Week In Review

Another Week Ends

Joyless Control Freaks, Self-Help America, the Death of New Atheism, and the Witness of the Black Church

Todd Brewer / 9.29.23

1. Lots to discuss this week. And no I’m not going talking about the Swift-Kelce whatever-it-is, though there’s something heartwarming about the high school music nerd conquering the world and now “embracing the high school tropes she never got to live out during her life as a child star.” Best of luck to the couple. Judging from the early returns in the media, they’re going to need it.

No, what’s far more interesting to lead off this column comes from Heather Havrilesky’s Ask Polly Substack, which sees techniques of control as the enemy to joy.

So many of the letters I get are about control. Our society, leaders, teachers, parents, and friends often somewhat lazily convince us that we can fix any problem, that we SHOULD fix every problem all by ourselves, in order to make us independent and self-sufficient. So we apply the full force of our brains to the things we can’t control until we’re obsessed, mapping out ways to bend each relationship or life circumstance or friend or relative into a shape that might bring us satisfaction and peace.

But this fixation on control is a big part of what makes most of us unhappy. We can’t control our careers, can’t control our friends, can’t control our spouses, can’t control our kids. We will never have enough money, we will always be short of beautiful, we will never be loved enough, we will never be successful and joyful. Our need for control is a dirty lens through which the whole world looks misshapen and dissatisfying. We will never have enough, and each day is a manifestation of that scarcity, that longing, that loneliness, that restlessness.

This is the mindset that makes you obsess about an exboyfriend who will never love you enough, a job that’s not fulfilling enough, a diet that never works, an apartment that’s never clean, a spouse that’s never affectionate enough. This is how you experience yourself as a broken piece of an ugly picture, a person who’s sure to keep messing up. The sadness and longing you experience is all your fault, and the only answer, outside of obsessively seeking control, is distracting yourself from reality, sedating yourself, or moving into a fantasy of how it will feel to have everything you desire, everything that will complete you, everything that will make you feel whole and safe at last. […]

Joy merely asks that you humble yourself to this day. Joy asks that you humble yourself enough to engage with some process, either hard work or physical labor or exercise or meditation or art or communion with others. That process never needs to be valiant or impressive. A moment of savoring the physical world around you, relishing nature, or even calmly observing the imperfections of a dark room, can be just as divine and humbling and conjure joy. Joy merely requires that you surrender yourself to the moment, and yield yourself to some purpose.

The wisdom here would probably count as radical if Jesus didn’t already say something similar, asking that we “consider the birds of the air” and not worry about tomorrow, taking up our cross daily. But the question is always how one can become humble enough to not control the outcomes of their life. How does one “live in the moment,” unburdened from the past? The key lies in Jesus’ other teaching, which offered unconditional forgiveness to tax collector and Pharisee alike. Forgiveness releases one from the grip of their faults, erases the slate of wrong, of who one has become. In doing so, one is freed to embrace the day on its own terms, to abandon everything and follow him.

2. Sticking with the self-help-adjacent wisdom theme for a bit, this next one has been bouncing around my head since it came out a couple of months ago. Writing in the New Statesman, Sohrab Ahmari argues that “America Is Nothing More Than a Self-Help Society.” Now, arguments that cast such a broadly scornful eye at the past are such to have their flaws. But, beginning with the observation that “self-help politics is as much a phenomenon of the online right as the left,” Ahmari zeros in on an explanation many take for granted: the middle class. He argues:

Such self-help programmes – whether conservative or progressive – aren’t going away, because they answer the needs of a group that has long conducted the moral soundtrack to America’s market society: the middle class. As the left historian Charles Sellers wrote, the US middle class “was constituted not by modes and relations of production but by ideology”: a myth of self-improvement repeatedly deployed to “quell rising anger over the class reality of bourgeois exploitation”. Beginning in the 19th century, striving middle classes corralled surging economic discontent into a frenzy for self-discipline and what today would be called “clean eating”. This historical role is crucial to understanding the strange mirroring of self-help politics on the left and right today. […]

At a time when the richest 10 per cent owned three-quarters of national wealth, a Presbyterian divine declared that “one [American] has as good a chance as another”, and, therefore, the “poor man gets little pity”. […]

Teetotalism, sparse herbal diets and cold showers were seen as the proper antidotes to the yearning for leisure that “wasted” wage-hours. Young men on the make voluntarily joined clubs and dormitories imposing military-style discipline: early curfews, exercise in the twilit hours. Evangelical Protestantism, which had once sanctified the anti-market (and anti-slavery) ethos of backcountry democrats, increasingly came to emphasise individual salvation. The era’s undisputed literary giant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, turned social reform into a matter of the heart: the harsh “laws of property”, he preached, would be transfigured into “universality”, if only young men of means would “let into it the new and renewing principle of love”.

I haven’t the means to assess Ahmari’s historical claims — the article does beg the question that economic advancement was more mythical than real — but even so, the ideal of the middle class goes hand-in-hand to the idea of self-betterment. Of particular interest to me is the way that the conditions for economic prosperity (hard work, prohibition, etc.) have taken on religious significance. Outside of Havilesky (above), precious few today would praise Type-Bs as moral exemplars, but the prodigal son wasn’t exactly an enterprising go-getter, particularly compared to his harder-working older brother.

3. In book news this week, Francis Spufford fans will be happy to hear that he has a new novel coming out, titled Cahokia Jazz. It was just released in the UK (Non-brits will have to wait until February 6th, though you can find it if you know where to look) and the story sounds thrilling.

Spufford’s “what if” is a fascinating one: he imagines that the variant of smallpox that arrived with European settlers was variola minor, both dramatically less fatal than variola major and conferring immunity on those who contracted it. This virological sleight of hand means that, far from being almost entirely wiped out (it’s estimated that between 90-95% of Indigenous peoples in North America were killed by smallpox and other European diseases), there is a huge and thriving Native American population in the US in 1922, when this novel is set.

