1. At his Substack, Tim Kreider eulogizes the model shops where he dithered in Covid times and the other quirky, abrasive, irreplaceable businesses that are ever more quickly dwindling in Manhattan. There are few things as authentic feeling as genuine indifference to your presence (or antagonism to it). Kreider describes what’s been lost in our frictionless contemporary world:
You find the thing you want, you click on it; a day or two later, the thing you wanted arrives. It’s true you don’t have any discomfiting encounters with misanthropes or wackos, but you also don’t come home with any stories. […]
The trip to the model shop, including the weird quirks of the owner, used to be as much a part of making a model as sanding or painting it. But for a lot of increasingly timid, introverted consumers, not having to interact with any human beings when they need something is the whole point of the internet. Which is why Jeff Bezos got to rent Venice for his wedding, and one reason people now seem so grotesquely maladjusted to interacting with each other, or living in a society. […]
Look: I am as ambivalent as you about Other People. Other People are problematic, impossible. I don’t want to get too sentimentally nostalgic about the lost joys of real-life encounters with crazy, abrasive human beings. I did not enjoy being treated like a contemptible dilettante or a simpleton when all I wanted was to buy some glue. […]
But we need the brush and abrasion of Other People, including — maybe even especially — annoying and difficult ones. Because look at the world we’ve constructed to avoid it. If it’s a choice between awkward conversations with eccentrics and cranks or this infinite blank impenetrable wall of corporate contempt we all now face daily — the constant, soul-eroding hassle of creating an account with a unique username and novel password including capital and lowercase letters plus at least one numeral and symbol for every single transaction or errand, scanning a QR code, downloading the app […] accidentally clicking on a popup and scrambling to close the blaring garish page it opens, being asked to take a moment to fill out a brief survey to rate your experience! and Let Them Know How They’re Doing, briefly explain your reason for cancelling, and having to delete one last “We’re Sorry to See You Go!” email — I know which world I choose.
Shopping used to be one of the few things that forced us to engage with others, in ways that abrade us but also give to us. Give what? It’s intangible, but maybe just a sense for a reality beyond ourselves. I’m reminded of a quote from Thomas de Zengotita’s brilliantly prophetic Mediated, that “the opposite of real isn’t phony or illusional or fictional — it’s optional.” I think part of what he’s getting at is that anything optional is, once chosen, something that you constructed, something you are responsible for, whose existence depends on your own. What feels real is the thing that exists outside of you — that bracing feeling you get on a mountain or at McSorley’s that the world exists utterly apart from you and will go on existing apart from anything you do. It’s those sorts of encounters, given rather than constructed, arising naturally from a human soul rather than private equity market modeling and focus groups, that seem to get lost in today’s world. Maybe our 2027 NYC Conference will finally be my year for a platza.
2. On Tuesday, journalist Calum Marsh published a history of CrossFit, which seems like a gold mine for tracing the seculosity of fitness in our culture, at least if this week’s profile in UnHerd is anything to go by. Apparently CrossFit pioneered the model, common today, of pricey subscriptions to a high-intensity exercise program that function not just for health but as an arena in which one can pursue personal excellence. At the time, the metrics were revolutionary, and the idea that an adult would pay to be yelled at seemed fantastical. The eccentric visionary who started it described the “spectacular” discovery underlying his idea: “Men will die for points.”
This mindset of competitive, measured eliteness, intentionally fostered, fell into exactly the sorts of oddities one associates with cults and excessive machismo. At the 2024 Summer Games, an athlete many had expected to win died. The review notes that the
suggestion that the event should be canceled to respect Dukic’s memory, some CrossFitters questioned what the “big deal” was; “people die every day”. Here was the central contradiction: a movement devoted to perfecting the body had become disturbingly casual about its destruction.
To their way of thinking, the body was merely a vector for the ego’s pursuit of excellence, to such an extent they could voice near indifference about its consumption. The review continues to discuss CrossFit’s seeming successor, Hyrox:
Hyrox elevates suffering and abasement as noble and purifying rites. […] Extreme fitness offers benediction in the secular age. Shared ordeals bind. Injury, collapse and even death are offerings. The official purpose of fitness culture is about health and well-being; when gymgoing becomes a jihad it shifts to something else — sacralized suffering, control of the self and, at the very top, others. Like most religions, extreme fitness touts its doctrine as unfalsifiable: a rockin’ bod is proof of concept, while physical or psychological damage is proof you didn’t believe hard enough. For some searchers in the post-modern world, salvation is always just one more rep away. Glassman’s vision may by now seem an ancient cult thoroughly displaced by more glamorous upstarts, but all of today’s die-hard gym bros have CrossFit to thank for the spread of extreme faith in fitness.
