Charles Mathewes:

Why are we so committed to the idea that we are all unique and fundamentally free individuals? (Indeed, this collective belief in our discrete individuality is one of the things that makes us moderns so alike.) What is the source, and the rationale, of this belief in individuality? This dogmatic bias against authority is rooted in beliefs we have about the nature of the human as an agent. These rely on anthropological convictions, convictions about the picture of the human agent we assume. To dislodge them, we have to tackle their philosophical fundaments directly.

The forces encouraging and reinforcing this picture of the human are complex and manifold. On the surface, the problem may seem to be linguistic. Our language of “choice” offers no way to acknowledge our participation in, or vulnerability to, one another; it assumes that we are fundamentally separate from one another…. It seems incoherent, or at least improper, to attempt to wrest another’s choice out of another’s control; given the basis of such choice in the mysterious subjectivity of the agent (“there’s no arguing with taste,” as the saying goes), it seems almost a category confusion to imagine that one could exercise another’s choice for him or her. […]

But note here how we are already moving from problems in our language to some more fundamental philosophical presuppositions underlying that language, presuppositions about the human agent. A large part of our problem here—I do not say the whole problem, merely a large part of it—lies in the picture of human agency most of us unreflectively assume today, and in this picture’s depiction of the relationship between God, humans, and creation. This picture…assumes that human agency properly operates through radically unconstrained choice, which is modeled on the radically unconstrained, ex nihilo action of God in creation. It is, in short, a Promethean vision of the human—a vision that emphasizes the human’s capacity to act while ignoring or downplaying the constraints on the human’s dependency on forces and persons beyond the human. To be sure, it relies on and obeys real authorities…but it cannot explicitly acknowledge them as authorities. This ex nihilo picture cannot, that is, understand authority. It offers no way to acknowledge our enmeshment or participation in, or vulnerability to, one another; it assumes that we are fundamentally separate from one another. Here love appears as nothing but the negotiation of our individual, private happiness. See in this light, our perplexities about civic engagement are rooted in deeper philosophical perplexity about our self-understanding as agents, and indeed as humans: we talk, that is, as if we do not believe that love is the core of our being; as if we believe that the world is ultimately a matter of sheer power, of conflicting wills, without respite; as if we want to be left wholly alone. Beneath our latent Promethean idolatry is a deep existential despair, a sense of being alone, of being abandoned.

Andy Crouch’s definition of human persons would go some way toward remedying this deficiency: “Every human person is a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love.” Imagine the political ramifications of taking that definition seriously. Crouch expounds,

We are designed for love—primed before we were born to seek out others, wired neurologically to respond with empathy and recognition, coming most alive when we are in relationships of mutual dependence and trust. Love calls out the best in us—it awakens our hearts, it stirs up the depths of our souls, it focuses our minds, it arouses our bodies to action and passion. It also calls out what is most human in us. Of all the creatures on earth, we are by far the most dependent, the most relational, the most social, and the most capable of care. When we love, we are most fully and distinctively ourselves.

Charles Mathewes:

Authority seems invisible to us because it is so pervasive in our world. In fact, pretty much the entire discipline of sociology is built on this puzzle. How is it, sociologists ask, that human society, which is so profoundly complex, essentially involving the voluntary consent and synchronization of so many millions, and now billions, of people—how is it that society works so smoothly? (Sociologists spend a good bit of their time studying deviance, but that’s really an avoidance mechanism for them; the real mystery at the heart of sociology is not that there are some people who break the rules, but that there are so very many who do not.) Clearly, society works as well as it does because people obey. They order their lives according to some fairly sophisticated, if rarely articulated, rules. […]

Humanity today, for all our talk about individuality, is a remarkably docile, obedient, and rule-bound species. Authority is all the more powerful for being so thoroughly imperceptible. Its ultimate triumph lies in how it is embedded in our psyches: we obey authority when we think we ought to do something. The sociological discussion of authority begins from the fact of the pervasiveness of obedience and conformity.

Charles Mathewes, trying to gesture at a more robust anthropology than the one undergirding consumer capitalism, which assumes that “individual choice” is the fundamental category of agency:

For Augustine, the fullest picture of good human agency is human agency as it will be exercised in the eschaton. He characterized that agency in a famous Latin phrase, non posse peccare, when humans will find it “not possible to sin.” For him, true, fully achieved human agency was not one where “choice” played any role at all, but rather was a kind of full voluntary exercise of one’s being, where one is wholly and willingly engaged—but where one seems to have no choice about this. This does not require compulsion of any dangerous sort; after all, it is “involuntary” in much the same way that one has no choice about laughing at a funny movie, but one laughs, at times (if it is really funny) with more than one’s voice—with one’s whole being. For this to happen we must be liberated from the slavery to sin to which we are all manifestly, for Augustine, captive. It is that enslavement that divides or splits our will and so sunders our integrity. Here is a picture of idealized agency where the center of the picture is not a wide range of options, but no options at all—a picture of human agency whose flourishing lies wholly in the complete and unimpeded engagement of the whole person in the dynamic joy of paradise.

