1. With Veteran’s Day tomorrow (or is it Armistice Day?) the weekend comes a little sooner this week.
First up is Jill Lepore’s phenomenal article in the New Yorker “The Case Against the Twitter Apology.” Don’t be fooled by the now commonplace dumping on Twitter (you’re doing great Elon! hehe). She has much more in view than social media. Because Lepore seeks to answer what appears to be a paradox: how can a culture that vehemently demands apologies be so ruthlessly unforgiving? The two, it seems, go hand in hand.
You can confess without apologizing and you can apologize without confessing, and this might be because, historically, an apology is a justification — a defense, not a confession. … In “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account,” Matthew Ichihashi Potts, a professor of Christian morals at Harvard Divinity School, offers what he calls “a modest theological defense of forgiveness.” His argument follows that of the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who, in “Anger and Forgiveness” (2016), argued that forgiveness isn’t salutary for either party if, in order to give it, you insist on an apology. Potts calls this “the economy of apology.” It’s not better than vengeance, since to demand an apology and to delight in the offender’s grovelling is vengeance by another name. His evidence doesn’t come from Twitter; it comes mainly from novels, including Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” Forgiveness, for Potts, is not an exchange — forgiveness granted in return for the opportunity to witness a spectacle of abasement and self-loathing — but a promise not to retaliate. Demanding an apology in exchange for forgiveness can never constitute healing, or deliver justice; it is, instead, a pleasure taken by people who delight in witnessing the suffering of those in their power (if only briefly). There is no such thing as a failed apology, then, only an abuse of power, because all forgiveness, Potts writes, “begins and ends in failure” […]
“Twitter gamifies communication,” the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen has argued; it’s custom-built to do things like score apologies, to drag users into a rating system that has nothing to do with morality. An unforgiving god rules Twitter, where the modern economy of apology runs something like this: If you express what I believe to be a toxic or ignorant opinion, you must apologize according to my rules for apology. If you do, I may forgive you. If you don’t, I will punish you, and damn you unto eternity.
Lepore then turns to (somewhat predictably, but hey) the early history of American Puritans and their demand for public confessions. She then connects (less predictably) the Puritan practice of apologies to the 20th century restorative justice movement. Soon, everyone from Ronald Reagan to the Vatican was apologizing to the degree that, “In many quarters, public acts began taking the place of religious ritual, political ideologies replacing religious faith. The national public apology took on the gravity and solemnity of a secular sacrament.”
The turn against apologies, Lepore hypothesizes, seems to have happened in the 1990s at precisely the moment when the public apology because fodder for daytime TV (Oprah and Phil Donahue) and when President Clinton unconvincingly apologized for his affair.
One might say that the apology became over-exposed. Once the apology became expected and therefore performative, it lost its power. Lepore recognizes this dynamic, but goes one step further. It’s not that all the apologies made are necessarily disingenuous, rather it’s the demand for an apology that pretends to be its opposite. One requires public mortification for the guilty in order to satiate a desire for punitive vengeance:
On Twitter at its worst, all harm is equal, all apologies are spectacles, and hardly anyone is ever forgiven. […] But very little evidence suggests that calling people out on Twitter, self-righteous indignation followed by cynical apology, is making the world a better place, and much suggests that the opposite is true, that Twitter’s pious mercilessness is generating nothing so much as a new and bitter remorselessness. […]
Dangerously, but predictably, the split seems to have become partisan, as if to apologize were progressive, to forget conservative. The fracture widens and hardens — fanatic, schismatic, idiotic. But another way of thinking about what a culture of forced, performed remorse has wrought is not, or not only, that it has elevated wrath and loathing but that it has demeaned sorrow, grief, and consolation. No apology can cover that crime, nor mend that loss.
As central as confession and absolution before God might be to Christianity, I find little evidence in the New Testament for our requisite ritual of apologizing. The prodigal son received the father’s forgiveness before he could ever mutter a word of his transgressions. Peter was restored through a reaffirmation of his love. A confession of sin might entail remorsefulness, but the measure of forgiveness is never given in proportion to our sorrow.
2. If all your friends voted the same as you, then you probably don’t have any real friends. That’s probably a bit too baldly stated. Political participation is a shallow measure of a person, much less a barometer for interpersonal relationships. Losing a friend to politics, however, is fairly commonplace, reflecting what David Corey argues is a deep disordering of our souls. And so partisan uniformity within friends might well exemplify at least one way the encroachment of politics into friendship has made us more lonely:
When politics is understood as war, genuine friendship becomes difficult because friendship contributes nothing to the cause. What it is replaced with is “allyship” or “comradeship.” And comrades are not, strictly speaking, friends. They are rather partners in a cause.
Cancel culture is perfectly explainable in this light. It has arisen precisely because we have come to value our fellow citizens only for the contributions they might make to political victory. Being cancelled is so painful because it delivers the revelation that what we supposed to be deep relationships of mutual admiration and respect — intrinsic goods — were in fact shallow relationships of instrumentality. Allies “use” each other, and any respect or admiration that may accrue over time will always be subordinate to the ends for which they are used. […]
Some people I know worry that genuine friendship is less possible in a pluralist age than in contexts where citizens share a robust conception of the good, or of God. But this is not my view. From experience I have learned that friendship does not require that friends love all the same things, much less that they love the same ultimate things. Friendships based on such common loves of course do exist, and perhaps they are of a higher order than those in which ultimate truths are not shared. But friendship is possible where what is loved is simply the person, not the person’s metaphysics or theology. Pluralism thus need not be the death of friendships that are genuine and deep. […]
A culture that views politics as war will inevitably struggle with meaninglessness. … We are seeking perfect justice, perfect agreement, and perfect stability over time. Because perfection in this world constantly eludes us, politics is like that chain suspended in midair. Each link seems meaningful, but the chain is anchored in nothing. The war to end all wars has no end. What ends is only our healthy relationship to intrinsic goods that bring happiness and meaning to life.
