I’m beyond excited that this July Sara Hendren, Claire Holley, and I will be leading a workshop at Laity Lodge on The Work (and Joy) of Repair. I’m gonna learn so much.
Moving to Texas eight years ago forced me to think often about water — and the future of American places that simply don’t have enough of it to sustain their populations. (I have an essay on this topic coming out in Raritan, but not for a few months.) Stories like this one are, to me, harrowing, and they always push me towards a counterfactual thought experiment: What would America look like if the growth of our population and the movement of our people had been governed by rational expectations of water supply?
From an interview with Todd Hido at Lens Culture:
LC: Your series Homes at Night is one of my favorites. We never see human silhouettes or the homes’ inhabitants. Why is it important to you that the houses appear on their own?
TH: Because of the very simple fact that if it is an empty shell, the viewer can place their own memories within it or create a narrative that would otherwise be blocked by the reality of what is actually inside.
neighbors and altruism
In my recent post on neighborliness, I quoted from a sermon by Helmut Thielicke, and I want to return to one passage from that sermon:
Anybody who loves must always be prepared to have his plans interrupted. We must be ready to be surprised by tasks which God sets for us today. God is always compelling us to improvise. For God's tasks always have about them something surprising and unexpected, and this imprisoned, wounded, distressed brother, in whom the Saviour meets us, is always turning up on our path just at the time when we are about to do something else, just when we are occupied with altogether different duties. God is always a God of surprises, not only in the way in which he helps us — for God's help too always comes from unexpected directions — but also in the manner in which he confronts me with tasks to perform and sends people across my path.
It strikes me that it is just this kind of surprise that the Effective altruism (EA) movement is determined to avoid. It’s a movement that puts givers in complete control: they rationally calculate how much to give and to whom, and are on principle unmoved by other considerations.
My hero Paul Farmer used to say that as generous as WLs (White Liberals) can be, they tend to believe that the world can be repaired at no cost to themselves. If that’s true, then the difference between the WLs and the EAs is that the latter think the world can be repaired at no cost to themselves in anything other than money.
For an alternative model, I would suggest that everyone read this long and deeply moving story about an active, overflowing love that does not count costs — that gives all it has without calculation — that is wholly human-hearted.
P.S.
The epicenter of the EA movement seems to be in the Bay Area, and I wonder if that could be significant. If you are a very wealthy person who has to step over or around homeless people and drug addicts every day -- or who at least has to hear regularly about your city’s crisis of homelessness and drug addiction -- wouldn’t it be nice to have a Theory that explains why you don’t need to do anything about the problem? Maybe that's too cynical, but I do wonder.
My friend Ken Myers — of Mars Hill Audio fame — has made a page with links to his several fascinating posts on the music of Passiontide.
rules, consent, virtues
The search for the perfect rule or set of safety settings does remind me of Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex. As she told me during our conversation, the modern culture around sex is marked by a broken promise. Many of her interviewees had a sense that, if you find the right rules, sex can only be good, and you and a stranger will never have to know each other or reveal yourselves to each other in order to feel good about what you do with each other. The rules (“two enthusiastically consenting adults”) will keep you safe.
But there’s no end run around character formation, and no checklist of consent items that lets us get around the fact that we are interacting with another human being, not a preference menu.
Christine’s book sounds absolutely brilliant, and I very much look forward to reading it. Leah’s conversation with Christine — I know both of them, thus the first names — is fascinating also. Such vital voices!
universal neighborliness
Re: my earlier post on an Ezra Klein column, I want to add that the universality of Christianity takes a very peculiar form, because it is a universality that also emphasizes neighborliness, a particular care for those who are nearby. Thus Matthew Loftus:
We cannot love “the whole world” except in abstraction, nor work for the mutual benefit of everyone in the same way that we can take care of our children or our sick neighbor. We must not fail in our duties to those close to us, even if our love ultimately does not stop there. Only by honoring the relationships that we have with others based on our common humanity and our common interchanges of trade and culture can we honor the God who created those people and places. Our local affections will have universal implications for how we use technology, farm the land, and execute trade. And in the global realm as well as the communal, love and sanity require limits.