This is an entirely different picture of agency, one that highlights humans' capacities of participation, receptivity, and particularly love: aspects of agency that subvert a picture of the human as fundamentally active. Love is the “root” of the soul, and so we are in a way composed by our cares: we do not make things valuable, the things that we value “make” us—or better, reveal who we truly are. When the soul is properly oriented in the love that is caritas, it is a unifying force, equally for our own self-integrity, our relationship with God, and our relationship with our neighbor. But love is not only an affective orientation toward things we care about, it is also intelligent, an articulate cognition of our situation, an attempt at assessing the true value of the world and the things within it. So when Augustine (in)famously says “love and do what you will,” he does not mean do what you will, insofar as the you is the you that you were before you felt God’s love; rather, that love has so transformed you that you now will to do love.

On this picture, joy is what we receive, a gift. We do not pursue it; we are always surprised by it. And what we do is bear it to others; it is by nature communicative. In loving, you become an instrument of God, and a vehicle for God’s love of the world. Hence caritas is politically unifying: as this energy has been directed toward the conversion of the self back to God, so it in turn energizes the self to seek communion with others. This is not a form of violence; we love others in friendship and treat them as would God.

This understanding of freedom entails a particular picture of the nature of human agency, one that sees such agency, at its core, as a matter of response to God’s action upon it, not as a matter of simply self-starting willy-nilly into the world. Furthermore, it is fundamentally responsive to a longing that is primordial to its being, the longing for God, so that all our acts are to be understood as forms of seeking our true home in God, a seeking that is also a beseeching, a pleading to God to come to us. As such it is both active and passive, with the passivity taking the lead. The primordial act of our agency, that is, is to respond to the eliciting call of God—to listen, or hear, or attend, or—most properly—wait on God. In doing this, we should see ourselves not as desiring but as desired, as objects of love before we are agents of love. Our destiny is not primarily to do something, but first and foremost to be loved.

Charles Mathewes:

Today our capacity to be creatures who love—who have long-standing and deep attachments that are irreducible to sheer animalistic appetites—is threatened, left to atrophy, by the consumerist mode of life we inhabit.

What does it mean to say that our mode of life challenges our capacity to love? It means that we are increasingly encouraged to think about desire and longing in ways detrimental to long-term commitments. Consider: I can get anything I want. But do I know what I actually “want” at all? Our world is awash in accessible consumer goods and pluriform forms of life, but this flood of consumables has seemed to go hand in hand with a growing sense of skepticism and even indifference to any good in particular. At the same moment when the good life, in multiple flavors, is being offered to us, we seem increasingly incapable of wanting any particular form of it for more than an instant. We live in an economic culture of immediacy and consumption, in which the idea of patience or waiting has no home to rest its head. Consumer culture “takes the waiting out of wanting,” encouraging us toward a kind of constant appetitive channel surfing, as one fickle appetite follows quickly upon another. This condition does not so much directly reshape us as indirectly mislead us: for it tells us, or sells us, a story about ourselves, and through that story seduces us into believing the illusory promise of immediate satisfaction. This promise is a powerful one; if we come to believe in it, we come to see ourselves as being the kinds of creatures who have only the sorts of short-term desires that consumer culture can satiate.

That last line is haunting. Already, we seem to be far down the road of desiring little beyond our short-term, animalistic appetites. I’m reminded of Lewis' famous line: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Of course, I still believe that those desires are deep within each person, but they are getting smothered. Such desires lack the time and quiet and patience to bubble up; they’re shouted down by lesser desires before they find the space to come to expression.

Charles Mathewes, speaking here on the delicate topic of “understanding” the evil perpetrated by terrorists, but with much broader application:

Consider a simple question. What does it mean to seek to “understand” evil? Initially I suspect the decent mind recoils from such an undertaking. If “understanding evil” means to render it intelligible in the sense of excusable or even rational, then such “understanding” is, I would argue, intellectually delusionary, psychologically futile, and morally hazardous. But this question can be taken in another, deeper, sense: here understanding is simply the project of depicting evil as something within the realm of human behavior, as something that we could conceivably do.

It is probably impossible not to feel the tug of the first form of understanding. Yet we should resist it as strongly as we can. That we could be like these “others” in different circumstances does not mean that we are in fact relevantly similar to them, and hence lacking any standing to judge them. Judging requires both sufficient proximity to secure a good sense of the matter at hand and sufficient distance to ensure that one is not improperly confusing one’s own interests and concerns with the situation.