I draw attention to Corey’s article, in part, because it offers a striking parallel to friendships within the church. Many people (myself included) have lost friendships after they changed churches. But also … the midterms just finished up, and Corey’s distinction between friendship and comradeship feels both envious and impossible. I wonder how friendship in the state of Georgia will survive with now four national elections in the span of two years. While might want friends who will stick with us no matter what, we rarely do the same with others. As ever, perfection is the enemy of love. Because what binds people together in friendship is not our common pursuits or shared values, but our shared imperfections and the grace that embraces them without drawing back.
3. A zinger this week from Brad East on what he calls the therapeutic church. Such a church “does not speak of sin, judgment, guilt, shame, wrath, hell, repentance, punishment, suffering, crucifixion, deliverance, salvation, Satan, demons, exorcism, and so forth.” It instead preaches “wellness, health, toxicity, self-care, harm, safety, balance, affirmation, holding space, and being well-adjusted.” In his view, this exchange turns a church into an an atheistic church that ceases to believe in God. He writes:
If the gospel is interchangeable with counseling, then people should stop attending church and hire counselors instead. Why not go straight to the source? Why settle for second best? If a minister is merely a so-so therapist with Jesus sprinkled on top, then parishioners can sleep in on Sundays, drop Jesus, and get professional therapy as they please, whenever they wish. I promise you, if what you’re after is twenty-first century quality therapy, neither Holy Scripture nor the Divine Liturgy is the thing for you.
Hence: a therapeutic church is an atheist church. Not because therapy is anti-gospel. Not because therapeutic churches are consciously atheistic. No, a therapeutic church is atheist because it has lost its raison d’être: it preaches a gospel without God.
The distinction here, I think, is a helpful one and mirrors my own thoughts on good preaching. But I find myself a bit more circumscribed on the sharp dichotomy he makes between a gospel church and a therapeutic one. East suggests that the therapeutic church, as opposed to the real thing, just gives people what they want. And yet the gospel surely has therapeutic effects and an encounter with the living God can, indeed, push a drug addict into recovery or ameliorate one’s inherent anxieties or self-destructive tendencies. The gospel isn’t self-help, but it also isn’t entirely disinterested in one’s well being either.
4. In humor this week, the Belladonna Comedy published “A Letter From the Committee on Good Deeds.” Reductress had “Woman Crumbling Under Intense Pressure to Relax in Bath” and then there’s the New Yorker’s “Wikihows That Hit Too Close to Home.”
How to Organize Your Self-Help Books
How to Actually Read Past the Introduction in the Aforementioned Self-Help Books, Instead of Just Talking About That One Chapter Repeatedly to Convince Friends That You’re Doing Really Well
How to Cut an Onion Without Crying
How to Go a Week Without Crying
5. After the lunar eclipse this week, it’s appropriate to close out with Tara Isabella Burton writing about tarot cards, horoscopes, and witchcraft (oh my!). Divination, or the idea that “the natural world holds within it the key to our personal futures” is way more popular than those inside the church bubble might realize. For myself, the idea of a horoscopes or tarot cards has always struck me as nonsense (or is that just something a Leo would say?!). Burton here is doesn’t condemn divination out of hand — Harry Potter is by no means the devil’s work — but because she finds it to be a far too meager and myopic way of viewing the world. The truth of horoscopes is far more interesting …
The problem with divination is not that it is too “magical,” but rather that it fails to grasp rightly the kind of magic that already exists in the world. Its practitioners are correct in supposing that the position of a star, of a tree, of the entrails of a certain bird, have something significant to say about the nature of reality that exceeds the way that we can describe it through science alone. But what they get wrong, I think, is reducing that reality to a mere set of propositions about our own personal lives, limiting the significance of these works of nature to the sphere of human purposes.
The magic behind the tree, the stars, the bird, is the magic of being itself, being that in turn points to the wondrousness of creation itself. We simultaneously are called to love trees (and stars and birds) as themselves, and as evidence of the glory and love of God who made them. Their precise haecceity, the way that they are themselves, in themselves, is also what makes them signs of a God by and for whom all creation is fearfully and wonderfully formed. To reduce the visible or invisible world to an instrument for discovering what we should do, to reduce the enchantment of creation to the question of whether some guy we met online will call us back or whether we will get a promotion in the next year, is an act not of wonder but of profound selfishness. It is an act of elevating our own earthly and individual destiny, at the expense of our shared participation in a creation in which the proclamation of the glory of God is a goal we share with all living things.
There is an enchantment in the stars, I believe, but that enchantment only spells our destiny insofar as we too hope that, in the end, we too can participate in such acts of love. Divination does not work, not because the stars have nothing to tell us, but because what they are busy telling us already is something far more important than the kind of questions we too often ask, and which matter far less.
Strays:
On Hope and Holy Fools. There is nothing very sexy about hope.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Does the Near Impossible
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