Spufford played out the “what if” scenario in his last book, Light Perpetual, and this seems to do the same, but on a far wider scale.

4. Speaking of Spufford, it seems like ages since there’s been anything written of the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Christopher Hitchens. So much so that many in England are declaring the movement dead. It’s not a stretch to say that Spufford’s fantastic book, Unapologetic, had something to do with the downfall. Another contributing factor? The arrogance of it all, and not just because the English have tended to eschew fanaticism ever since the Puritans killed the king. Writing in ABC Religion, theologian and apologist Alister McGrath had this to say:

Yet even as the movement emerged, there were signs of anxiety about its puzzlingly aggressive rhetoric and ambition. Gary Wolf, the journalist who coined the term “New Atheism”, found its asserted certainties to be arrogant and improbable, amounting to a significant intellectual overreach on their part: “People see a contradiction in its tone of certainty. Contemptuous of the faith of others, its proponents never doubt their own belief. They are fundamentalists.”

Wolf could see the dangers of this overconfidence: “Even those who might side with the New Atheists are repelled by their strident tone.”

Yet it wasn’t just that Dawkins and others set out to make religious faith a badge of shame. The “New Atheism” encouraged a discriminatory rhetoric of denunciation and demonisation directed not primarily against religious ideas, but against religious people. Many were alarmed at this trend. The feminist atheist blogger Ashley Miller distanced herself from those who suggested that “people who are religious aren’t worthwhile and are certainly too stupid to be respected”. The debate ought to be about assessing ideas, she insisted, not about publicly ridiculing religious people: “We dehumanize people who disagree with us instead of arguing about ideas.” It didn’t exactly help with the public face of atheism.

Perhaps unsurprising to practitioners of grace, but the way one argues almost matters as much as what you are arguing. Looking back now, the strident tone of New Atheism was actually part of its appeal, much in the same way that Mark Driscoll once captured headlines of the early theo-blogging days. Cruelty was a feature, not a bug, for both Driscoll and the New Atheism. It gained them headlines, clicks, and lucrative book contracts. Suffice to say, there is something to being more winsome than angry, more persuasive than prophetic. Because as much short-term gain there is to be made from the rancor, it ultimately undermines whatever lasting change one wishes to effect. A lesson, it’s worth saying, that many should learn nowadays.

5. In humor this week, “‘Aw, Our First Fight!’ Says Man Unaware This Is Their 7th Fight” hits pretty close to home. “Congratulations, It Was All Worth It: You Were Hand-Selected to Apply for a Discover Miles Credit Card by God and His Angels” from Points in Case is pretty insightful. And as someone who is more online than most, “Just Making Sure You Saw My Thing” is spot on. But the top spot for humor has to go to “REPORT: Roommate Who Bakes Is Atlas Carrying Weight of Apartment’s Mental Health“:

“Levels of happiness and satisfaction are significantly higher in apartments where there is at least one baking roommate,” said scientist Georgia LaRue. “While in apartments where no one bakes, everyone basically wants to curl up in a ball and cry all the time, and they’re each just waiting for someone else to step up and bake.”

The report found that, much like Atlas is condemned to hold up the heavens or sky for eternity after the Titan War, the baking roommate does not necessarily want to be responsible for the apartment’s mental health, but it is a responsibility thrust upon them — or shall we more accurately say, her. […]

“Am I skilled in philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy? Yes. Am I forced, instead, to hold the weight of the world in my own two hands? You bet your ass I am. Matcha cookie?”

Reporters confirm the matcha cookies were amazing and did give them a positive outlook for days to come.

6. If you haven’t already purchased Esau McCaulley’s book How Far to the Promised Land, it’s never to late to atone for past mistakes (kidding, but also check out our interview with McCaulley). The question at the heart of the book, and one he discusses at length in his recent NY Times column, is “What led me to remain in the church?” Why didn’t he, as some of his literary heroes have, leave the faith of his ancestor’s enslavers?

My ancestors converted to Christianity on a plantation with all the contradictions that have driven African Americans from the faith. Like many other enslaved people, they found God apart from the watchful eye of the slave master when they gathered to worship in secret.

I came to see that the rightness of Christianity, despite the evil done in its name, was not first posed during my strolls around campus or email exchanges with high school friends at different universities. It occurred a century before on the Bone plantation. I believe that my ancestors wrestled with the questions of faith when the evil was not literary or historical, but a material thing of flesh and blood. How did they manage to see goodness in this religion?

I think that for them, the Black church did not just provide an answer. It was the answer. In a world that proclaimed that the enslaver was lord of all, the idea that something more mighty ordered the tide of events that swept up their lives was the hope needed to survive the day. What if belief in the unrelenting love of God combined with trust in with his power to bend history was not a tool to make chains but to break them? […]

That work of transforming the lives of individuals is the seedbed out of which mass movements grow. The organizers did not succeed because they had an army of studied philosophers. Instead, the marchers reasoned that faith in the God who carried them when there was no revolution would do the same now that there was. Put differently, the confidence in God’s ability to overcome slavery, segregation and white supremacy flowed from a belief in his power to overcome sin and death.

McCaulley’s is a pertinent question not just for the black church, but really for every Christian. Not simply because the present must give an account for the past if it is to be forgiven, but because the church itself remains an institution comprised of sinners. The deeper you go into a church, the more skeletons you find. To embrace the faith preached by such a church requires far more than denial or justifications, but a belief in a God whose grace exceeds his faulty emissaries. Perhaps then the past can be viewed with the compassionate gaze of forgiveness that makes all things new. Even today.

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