1. It’s the sort of article you can’t post a week after a hotly contested national election, but two weeks later in the New York Times, Jeneen Interlandi proclaims that “We Tire Very Quickly of Being Told That Everything Is on Fire.” Interlandi, whose area of expertise is public health, takes journalists, policymakers, and other public figures to task for unilaterally declaring that everything is a crisis. Not only does it create confusion for which crises are actually worth paying attention to, but human beings are simply not wired to handle the knowledge that everything is falling apart:
The United States is in what can only be described as an epoch of crisis. There is no quarter of American life that has not been claimed by the term, from the planet (climate) to the Republic (democracy, migration, housing) and the deepest chambers of the human heart (loneliness, despair). In the future, if we survive that long, historians will marvel at either our capacity to endure so much hardship at once or our ability to label so many disparate problems with the same graying word. In the meantime, officials and policymakers — and, yes, journalists — ought to consider how they employ this term and why, and whether it’s having the desired effect.
In public health, at least, there is no objective formula for determining when a problem becomes a crisis. Emergencies and epidemics are governed by formal declarations and precise definitions. Crises are a much fuzzier beast. It’s up to us (officials, journalists, individuals) to decide when or whether that threshold has been crossed and, if so, what to do about it. And those decisions have always been fraught […]
But when it comes to discussing their relative urgency and import, we need either a new way or a new word.
The biggest problem, according to Nat Kendall-Taylor, the chief executive of the FrameWorks Institute, a communications think tank, is how all the noise wears people out. “There’s this expectation that, ‘If only people knew how bad the problem was, they would trip over themselves, running to support my initiative,’” Mr. Kendall-Taylor says. “And the data are really clear that that assumption is incorrect.”
The reasons have less to do with the wisdom or folly of any given crisis than with the way the human brain works. “The way we frame a message impacts the way people hear and react to it,” Mr. Kendall-Taylor says. The crux of this exchange is what social scientists refer to as mind-sets, discrete sets of assumption and belief that guide our thinking and decision-making: Different messages conjure different mind-sets, which in turn lead people to make different choices […]
Crisis framing tends to activate a mind-set known as fatalism (a sense that the world itself is beyond repair), which in turn makes people apathetic and resistant to change. “We tire very quickly of being told that everything is on fire,” Mr. Kendall-Taylor says. A far better strategy for instilling urgency or inspiring action is to show people that real solutions lie at the ready — that change is not only desirable but also eminently possible.
It’s that fatalism, the loss of hope that relief or rescue will come, that drives so much of our own personal suffering. It’s certainly made me reconsider what we mean when someone has a “crisis of faith” or a “spiritual crisis,” since the attendant fatalism of that phrase may only make matters worse. If the gospel is true, and God’s love and forgiveness is as certain as his bragging indicates, then maybe that “crisis” is really just someone having a rough go of things. In the hands of God, nothing is beyond repair.
Interlandi’s insight also applies to the idea of spiritual growth. In traditions where sin is a crisis that must be urgently addressed lest the Christian miss out on the pearly gates, the fatalism inherent in that system drives a perfectly faithful and sane Christian into a sense of despair. Don’t get me wrong, sin is bad, but God’s treatment of the condition is rooted in patience. He could have wrapped the whole thing up with Noah, but he took something like two thousand years to send Jesus and has let it sit another two thousand to let the gospel simmer. Perhaps, then, instead of flirting with anxiety and fatalism, we can trust in God’s continuing work.
2. Mine was not one of the sixty million households that tuned into the Jake Paul and Mike Tyson bout last week, but those who did were confronted with their own mortality. That’s the argument from Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic this week, who reflected on both Tyson’s waning prowess and Paul’s desperate attempt to prove himself as something more than an early internet jester. Both, presumably, needed the glory of the boxing ring to prove something to the world before age made them irrelevant, a story that millions of (primarily) men found interest in.
I thought not only about how old Tyson is, but about how old the internet is—how far we are into the process of reality being hollowed-out by digital forces. The ropes advertised tech products: Meta Quest, the VR headset; DraftKings, the gambling network repopularizing one of humankind’s oldest addictions. Paul cut an imposing figure, his neck as thick as a ship’s mast, his tattooed legs swathed in diamond-draped shorts. It was breathtaking to remember that a little more than decade ago, he became famous as a happy-go-lucky teen goofing around online with his brother, Logan. Now he’s an emblem of a generation of men—and a wider culture—starving for purpose while gorging on spectacle.
