1. Lots of buzz this week about the latest from (2024 Mbird Conference Speaker) Meghan O’Gieblyn’s new memoir, Will and Attention. We can’t yet link you to her conference talk, but it’s safe to say O’Gieblyn’s reflections on the uncontrollable serendipities of grace have long been objects of our, erm, will and attention. If the New York Times is right, her new insights suggest that even a turn to religion is an attempt to control and regulate the dispensations of grace, and in that way, it’s no different than her experiences with alcoholism. From their review:
Many alcoholics credit religion with helping them out of addiction. For Meghan O’Gieblyn — who grew up in a Christian fundamentalist family and lost her faith in her early 20s — religion had virtually the opposite effect. When she was 28, she went into treatment for drugs and alcohol. Eleven years later, she started drinking again, not long after she had tried and failed to convert to Roman Catholicism.
In her searching new memoir, “Will and Attention,” O’Gieblyn connects her relapse with alcohol to her relapse with institutional religion: “It’s clear to me now that this was just a veiled desire for intoxication, that the experiment with Catholicism served as a gateway back into drinking and justified the severance from the stable life I was living.” She half-jokingly berates herself for a “lack of imagination” when it came time for her midlife crisis. “There are a million ways to sabotage one’s life,” she writes, “but I could not seem to come up with anything more original than the things that had ruined my life before.” […]
Part of what drew O’Gieblyn to Catholicism was the beauty of the Mass, the vaulted ceiling of the chapel, the endless choreography of standing and kneeling, the rituals so refined that they “did not ask you to think.” She longed to lose herself in mystery and rapture. It was the same longing she felt with alcohol. But these ostensible acts of submission turned out to be warped attempts at control. She eventually realized there was something acquisitive in both. Alcoholism, she says, “is little more than the belief that the ecstasy and joy that life doles out so sparingly and unpredictably can be had on demand, whenever you want it. It is an attempt to bottle grace.”
Catholicism, too, was an attempt to bottle grace. It seemed to promise something grander than an amorphous recovery spirituality that felt “too muddled and lukewarm.” Only later, after O’Gieblyn stopped with the Masses and the drinking, did she resolve “to live in deference to that inner muddle.” This is where life actually takes place.
The same criticism O’Gieblyn has here of Catholicism* can be said of any religious system that promises to “bottle grace” and dispense it with some regularity. Understanding grace as God’s merciful and loving disposition toward his people means it cannot be controlled, any more than I can control the disposition of my wife, my kids, or my boss. A disposition cannot be bottled, but it can be a gift. I hear the memoir is a popular read in the Mbird office these days, and I expect we’ll hear more about it in the weeks to come. (See these same themes discussed at length in this interview with O’Gieblyn in the Point Magazine.)
2. Here’s another memoir moment from this week that’s worth our spiritual consideration. At the Atlantic, Tom Junod reflects on how his father was a philanderer, and how that relationship became the core of his writing career. Such things are normally kept secret, but once he started promoting his new memoir about his philanderer father, he came to a stunning and reorienting discovery: he wasn’t the only one out there with a philanderer father, and that his father, despite all his bravado to the contrary, wasn’t special in his sins.
“How many of us do you think are out there?”
It was the us that threw me. I’d known almost all my life that my father was different from other fathers, both the comical ones I met in my neighborhood and the wise ones I watched on TV. When I was 3 years old, he had an affair with the mother of my first friend. When I was 6 or 7, he asked — he made a big deal of asking — if I wanted to go out for a hot-fudge sundae, and then stopped at a woman’s house on the way to the ice-cream parlor and left me outside on the swings. When I was in college, he invited me to New York City for a night on the town, and introduced me to one of his girlfriends. I was close with my brother, my sister, and my mother, but I never told them what I knew. I never told anyone.