The question is important because we need to know “the enemy” precisely in their enmity to us—their rationale for why they do what they do. To do this we must resist the all-too-human reflex to alienate them as “the enemy,” to see them as fundamentally different from us, fundamentally nonhuman. (This is not to deny others' sole responsibility for their particular acts of malice; it simply identifies the disquieting fact that this behavior is, in some way, done by creatures inescapably, disquietingly like us.) Yet we must also resist the counterreflex to depict (and tacitly excuse) them as “just misunderstood.” Instead we have to see them as continuous enough with us to be recognizably human, but take no comfort in the fact of their bare “humanity” as somehow securing them from the possibility of being, paradoxically, monstrous.

A drawing of Bruce Springsteen by my mom, which she sent to a New Jersey club in 1985 as a tribute to Springsteen. Mom was recently contacted by someone in Kansas City who found the drawing with their deceased father’s belongings and wanted to return it to her. Her commentary on all this: “Strange is the life of an artist.”

Freddie deBoer (HT: @ayjay), in a post that begins with his thoughts on a bad take about Fury Road, zooms out to consider larger questions around why we hold certain opinions. He rightly concludes that people hold wrong opinions “because they are impressionable and they’re impressionable because it’s scary to stand alone.” While we might think we hold “intelligent” opinions about any number of matters, Freddie suggests that we essentially latch on to memes (or, we could add, podcasts or TikTok videos or whatever) to substitute for real thinking because real thinking is hard. As he says, “I think ideas become memes because a lot of people are afraid to have their own ideas. I think people say this sort of thing because the internet has taught them that the only thing that matters in life is appearing clever and so they say stuff other people have already preapproved of as clever ideas.” He ties all this to the “rampant emotional insecurity” that a lot of us feel. His closing words are spot on:

People feel that they have to make incisive or witty observations about everything around them, in order to be liked, and fumbling around in the burlap sacks of their minds they find only those baubles that someone else crafted. So they throw them out there. And, over time, these things get repeated so often, so insistently, and by so many people who are wracked with a need for social approval so deep I can’t comprehend it, in spite of how wrong they are I’m tempted to say, well, who am I to blow against the wind?

Ah, the baubles in my burlap sack. Ouch.

Sabrina Little, in an essay for Aeon, takes up a question that I’ve been interested in for some time: Does it take a bad person to be a good athlete? She argues that certain behaviors—like selfishness, envy, and pride—are “performance-enhancing vices.” While considered vicious in other realms, these behaviors actually aid the athlete in their pursuit of greatness. Little explains,

Performance-enhancing vices are defects of character, or traits that otherwise detract from a well-ordered, flourishing life, which help one become a more successful sportsperson. In general, we can identify them by asking ourselves whether certain traits that help us be competitive in sports also impede our ability to be loving friends or responsible citizens. These vices may undermine our ability to have a long view of sports and life – to think sustainably about how we use our bodies – and they can prevent us from maintaining a balance of interests outside the sport.

As I’ve discussed this with friends, the particular angle that we’ve taken on this question has been: Does Christian faith aid or hinder someone in athletics? Often, my interlocutors have argued that, on the whole, Christianity is compatible with athletic excellence. To them, there is nothing about Christianity that would hinder an athlete from performing at the highest level and achieving excellence in their sport. I, on the other hand, have wanted to argue the opposite: My inclination has been to see Christian faith as more a hindrance than a boon to athletic achievement. With this essay, Sabrina Little has provided me with a richer vocabulary for registering my dissent. The notion of “performance-enhancing vices” is a pretty big hurdle to get over for those who would argue that Christianity improves sporting performance.

Charles Mathewes:

If we want to ask the question “what is going on in the world today?” in distinctively Christian fashion, we find we must undergo a crucial dislocation from our usual point of view. Most of us reflexively ask that question from the relatively parochial “we” of national identity and national purposes; a few of us, resisting that nationalist captivity, ask it instead out of a sense of “we” as citizens of the world—say, of universal values, or the U.N., or some other political imagination of that sort. But Christianity’s perspective is neither finally nationalist nor cosmopolitan. It speaks neither to citizens of this or that nation, nor to citizens of the world, but to those who would be citizens of the kingdom of heaven. Proper Christian formation challenges the way we take the division of the world into nation-states as “natural”; it helps us articulate our intuition, never fully absent, that we share with others around the world a common humanity, and that that humanity asks of us not only respect for them, but also honor for the way they manifest the glory of God in their own wondrous and fearfully made individual lives.

Charles Mathewes:

We are not called just to wait around until this hope hits us. We are not simply supine before the winds of the moment; for such hope is always real, and our failure lies in our lassitude at cultivating our capacity not directly to be hopeful, but to see the hope that is offered to us. There is much work we can do to cultivate hope, for we must learn to be receptive to it—in a way, to suffer it, for in truth hope is disconsoling; where despair and presumption both try to resolve, to settle, hope is unsettling. Indeed, hope is part of a way of being in the world, a virtue whereby we come to shape ourselves as perpetually unsettled, or of recognizing our unsettledness—a way of enduring our begrudging recognition that the future is going to be genuinely surprising—surprising in a way whose “surprisingness” will never end.