In this context, the popularity of combat sports is more than just a fad. Today’s American dream tends to involve virtual pursuits—influencing, making a killer app, getting lucky with crypto—but the gladiatorial ring is a macho, meat-space proving ground. No wonder Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match. In the case of the Paul brothers, winning substantiates their right to do what they’ve always done: peacock. As Norman Mailer wrote of Muhammad Ali, reflecting on his tendency for trash talk, “The closer a heavyweight comes to the championship, the more natural it is for him to be a little bit insane, secretly insane, for the heavyweight champion of the world is either the toughest man in the world or he is not, but there is a real possibility he is. It is like being the big toe of God.” […]
As probably could have been predicted, Tyson turned out to be a 58-year-old man whose body has taken a lifetime of abuse, facing a wealthy 27-year-old who’s devoted his past few years to training. Jake set out to prove he was something realer than a media whore, but he showed only that he had the clout to overhype a terribly unfair fight. Coming so soon after an election partly decided by highly online men who feel their status to be under threat, this outcome seems like an omen: Old systems may soon be torn down, with little to replace them but bluster spun as redemption.
3. If the men are searching for glory in the boxing ring, the women are searching for glory with a vacuum in one hand and a feather duster in the other. Annie Lowrey says as much in The Atlantic as she urges Americans to “Put Down the Vacuum.” Yes, there are social mores and customs and gender expectations that drive the quest for a clean home, and yes, social media and tech have made the problem worse. But also, according to Lowrey, sometimes the call is coming from inside the house, and as much as women bemoan the housework obligations they take on, they’re also just as prone to put those expectations upon themselves.
Perhaps the problem is women, and the remedy is for women to do less housework and tolerate a consequentially messier home. “The tidiness level of a home is a matter of simple preference with no right or wrong,” my colleague Jonathan Chait has written, offering an “easy answer” to the chore wars. “My wife and I happily learned to converge on each other’s level of tidiness. We settled—fairly, I think—on a home that’s neater than I’d prefer to keep it, but less neat than she would.” […]
Women internalize this kind of judgment, making the individual desire to keep things clean inextricable from the social expectation to do so. Women are critiqued for having pans in the sink and grime on the countertops in a way that men aren’t. Women’s cortisol levels go up when their space is messy in a way that men’s cortisol levels don’t. Asking women to clean less means asking women to accept more criticism, to buck their culture, to put aside their desire for a socially desirable space. At the same time, men internalize the message that an untidy home is not their responsibility.
The best path forward might be for men and women to applaud messy, normal, mismatched, lived-in spaces. We should recognize that multinational conglomerates are in the business of devising problems that need solutions, which are conveniently available at Walmart and Target; we should admit that everything done in front of a camera is a performance, not reality; we should acknowledge that being welcomed into someone’s house is a gift of connection, not an invitation to judge. Easy enough for me to say. I am one of the millions of us who cannot seem to put down the vacuum, even if I do not want to pick it up.
At first glance, a story about men boxing and a story about women’s compulsion to clean house could not be more different. The commonality between them is the search for righteousness in the midst of gender, a desire to live up to cultural expectations and collect the social capital that comes with it. Men and women both, it seems, have that longing to be “enough,” a longing complicated by the fact that the inner desire can only be met by external validation. Perhaps, as Martin Luther famously suggested, the quest for glory cannot be satisfied, only extinguished.
4. I’m new to the idea of Christendom’s Holy Anorexics, a host of medieval women saints who displayed the telltale symptoms and struggles of an eating disorder. Over at The Point, Rachel Fraser reviews a number of new books helping readers understand the anthropology behind the treatment of anorexia. After casting doubt on treatments that exhort the anorexic to willpower or exclusively blame cultural expectations for the disorder, Fraser imagines a more collective solution to the matter of eating disorders, one inspired by the saints of old:
In Holy Anorexia, Rudolph Bell’s study of medieval Italian anorexics, Bell reports seeing a pattern emerge in his research. A “superficially obedient but deeply strong-willed child” is brought up intensely religious, usually by her mother. In her early teens, the girl’s father gets involved: he pressures her to marry. The girl resists, and “comes to display the classic anorexic syndrome; ultimately she runs away to a convent.” When the girl is a novice, she still cannot eat; she is depressed and tormented by demons. But gradually, the girl recovers, by becoming active in the life of her convent; often, she would become the abbess, or the mother superior. The convent, Bell thinks, facilitated recovery because it was a place where a woman could exercise agency: where female ambition could be channeled outwards, into the world, rather than cooped, with only the body to claw at. “When you are isolated,” observed Hilary Mantel in an essay about mystics and anorexia in the London Review of Books, “control over your own ingestion and excretion is all you have left.” What Mantel misses is that isolation may be partly self-imposed, a crucial stratagem in the project of control. Anorexia is a will to power, twisted into a pretense at its absence. This pretense, perhaps—the anorexic mimics feminine diffidence—is part of why we find it so hard to recognize that anorexia is not an autonomy deficit, but rather a peculiarly uncompromising articulation of the desire to self-legislate.
