when you’re thinking about how much Tiger Balm went into its making.”

5. At Christianity Today, Matthew Burdette offers a cautionary reflection to the liturgy lovers in our midst. Like Burdette, I come from a tradition that uses the Book of Common Prayer, and like Burdette, it’s unintuitive to for me to worship any other way. But in my thirteen years of ordained ministry, I’ll testify with Burdette that the supposed utility of liturgy, its pragmatic use for not only worship but Christian discipleship and faith formation, is overstated. In fact, when approached as a tool for formation, liturgy becomes its own sort of works-righteousness, a pathway to grace that detours into law.

Liturgy enthusiasts tend to be enamored with the power of liturgy for Christian faith formation. After all, they say, liturgy forms people in habits that are politically, culturally, and economically countercultural. Rich or poor, ugly or beautiful, we all eat together. People of every race and nationality come to the same table. We recite the historic creeds in one voice.

Certainly, these observations of what happens in liturgy are factually correct (and good and right). But they misunderstand worship as a means in the spiritual life. It is not a means. It is an end in itself.

The purpose of our lives is to worship God. Yet I see newly minted liturgy enthusiasts wanting to take that end and wield it as a means, a way to form better, cooler, more politically with-it Christians.

But the worship of God isn’t for that — or for anything. We worship God because that is why we exist. We care about the poor and about racial reconciliation and justice as acts of worship on our way to the greatest act of worship with all God’s people. That our communion with God in worship should result in bearing fruit of good works is God’s doing alone (Eph. 2:10; Phil. 2:13), not a result of our clever liturgical scheming.

And there’s another, somewhat alarming problem with the liturgy-as-formation assumption: Throughout church history, liturgical Christian communities have not been better than others. They have not been more pious, more socially just, more culturally diverse. […]

The structure of liturgy is, in the end, little more than the regulation of the “traffic pattern” of the church’s life: It is the lines on the road, the yield signs, the traffic lights, the guardrails when we’re going around the bend, all of which we need. I don’t blame evangelicals for wanting these things. But if you come to the next town over, you’ll see that people still run red lights and roll through stop signs. Liturgy is intended to ensure that the church’s worship is deliberate and faithful, but by itself it doesn’t guarantee vibrant Christian faith and practice any more than decent road infrastructure guarantees good drivers.

For that, you’ll need something more. Conveniently, I think evangelicals already have what it takes.

6. We’ll close this week with Jon Malesic’s criticism of AI over at Hedgehog Review. Frankly, there’s not a lot of new ground to cover with AI — the irresistible force of “it’s inevitable, better integrate it now” continues to meet the unmovable object of “it’s not human, so it doesn’t matter.” Malesic’s take aligns with the latter, but it’s a really good one, particularly his exploration of the definition of gimmick:

We call something a gimmick, the literary scholar Sianne Ngai points out, when it seems to be simultaneously working too hard and not hard enough. It appears both to save labor and to inflate it, like a fanciful Rube Goldberg device that allows you to sharpen a pencil merely by raising the sash on a window, which only initiates a chain of causation involving strings, pulleys, weights, levers, fire, flora, and fauna, including an opossum. The apparatus of a large language model really is remarkable. It takes in billions of pages of writing and figures out the configuration of words that will delight me just enough to feed it another prompt. There’s nothing else like it.

But look at what people actually use this wonder for: brain-dead books and videos, scam-filled ads, polished but boring homework essays. Another presenter at the workshop I attended said he used AI to help him decide what to give his kids for breakfast that morning.

Such disappointment inevitably accompanies the gimmick. “The gimmick lets us down,” Ngai writes, “only because it has also managed to pump us up.” A universal culture-producing machine? Remarkable! Then we see its results. Widder and Hicks note that the failed promise of AI “is not surprising, as generative AI does not so much represent the wave of the future as it does the ebb and flow of waves past.” MOOCs, NFTs, AR: We should be wise to the tricks by now. AI progress in cultural production already seems to have slowed because the models have run out of human-generated writing to “learn” from and increasingly feed on AI-produced content, gulping down a vile soup of their own ever-concentrating ordure.

For how many people, I wonder, have workout apps like Strava become a gimmick? Or social media for that matter. I, for one, find many of the most structured and rigorous outlines of Christian spirituality to match the definition of “appearing to both save labor and inflate it.” (This is my own personal potshot at Ignatian spirituality — I found it tedious, though many find it very helpful).

Is it all more trouble than it’s worth? For Malesic, he prefers the tedium of “tricking students into loving what the learn.” Assign them quizzes, make them read, proffer them grades, and hope that by some providential blessing the student’s heart is set ablaze by an encounter with something real and true. Which is how you get real miracles like this:

This is not to say I have never been astonished by my students’ writing. [Princeton History professor and AI evangelist D. Graham] Burnett reports being moved to tears by one of his students’ interactions with a chatbot. I, too, have cried while reading student essays. I once had a student who started college only after he had retired from four decades working for the phone company. He was not a great writer, but he wrote from the heart. In a class on religious autobiography, he described going to the hospital to speak to the man, by then on his deathbed, who had murdered my student’s mother. The man asked my student to forgive him. My student did so. He forgave. The essay testified to a form of love few of us would be capable of. Sitting at my kitchen table, I read the essay a second time; I cried a second time. It was the rare piece of student writing that improved the world by its existence. It made mercy more widely known.

Strays:

• A new Banksy preaches imputation?
• Vox on building trust.
• Kierkegaard’s Attack on Cultural Christianity.
• DZ continues to tour for The Big Relief, with an especially notable stop with Mbird friend Steve Brown (video below).