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.
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.
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.
Hope is transcendent because it looks for genuine novelty, not more of the same—a novelty that comes like a thief in the night, able to alter radically our lives in ways we are incapable of doing ourselves. But hope is also eschatological because while it exists in the present as an affirmative power, it also insists “not yet”; it looks forward to a radical refiguration of our lives and the world as a whole, a refiguration that will purify our ideals and resolve our conflicts, redeeming our partial goods and semi-achievements, giving us what we long for at every moment in history but cannot receive from or in history. Hope is the hope that, though we are creatures who move through history—stretched out across time, part of us “lost” as memories of the past and another part not yet arrived as the coming future—we will finally be given our whole existence fully, all at once, in a radically transfigured dispensation, which Saint Paul calls the “new creation.”
Hope is a means of accessing reality, of getting at it, seeing the hopefulness at its center without occluding or deflecting or otherwise avoiding the depth of pain, injustice, and wrongness in the world. Hope sees all that is there, the bad as well as the good, but realizes that a hasty acquiescence to what is immediately apparent is not realism, but one more form of the false consolation of complacency. Hope is surprising—indeed, it is the capacity to be joyfully surprised. In this way hope is readily called transcendent, and even, in a way, “otherworldly.”
“The capacity to be joyfully surprised”—now that is an intriguing definition of hope. It seems that most political projects currently on offer, Christian or otherwise, do nothing to cultivate this capacity. My mind goes to Jesus' use of parables, often to teach about the kingdom of heaven. A consistent feature of the parables is that things will turn out in some quite unexpected ways, for outsiders and insiders alike. Might one purpose of such teaching be to open up imaginative space for just this kind of capacity?
Charles Mathewes (emphasis mine):
This, I submit, is the danger we face: a willed blindness to the basic character of our situation. It is a fundamental human flaw throughout history, but it is an especially prevalent problem today. To correct for it, you must learn, patiently and meticulously, to notice the world for what it is, recognizing not just the things you expect to see there, but also those things that do not fit into your expectations. And that means you will never be able fully to affirm one thing—the contrary examples will serve as a counterpoint, to perforate any too-seamless confidence. That in turn entails that honest apprehension of our condition will never be wholeheartedly on one side or the other of anything.
Currently reading: The Republic of Grace by Charles Mathewes 📚
Currently reading: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury 📚