I was ashamed, of course — ashamed of him, ashamed of myself. But I was also proud. I had to be, because that’s what he demanded, that was our margin of survival. He made my mother cry. He made me cry too. But that wasn’t his fault; it was ours. It was, especially, mine. He didn’t do what he did because he was broken or weak or simply bad; he did it because he was special, a traveling salesman who, by virtue of his looks, his tan, and his insistence on his own virility, became a kind of bedroom celebrity, even to actual celebrities like the Gabor sisters. He did what other men wanted to do, what all men would do, if only they could, if only they weren’t so … weak. Did I want to be weak? No, anything but that. And so I made a faith of his faithlessness, believing that it, like Lou Junod himself, was unique. […]
And there it was, the most impossible word for the child of a philanderer, the us that tells you you’re not alone. Don’t get me wrong — I liked the idea of having something in common with other people. I even liked the idea of being, well, a people, something larger than myself or even my family, a betrayed class, an entire woeful demographic. The only difficulty was that in seeing myself as part of an us, I had to see my father as part of a them, and I had invested so much of myself and my writing in the premise of his singularity. He was grubby and unglamorous as part of a group. He was typical — oh, let’s just say it, he was a typical male. He was not just unfaithful, he was not just promiscuous, he was not just an adulterer, he was not just a cheater, he was not just a philanderer — or, rather, he was just those things, and nothing more.
He was run-of-the-mill.
There are two epiphanies from Junod worth considering: we are not unique in our sin, and we are not unique in how sin impacts us. We only think this because most of us are too embarrassed to share our hurts with others. Lest you write off Junod’s experience, however, remember that he is the man behind Esquire’s famous 1997 profile of Mr. Rogers, “Can You Say… Hero?” and Junod’s friendship with this paternal-opposite, sweatered surrogate has been widely documented and admired. Which is to say, not only do I think Junod’s epiphanies are wise and worth considering, I also think they are spiritually informed by a loving neighbor.
3. Back in August, Adam Mastroianni took to his Substack to declare that “Incentives are for losers.” I think he’s right: most of life’s important decisions are best made by avoiding the incentivized solution and engaging with something harder instead. Along the way, he taps Christian Smith’s infamous study about “moralistic therapeutic deism” and coins a great new image for having a life epiphany: beholding the fish.
You can summarize most of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories as “Guy looks at something so messed up that he goes totally bonkers.” “Dagon” was among Lovecraft’s first: it’s about a guy who gets marooned at sea and encounters a really freaky fish, which upsets him so much that he ultimately throws himself out a window.
This is a useful metaphor, because I think at the center of everyone’s psyche is some version of the Big Horrible Fish: some unexamined assumption that, if you fully considered it, would require you to upend a significant portion of your life. […]
When I meet someone of uncommon integrity, someone willing to defy the incentives at any cost, I find they almost always have seen the fish—big, hulking fish, far larger than any I’ve ever encountered. They have undergone some kind of moral reckoning that undid their illusion of philosophical depth and gave them the chance to forge their own values. They’re the kind of person who could go to the gallows with a witticism on their lips, the opposite of a loser. […]
I understand why so many people are so concerned with incentives. It’s infuriating to watch villains succeed. And look, if we can stop rewarding people for doing the wrong things, we obviously should.
But I don’t know if we can. Goodhart’s Law, Campbell’s Law, and their corollaries state that every incentive is destined to be corrupted eventually, and so far, no one has proven these conjectures wrong. That’s why discussions around incentives often sound to me like we’re talking about a monkey’s paw that will grant our wishes, but only in evil, ironic ways. “The last time we made a wish on the Monkey’s Paw, it backfired horrifically. To rectify this, we have decided to make another wish on the Monkey’s Paw.”
In the eternal game of cat and mouse between the goodhearted people trying to fix the incentives and the Goodhart’d people trying to exploit the incentives, I am rooting for the cats. We should check whether our incentive systems are having their intended effects, and we should revisit and revise them accordingly. But for some reason, the second we start talking in terms of incentives, we also start acting like courage doesn’t exist and can’t exist. Bad incentives have become our generation’s version of “I was just following orders”, an excuse that should be an indictment.