5. Let’s move on to the laughs. McSweeney’s offers Updates on the Arc of the Moral Universe. It turns out, “The arc of the moral universe wants you to sponge its forehead and bring it soup,” and “the arc of the moral universe can be a delicate creature.” The Onion personally attacks me with “Every Movement In Man’s Burrito-Eating Technique Informed By Past Burrito Tragedies.” The Babylon Bee nailed it with its self-care-inspired take “Lot Tells His Salt Pillar Wife She Should Drink More Water“:
“Babe, maybe it would help if you stayed more hydrated,” Lot reportedly told his wife. “You’d probably feel a lot better and wouldn’t be dealing with all of this discomfort every day. They’ve done a lot of studies about this. Everyone says you need a certain amount of water for your body to function properly. At least just think about it, sweetheart.”
6. Yours truly got a chance to plug U2’s 2004 album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb this week in our desert island album roundup. Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the album, and to celebrate, the band released some of the tracks that were cut from the original album in a new companion “shadow” album. I’m enjoying “Country Mile” and “Luckiest Man in the World,” both of which are embedded above. There’s plenty of good news to hear there for those who have ears to hear.
I’m ripping the stitches
You’ve been bandaging up
I’m digging the ditches
For relics of your loveLove hears when I lie
Love puts the blue back in my eyes
The sand inside the pearl
You were the luckiest man in the world
7. This week’s last word goes to Russell Moore, whose reflection on gallows humor is validating for anyone who’s ever joked at a funeral, chuckled in the face of bad news, or become stuck in a cycle of laughter and tears during a moment of heartbreak. Could it be that gallows humor is actually a fruit of the spirit, as Moore’s wife accuses him of believing? From his Christianity Today newsletter:
One of the hardest things for me to get used to as a young minister was the joking that would go on “backstage” at funerals. The funeral directors looked appropriately somber and sympathetic with the families, but the minute the elevator doors closed, they were telling jokes and one-upping each other with puns and anecdotes. Some of the most resonant laughter I’d ever heard was around a casket. I was unnerved.
I tried for a while to spiritually and psychologically diagnose this sense of humor: It was the result of routinization, perhaps. This had become a job for them, and with the familiarity of it, they had grown numb. That kind of dark humor is indeed a warning sign—maybe not of dementia, but certainly of cynicism. One can see this all over the place these days with the sort of “LOL, nothing matters” humor, a hyena-like quality of this twisted time, a way of signaling that one is not inhibited by the naive strictures of morality or sincerity or hope.
But not all of those funeral directors were cynical. For some of them, the humor, though dark, was a different kind of coping mechanism. The laughter was to keep them from normalizing the grim reality of their daily task. Laughing was a way of reminding themselves that death does not, in fact, have the final word. […]
If all that you see is comedy, you are in denial. If all that you see is tragedy, then you are in despair. But if you see them both, you will learn how to both laugh and cry—and sometimes to do both at the same time. You will see that the darkness around you (and sometimes within you) is real. But you will also see that it is not ultimate. […]
A moment of laughter in grave times can shake us out of the fear that can come when we look for signs of God’s presence in a fallen universe. It can remind us that the sign is the absence itself—and of the pain of longing that it evokes. A little bit of humor in a dark time can shake us to hear the words our mothers in the garden needed to hear 2,000 years ago: “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you …”
Strays:
- Advent is right around the corner, and our pals at Storymakers have a great new Advent resource set for the little ones. We’ve even got an exclusive promo code – apply MBIRD20 at checkout for a 20% discount on your order.
- The Guardian tapping retired Archbishop of Canterbury and preeminent theologian Rowan Williams to review Jordan Peterson’s new book We Who Wrestle with God is a hoot. Spoiler: those who truly wrestle with God have a different perspective than Peterson’s myopic self-help angle (I wrote about JP for the site some time ago if you’re interested in more Anglican reflections on the psychologist and life coach).
- Flame Raps the Sacraments. Christianity Today shares Gretchen Ronnevik’s interview with rapper Flame on his shift from the Reformed Baptist tradition to Lutheranism, and how that has impacted his music.
- Anna North asks “How many toys is too many?” this week over at Vox. I appreciated the scope of this article — did you know toy prices are one of the only things that have fallen over the past few decades? — but beyond the economic perspective, I wish she had addressed the roles that guilt, shame, and fear play in the cataclysm that is my kid’s current playroom.
