The Good Life & Community

Two days after my high school graduation I drove with my older brother to Keystone, Colorado. Our plan was to spend the summer in the mountains before coming to UNT for the fall semester. Although “plan” is probably too strong a word, since we hadn’t thought to secure jobs or a place to stay before setting out.

Lucky for us, the town was in need of unskilled laborers, and we were able to quickly find work and an apartment. The apartment was actually employee housing – a furnished room with bunk beds plus a kitchen that we shared with our suitemate. Though humble, it was the first place I’d ever lived without my parents, and as such it held an unshakable air of sophistication. Besides, that aforementioned suitemate was a female who scandalized me by her very existence.

My brother worked as a waiter that summer, which meant that I got to eat free breakfast on occasion. My job was with a hotel. I held the position of “house boy,” and carried myself with all the dignity implied by that title. For all its down sides, the job gave me plenty of time to think.

I spent long mornings pushing a vacuum cleaner up and down cavernous hallways. The burgundy carpet was already clean, and so I understood my work there to be essentially ceremonial, drawing parallel lines along the length of the floor. The stillness of the empty meeting rooms and the drone of the vacuum created the perfect environment for uninterrupted reflection. I had time to think about my impending college career and the adult life that awaited me thereafter.

One recurring daydream went like this: I would work for a large chain of hotels. I would be some type of vaguely executive professional travelling to all of the different, but unfailingly exotic, properties owned by the company. I wouldn’t need a house because I could always stay in the immaculate rooms of the gleaming hotels. All my meals would be eaten at nearby restaurants. There would be fried foods.

I didn’t get very far into my reverie without thinking of women. There would need to be a female. Easy enough. I would be married, and my wife would travel with me. I would work during the day while she swam, read, or applied cucumbers to her eyes (as women in hotels seemed wont to do). I felt sure that my future spouse would be pleased to permanently live this way.

If you think that I made some mental accommodations for my progeny then you have overestimated me. Children had no place in this fantasy. It would just be me and my thoroughly relaxed wife floating frictionlessly through the world. We would live happily without ties to anything, anyplace, or anyone.

Silly as it was, my daydream was quintessentially American. It followed a pattern visible in the work of the beat poets and country music radio. Hit the open road. Follow your passion. Chase your dreams.

But all that rootlessness tends to ignore an important fact: other people matter. We humans are social animals, intended for community. And community is the native soil of good conversation.

If we’re to have any hope of real dialogue, then we will have to cultivate the kind of relationships that can sustain it. A room full of friends engaged in meaningful discussion is the reality of which social media is only a simulation. But unlike social media, a room full of friends requires some limitation. It demands that the participants inhabit one particular place and that they speak with specific people. As Wendell Berry put it:

No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity.

My summer in the mountains eventually came to an end. When it did, I came to Denton to start school. I have been here now for about 18 years. I am decidedly less cosmopolitan than I imagined I would be; yet I can’t help thinking that parochialism is a small price to pay for community.

This is the sixth post in a series on the topic of conversation. Links to the previous posts are below:

1. How to Impress a Teenager

2. A Feast for the Soul

3. The Case for Wonder

4. Minimalism of the Soul

5. A Fair Fight

Death Is My Life Coach

A reader of this blog (oh, you read that right) recently asked me an unfair question. He requested a reading list on the good life. What can we read and consider that will make us more capable of facing down the next 50 or so years?

His question was unfair because, really, that is the only question I am interested in. In a certain sense, everything I read is an attempt to better understand how to live well. I’ve put together reading materials on Virtue Ethics, Family, and Embodiment, all in an effort to clarify that question and explore its potential answers.

But allow me to give a somewhat peculiar recommendation. I’ll bypass Plato, skip the Sermon on the Mount, ignore the Stoics, and head straight for Gizmodo. That’s right, I’m sending you to a tech blog to learn about the good life.

In 2015, Gizmodo posted a story called This Is What Happens to Your Body After You Die. The lengthy post chronicles the deterioration that befalls our flesh upon death. It tells of enzymes breaking down cell walls, of toxins running free, and of the body digesting itself.

Does that sound morbid? Gratuitous? If so, that’s not why I’m recommending it. I like it because it reminds me that I’m not built to last. I have an expiration date.

Such a conviction is hard to maintain. As C.S. Lewis once said, it can be difficult to believe that, “my hand, this hand now resting on the book, will one day be a skeleton’s hand.” Maybe that’s why the Bible returns again and again to remind us of our mortality. We are repeatedly being compared to flowers, and the comparison is not complementary. We aren’t flower-like in our beauty or fragrance, but in our ephemerality. “Like a flower he comes forth and withers.”

Being conscious of our mortality isn’t simply a piece of knowledge around which we can construct a theory of living. Rather, it is a way of being in the world. It makes us – or has the potential to make us – comport ourselves differently. This is something the philosopher of ethics seldom mentions, but that the novelist never forgets.

Consider Ames, the narrator in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. In the book, Ames is writing letters to his young son. He does so because he is old and likely to die before his boy becomes a man. This knowledge, this settled conviction of mortality, pervades his thoughts and actions. He sees the world differently and more clearly than most of us. He is less ambitious, less vain, and more observant. I’d like to quote the entire book as an example, but I’ll settle for two paragraphs:

“As I was walking up to the church this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the war memorial — if you remember them — and I thought of another morning, fall a year or two ago, when they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost. There was all sorts of thrashing in the leaves and there were acorns hitting the pavement so hard they’d fly past my head. All this in the dark, of course. I remember a slice of moon, no more than that. It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail. I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, it is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees still can astonish me.

 

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.”