On the one hand, the fish imagery isn’t all that new — akin to David Foster Wallace’s bit about the fish in water, or having the scales fall from someone’s eyes. What’s helpful is how Mastroianni recognizes that true life and love and justice and courage is found beyond carrots and sticks. The best things in life come from those who eschew simple incentives and voluntarily take on suffering for the sake of others, and so a society that structures itself only around incentives cannot expect to flourish. That is, perhaps, the biggest fish worth engaging with for those with eyes to see.
For those who haven’t seen the fish yet, here’s a bit of tech news. Before long, when your team is winning, you’ll be getting advertisements for t-shirts and championship apparel. When your team is losing, you’ll be getting advertisements for fast food delivery. Talk about incentives with dubious integrity.
4. Among the many anniversaries one might celebrate this year, October marks the 100th anniversary of the first Winnie-The-Pooh storybook publication. There will certainly be a number of retrospectives, but at the New Statesman, I appreciated the insight from Anoosh Chakelian that the crew from the Hundred Acre Wood has, thankfully, remained immune to our modern age’s penchant for theory, philosophy, and moralizing:
Having read a great many bedtime stories over the past two years, I can report that it is rare to find picture-book characters with such depth, and such little purpose. “Nothing” with a capital N is their favourite pastime. Milne’s characters are more motivated to do things out of boredom or necessity than some moral teaching about the value of imagination or friendship from the hand of the author. That reticence is made explicit in the poem “Twice Times”:
There may be a Moral, though some say not;
I think there’s a moral, though I don’t know what.When Pooh asks Christopher Robin what the North Pole is, as they prepare for an “expotition” there, he replies: “It’s just a thing you discover.” As Kanga and Baby Roo arrive in the forest, Pooh asks how they came to be there. “In the Usual Way, if you know what I mean,” is all he’s told. And one of the most paradoxically satisfying stories is surely the “Woozle hunt”, as Pooh and Piglet walk around in circles wondering whose footprints they’re tracking in the snow. […]
While there was “no attachment left for the animals at all” in the Milne family, as Winnie-the-Pooh’s biographer Shirley Harrison once told me, they have come to represent all sorts in the modern English vernacular. A meme went viral following the Brexit vote illustrating a conversation between Pooh as a Remainer and Piglet as a Leaver: “Are we still friends?”/“Yes… yes, we’re still friends,”/“Good, let’s go and get pissed.” And, of course, they have all been diagnosed: according to one so-called study, Eeyore is a chronic depressive, Christopher Robin a “possible schizophrenic”, Kanga and Baby Roo have an unhealthy mother-son attachment style, and Tigger has ADHD.
But if Peak Paddington has manifested a story of progressive patriotism then Peak Pooh is surely the “philosophy” we’re told thrums among the pinewood spinneys of Hundred Acre Wood. You can fill your stockings with any number of companion guides to Pooh Brain: Pooh and the Philosophers, The Tao of Pooh, Pooh and the Psychologists, The Wisdom of Pooh. Enter the downstairs loo of any middle-class English household and you’re bound to make uncomfortable eye contact with Eeyore’s Nietzschean worldview.
Perhaps it is a tired and uncertain country that returns to the comfort of its bedtime stories in search of a national character. An easily referenced moral tale when children’s books – and no longer folk tales or religious texts – survive as our most commonly shared reading experience. I love the books for their quiet wisdom, of course. But it is an anti-philosophy that endures. An anarchy and randomness. A prose that mimics more than any other cadence the eternal question-answer-stop-start-tangents of a pre-schooler’s mind. Fragments of thought floating along a stream of consciousness, racing to the other side of the bridge.
5. On to laughs, most of my knowing grins this week come from “Reasons You Might Be Calling Me Instead of Texting” at the New Yorker. A sample:
Someone died.