3. For the second consecutive week, the New York Times delivers on grace. This week, Methodist pastor Lydia Sohn reflects on the loss of religious language, especially a five-letter word that starts with g:
What has replaced religious language for moral guidance? Professors Grenoble and Whaley observed that smaller languages tend to become displaced by those with greater political, economic and social power. The language of law and public justice — accountability, rights, reparation — has become the dominant framework through which many of us structure our relationships.
There seems something endemic to Christianity that, unlike most other ideologies, bends against asserting or defending a dominant position, even if only occasionally and inconsistently. It’s nothing new: Since the days of John the Baptist, the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force (Mt 11:12). In our society, the power seems to lie largely in an economic sphere supercharged by the Industrial Revolution, technological innovation, and free markets. These patterns show up in our language, first in the public sphere, then increasingly in the private one (or whatever is left of it):
The language of investment and return, cost and benefit, what one gives and what one is owed threatens to overtake private domains like our marriages, friendships and the schoolyard. It is little wonder, then, that “grace” has fallen out of our everyday vocabulary.
Grace, by definition, interrupts the logic of exchange. It is a gift freely given rather than earned or traded. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the language of the law and the marketplace, it is insufficient to the task of capturing how we seek to treat and be treated by others. […]
This is the reversal I’m interested in: not the language of law traveling inward until our marriages and friendships resemble courtrooms, but the cultivation of a spiritual vocabulary within our intimate moral lives and faith communities rippling out into the public sphere.
Her phrasing is helpful. We aspire to experience love and be loved, to relate to others, in a way that the dominant language today simply can’t begin to account for. In particular, we long for love independent of our performance, value-add, or expected return, but those paradigms of conditional value have become deeply seated in how we think of ourselves and the world.
That said, to view the problem as the intrusion of “the world” into our otherwise pristine selves would be to miss the enemy within. If I treat my relationships like a courtroom, it’s probably because the litigation provides a framework for me to express my inherent desire to justify myself, divert blame from me to thee, and so on. So it’s not so much that the disruptive language of grace comes from cultivation of the private sphere (see too Mt. 15:11), but rather an in-breaking from outside the world and, critically, from outside ourselves.
I do think Christianity provides resources for alternative linguistic frameworks. Paul did a lot of that, constantly contrasting the language of the culture of his day — honor, competition, the valorization of pride and ambition, rigid hierarchies — with that of Christianity, often inverting or parodying it (e.g., Rom 12:10, 2 Cor 11). One of my favorite Mbird talks, from the NYC 2024 Conference, did just that for the present day: grace is inefficient; love is slow; and you don’t need to accomplish anything with whatever time you have. It gestures toward a whole ‘nother outlook on life, and one that is immensely liberating.
4. Speaking of fightings without and fears within, over at the Hedgehog Review, Anna Ballan brilliantly probes the limits and weaknesses of modern pop psychology culture by contrasting it with the estranged dead father of psychotherapy himself, Herr Doktor Freud:
The psychological culture popularized on screens often assumes several things: that you actually want to get better; that insight leads frictionlessly to change; that naming an issue defuses it; that the self is a project to be perfected. Freud assumes that a part of you — perhaps the most salient part — does not want to get better; that apparent insight can deepen the problem and naming an issue can intensify its grip; that the self is a kind of battlefield. If the therapy of today’s screen culture holds a mirror up to a curated self-image, actual therapy, Freud would insist, is more like a light held up over a swamp.
She sees Freud eclipsed in the ’90s by more chemical/pharmaceutical models, as partly the result of a preference for seemingly quicker, more immediate, or more predictable fixes. There’s also the dynamic of popular reception appropriating Freud’s language for get-well-quick schemes underwritten by high anthropology, a dynamic depressingly familiar to those interested in psychology (or theology). Articulating one’s inner landscape may illuminate, but it can also darken:
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the assumption that self-articulation liberates is only half true. The more articulate we are, the more elaborate and agile our evasions may become. Pathological symptoms are not random errors, after all: they are solutions the psyche has devised, protective compromises that maintain a precarious psychic equilibrium — a panic symptom that holds in abeyance a deeper grief, a chronic independence that protects against the anxiety of dependency, a rigid scruple that helps fend off an inconvenient desire. To unravel these is to tamper with a system that may, however painfully, be functioning. And naming a feeling — far from resolving it — can make it more dangerous, like a virus mutating under pressure. Freud noticed that his patients did something interesting. They claimed that they wanted to change, but they evolved intricate psychological ecosystems to ensure precisely that they didn’t, and they enlisted Freud as an accomplice in their stasis.