I have forbidden the use of the EMR [Electronic Medical Records] in my mental health clinic at the hospital, at least for now. As I scribble my notes on paper, I look to the parent, sibling, child, or friend who has accompanied the patient to the clinic. When I ask how well the medications are working, sometimes the patient will say they are fine while their companion smiles and tells me the truth. Rarely do patients come alone; some friends or family members pay a day’s wages for an hour-long bus ride to the hospital to accompany their suffering loved one. I like to think that no one in our hospital suffers alone because the cultural ethos here forbids it.
Please do read the whole thing. But this is key: “Our local affections will have universal implications.” And, conversely, our universal commitments will necessarily have local instantiations.
I think Charles Dickens understood this paradox very well, as we see in the greatest of his novels, Bleak House. There we note Mrs. Jellyby practicing her “telescopic philanthropy” — meditating always on the suffering of the people of Borrioboola-Gha while utterly neglecting her own children — and the “business-like and systematic” charity of Mrs. Pardiggle. As Esther Summerson says, “Ada and I … thought that Mrs. Pardiggle would have got on infinitely better if she had not had such a mechanical way of taking possession of people.” When pressed by Mrs. Pardiggle to join in her “rounds,” Esther has a profound response (even if Mrs. P can’t grasp the import of it):
At first I tried to excuse myself for the present on the general ground of having occupations to attend to which I must not neglect. But as this was an ineffectual protest, I then said, more particularly, that I was not sure of my qualifications. That I was inexperienced in the art of adapting my mind to minds very differently situated, and addressing them from suitable points of view. That I had not that delicate knowledge of the heart which must be essential to such a work. That I had much to learn, myself, before I could teach others, and that I could not confide in my good intentions alone. For these reasons I thought it best to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind services I could to those immediately about me, and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself.
Words to live by, say I. And let me conclude with words still wiser, from Helmut Thielicke’s great sermon on the Parable of the Good Samaritan:
You will never learn who Jesus Christ is by reflecting upon whether there is such a thing as sonship or virgin birth or miracle. Who Jesus Christ is you learn from your imprisoned, hungry, distressed brothers. For it is in them that he meets us. He is always in the depths. And we shall draw near to these brethren only if we open our eyes to see the misery around us. And we can open our eyes only when we love. But we cannot go and do and love, if we stop and ask first, "Who is my neighbor?" The devil has been waiting for us to ask this question; and he will always whisper into our ears only the most convenient answers. We human beings always fall for the easiest answers. No, we can love only if we have the mind of Jesus and turn the lawyer's question around. Then we shall ask not "Who is my neighbor?" but "To whom am I a neighbor? Who is laid at my door? Who is expecting help from me and who looks upon me as his neighbor?" This reversal of the question is precisely the point of the parable.
Anybody who loves must always be prepared to have his plans interrupted. We must be ready to be surprised by tasks which God sets for us today. God is always compelling us to improvise. For God's tasks always have about them something surprising and unexpected, and this imprisoned, wounded, distressed brother, in whom the Saviour meets us, is always turning up on our path just at the time when we are about to do something else, just when we are occupied with altogether different duties. God is always a God of surprises, not only in the way in which he helps us — for God's help too always comes from unexpected directions — but also in the manner in which he confronts me with tasks to perform and sends people across my path.
P.S. I meant to schedule this to post tomorrow – sorry for all the stuff in one day. If I don’t post anything for the next day or two, just read this post several times. It’ll do you good.
At the request of … several, I have enabled a subscription plan for my blog. Please spread this exciting (?) important (??) news.
Can the constant confrontation with our failures and deficiencies produce a culture that is generous and forgiving? Can it be concerned with those who feel not just left behind, as many in America do, but left out, as so many Ukrainians were for so long?
The answer to that, if there is an answer to that, may lie in the Christianity the anti-liberals feared, which too few in politics actually practice. As an outsider to Christianity, what I've always found most beautiful about it is how strange it is. Here is a worldview built on a foundation of universal sin and insufficiency, an equality that bleeds out of the recognition that we are all broken, rather than that we must all be great. I've always envied the practice of confession, not least for its recognition that there will always be more to confess, and so there must always be more opportunities to be forgiven.
It would be a delicious irony if the postliberal contempt for universal obligations — plain old humanism — started making the intrinsic universality of Christianity more appealing to “outsiders to Christianity.” That might arouse some very complicated feelings in the bosoms of postliberal Christians who have redescribed Christianity as merely a superior tribalism.