You mistakenly assumed that my brain wouldn’t beeline straight from “unexpected call” to “someone died.”
You’re feeling too lazy to text, and you know perfectly well that I’m just going to let it go to voice mail and then text my response anyway.
You’re one of those weirdos who enjoys talking to other humans.
You accidentally deleted the messaging app, and you also accidentally deleted the Google app, so you can’t look up “deleted messaging app how to get back.”
You need to tell me something that you can’t spell, like, “My mischievous phlebotomist exsanguinated my vein, and then used a fuchsia handkerchief as a tourniquet, and, if I can’t instantaneously discuss this with my preternaturally conscientious psychologist over hors d’œuvres, I’ll definitely be interred in a beautiful cemetery. Pterodactyl.”
Butt-dial. You have no idea that this crisis is even happening.
Other jokes this week: “Smoothie Shop Workers Not As Excited For Man’s Birthday As Marketing Email Made It Seem,” and “Meta Glasses capture footage of man being avoided for wearing Meta Glasses.”
6. Leaving the culture war commentary aside, if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the trailer for Greta Gerwig’s take on The Magician’s Nephew. And also this week, new music from Jon Guerra, embedded above. You can’t find two more tonally opposite bits of pop culture trying to say something important about Jesus. My hunch is that they will both say something profound in their own ways.
7. The last word this week goes to an unexpected theologian. Chris Rock has definitely seen some fish in his life. He says as much to David Marchese in an interview this week as he’s promoting his new movie Misty Green. The duo touch on all the hot-button issues — race, crime, sex, police, wokeness, mental illness, “the slap” — but things take a decidedly theological turn when Marchese asks about a standout line from the new movie. It turns out that Chris Rock has more wisdom about biblical theology than many seminaries.
DM: There’s a line in your movie that I wanted to ask about. The character that you play in the film says to Misty, “True love starts at forgiveness.” Is that your experience of forgiveness?
CR: Yeah. You don’t really realize if you love somebody until you have to forgive them. I can enjoy myself with just about anybody. It’s when somebody tests you, when somebody betrays you, when somebody lets you down and you still want to be around them — that’s love. I have a friend that’s going to be nameless that might have gotten canceled. Another friend of mine was like, “How can you be friends with that person?” I was like, “If you’re only friends with your friends when they’re good, they’re not your friends.” If you’ve got a bunch of people that are only going to be there when you’re good, you have no friends. That doesn’t mean condoning abusive behavior; you can reprimand your friends. That’s also part of friendship.
DM: But we all have a line, right?
CR: You and I live in different worlds. I’ve got friends that are in jail. I’ve got friends that are drugged out. I don’t live like you.
DM: You don’t know that.
CR: I can tell.
DM: I mean, you happen to be right.
CR: And by the way, I’m not being dismissive of you. I’m just saying that my friends have tested me more than yours, and maybe I’ve tested them. I’m not religious, but I’m a Christian, and God forgives. That’s what it’s all about. The problem with quote, unquote, wokeness — and don’t get me wrong, it is great that marginalized people have a voice; it is great to advocate for anybody that feels marginalized — but the problem is we’re in the Old Testament right now, and the Old Testament has no forgiveness. The Old Testament didn’t work, so they had to write a remix called the New Testament.
Strays:
- If Chris Rock’s take on forgiveness wasn’t enough, here’s An Existential Guide to: Forgiving Your Parents.
- The New York Times had a lovely retrospective on the highs, lows, judgments, and joys of publishing letters sent to the paper’s editor. It’s quite the column, and Sloane Crosley does an excellent job of exploring the psychological elements of anger from readers, but also chagrin from those who are called out.
- From Bustle: “Can We Stop Ranking Things, Please?” I particularly appreciated the insight about recency bias: the most recent fun things are always five-star experiences until the next fun thing happens.
* And yet, though the criticism of Catholicism can be applied to other religious systems, let those seeking to swim the Tiber be given to similar contemplations.