Again, hard not to notice the resonances with other forms of modern self-help. Is veganglopescatarianism the route to true healing, or something that reinforces a more fundamental underlying issue? What about your nephew’s rediscovery of biblical masculinity? Easy to point fingers, but I suspect we all have coping or deflecting mechanisms that are potentially embarrassing, and most of us probably subscribe to an implicit grammar of self-improvement that hinders at least as much as it helps. It’s fitting that the author lands in a place of compassion:
Freud dismissed the idea that making the unconscious conscious could be accomplished by simply reciting traumatic childhood episodes or diagnostic labels at a patient: “Such measures,” he wrote in a 1910 essay, “have as much influence on the symptoms of nervous illness as a distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine has upon hunger.” […]
Grasping at the diagnostic category du jour may be misguided, but the desperation driving it is authentic. You can no more reproach someone for it than you can blame a starving person for eyeing a menu; they are both looking for sustenance, however illusory it may prove.
In other words, we’re all needing human beings, and the techniques we overestimate are also signs of places where we need help and might, somehow, find it. And rejecting the modern pop psychology idea of cheap, self-induced abreaction does not automatically entail resignation or despair:
Freud’s famous episode in Beyond the Pleasure Principle lays this bare: the child’s “fort…da!” game — throwing a toy away (“gone!”) and retrieving it (“there!”) — stages his mother’s absence and return in ritual form. Imagination does not restore what is missing, in the Freudian picture, but it is capable of formalizing missing-ness — of creatively accommodating a painful absence and making it generative.
So naming places of pain doesn’t automatically heal them, but it can help find ways to live in an “uneasy détente” with the wound (to quote Tim Kreider’s description of the contentious relationship between two owners of a business on 10th St.). And those places can be, and often are, the “cracks … where the light gets in,” to quote Cohen, or the “holes in the roof,” in Paul Zahl’s image from a talk earlier this year. That seems a more realistic and genuinely hopeful vision of psychotherapy and business disputes than one typically finds.
5. In humor, with election season coming up (I can’t think what I did in college that’s put me on the text list for “Georgia Catholics”), “Kids Table Having Far More Calm and Mature Discussion than Adults Table” may be prophetic for the holidays. The Onion’s “Years Of Learning To Love Self Undone By Single Glimpse Of Body In Self-Checkout Camera” hits too, the fragility of the ego being a recent theme of ours from the (IMO odorless) Sam Bush. And for Halloween, an imagined dialogue with a ghost of a creepy hotel seems preferable to that long-delayed rewatch of The Shining.
6. Apparently the American Academy of Pediatrics’ sugar guidelines are fairly generous these days, per the Atlantic. There’s a nice grace angle for parents of young’uns on Saturday. Apparently, too, a 1985 controlled trial found that sugar doesn’t cause bad behavior, a realization that careful readers of Matthew 15:11 may have stumbled upon already. But why, then, do sugared-up kids act out? Are our eyes deceiving us? Two factors play a role: first, that “sugary foods tend to be served during celebrations that are otherwise chaotic and overstimulating.” No easy physiological mechanism to take the fall.
But there’s another factor too:
Parents may also expect kids to become hyper when they have sweets: In one study, mothers who were told that their kids had consumed a large dose of sugar rated their children as significantly more hyperactive than mothers who were told that their kids had received an artificially sweetened placebo — even though all of the kids had actually ingested the placebo. (This expectancy effect was stronger, the study authors said, for “cognitively rigid mothers.”) When kids eat sugar, parents may be more likely to interpret their behavior as wild, and attribute it to the sugar. So the myth lives on.
I also think parents persist in believing that sugar makes kids rambunctious for the same reason they believe in so many other dubious child-rearing fallacies. Parents long for an explanation for their kids’ inexplicable behavior and for a sense of control over it. If sugar really explained why kids became manic and naughty, parents could create peace by banning Skittles and soda. But sugar isn’t to blame, which leaves us to accept our kids for the frenzied, irrational beings that they are.
The author’s expectations mechanism — that they affect how one expects or interprets behavior — makes sense, but we might go father: expecting a kid to be hyperactive or otherwise ill-behaved might actually make them that way. But then hyperactivity, impulsiveness, and — heaven help us — cognitive rigidity are, to an extent, built-in realities. Here’s to a sugary Reformation Day.
Strays:
- Start getting excited! The Friendship Issue of the magazine is headed to the printers and pre-orders will be opening up very soon.
- Re: Reformation Day (tomorrow), here’s Amy Mantravadi’s latest, “The Alternative Enchantment of the Reformation.”
- A new study out of South Korea shows paper straws may be worse for the environment than plastic ones, according to the Korea Herald. All our righteousness are as plastic straws.
- Aeon ran a lengthy but thoughtful piece on grief and what is lost when we minimize or deny it:
Grief named and disclosed is grief that can be met, grief that can be placed between you and another person, where the two of you can look at it and hold it together. That shared vulnerability lets one person recognise another in their common humanity. Grief, as Weller reminds us, was never meant to be carried alone; it was meant to be held and processed by a whole village. Strip it of its name and you strip people of the possibility of being seen in their loss, of discovering that the wound they thought was theirs alone is in fact shared by those around them.