Acknowledging the reality of death can shake us out of our stupor. It can kindle a sense of nostalgia and wonder for ordinary things. When death is our mentor, we are less likely to fall into boredom and pride. And we are more likely to be humbled and astonished by ordinary things; even a row of oak trees.

A Fair Fight

A friend of mine grew up in a house of discussion, debate, and disputation. Every topic was a fresh opportunity for disagreement. They weren’t fighting with each other, mind you, just talking with passion. It was the family past-time, and they knew how to do it without hurting one another’s feelings.

This same friend’s wife had the opposite experience. Her family never fought, never debated, and hardly ever disagreed. Differing opinions were looked upon as potential fights to be avoided. Tension was resolved with space, time, and the tacit agreement to never again bring up the issue.

As you might imagine, this created a certain imbalance in their home. Both of them were skilled at sniffing out the slightest tension. Upon detecting a mild difference of opinion, they proceeded to react in opposite ways. She would retreat, he would advance. She wanted to avoid discussion, and he wanted to settle the matter. He even offered her counterpoints to his own arguments. The result was a slow chase around the house with my friend arguing against himself.

Though absurd, my friend’s situation is far from unique. Most of us have some kind of reaction to argument. And often, that reaction is anxiety. I’ve been in plenty of discussions (I suspect you have too) where a difference of opinion arises and someone in the group tries desperately to snuff it out. They read disagreement as social tension, and try to ease it as quickly as possible.

On the other hand, some people say that they enjoy debate. Too often this is code for, “I’ve never conceded a point.” With an offensive posture, they deflect every question and wave off every challenge. In so doing, they guarantee that the discussion won’t advance.

Socrates had a different approach. He certainly wasn’t scared of debate. After all, he was in the habit of asking provocative questions to everyone he encountered. But neither was he a pugilist; using discourse as an opportunity to pummel his interlocutors. Instead, he approached every conversation with a mix of curiosity and humility. He was confident that other people knew things that he didn’t know, and he was determined to find those things out.

The Socratic method gives more dignity to human beings than much of our contemporary dialogue. Instead of mocking or pathologizing disagreement, it asks questions. In so doing, it assumes that the people with whom we are speaking are reasonable. It assumes that they hold their positions because they believe them to be true.

I recognize that my wife and I are currently creating a home that is having an impact on our kids. The way we handle controversy is shaping how they react to it. I hope they will grow up to be comfortable with debate. I hope they will soak up the rules of good discourse – maybe even learn a fallacy or two. I want them to think of disagreement, not as a reason for anxiety or aggression, but as an opportunity for curiosity and humility. Who knows, maybe our discussions will even impress them.

This is the fifth post in a series on the topic of conversation. Links to the previous posts are below:

1. How to Impress a Teenager

2. A Feast for the Soul

3. The Case for Wonder

4. Minimalism of the Soul

Minimalism of the Soul

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I was recently provoked to envy by an Instagram post. I realize that is the main purpose of Instagram – to show us meticulously staged moments which make our own lives seem drab. But this time it was in the description more than the image that I glimpsed an enviable vision of the good life.

The picture was of a young couple travelling across the country and living out of a van. Now, I have already been young, and it is a condition I do not wish to revisit. Also, I am a homebody who values regular showers and clean laundry, so they can keep their van. What sent me into revery was the description of the couple. They didn’t have much money, it said, but what they did have was plenty of time for “reading, writing, hiking, and thinking.”

Reading, writing, hiking, and thinking. I would like to spend more time doing those four things, to enjoy their slow and ponderous pace. I am anxious to miss out on a great many things; to ignore the stream of diversions that constantly beckons. In short, I would like to practice a minimalism of the soul.

These thoughts occurred to me recently as I watched Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things. The movie cobbles together interviews with a variety of people, all of whom adjure you to join their tribe. (Perhaps “church” would be a better word. The movie is incurably religious.) The thesis is that we all want to be free, but we are imprisoned by our stuff. We work hard so that we can buy new things, but this endless stream of purchases will never make us happy. The result is inescapable misery. We have built our own gilded cage, full of cheap clothes and gadgets.

In the movie, freedom is synonymous with purging. Get rid of your stuff. Maybe trade your suburban home for a tiny house. Remove yourself from the crushing cycle of getting and spending. Minimalism isn’t sold merely as a way to get more closet space. Instead, it’s the path to living more simply, more authentically, and with greater control.

Admittedly, this is a compelling vision. I relish the thought of paring down until the only things that remain in my life are those things that I really want. I approvingly imagine a sparse and gleaming house. But wouldn’t a well ordered mind be worth more than well ordered cabinets. But this is easier said than done.

Matthew Crawford explained the phenomenon in his book, The World Beyond Your Head:

“Think of the corporate manager who gets two hundred emails per day and spends his time responding pell-mell to an incoherent press of demands. The way we experience this, often, is as a crisis of self-ownership: our attention isn’t simply ours to direct where we will, and we complain about it bitterly. Yet this same person may find himself checking his email frequently once he gets home or while on vacation. It becomes effortful for him to be fully present while giving his children a bath or taking a meal with his spouse.”

It seems that our diversions may be more difficult to part with than our possessions. Crawford investigates the possibilities of “skilled practices” as an antidote to chronic distraction. When we engage in tactile activities such as cooking a meal, riding a motorcycle, or building a musical instrument, we are interacting with the real world on its own terms. These activities guide our attention. And that guidance differs qualitatively from the manic shrieking of radio ads and click bait headlines.

Conversation with other people offers a similar reorientation. When we diligently attend to other people, we are engaging with a real part of the world on its own terms. It would be rare, I think, for someone to have a long conversation with their child and later lament the time they missed with their cellphone.

Most of us are not in a position to be able to travel around the country in a van. (My friends Darren and Lindsey Smitherman might protest this point.) But that doesn’t mean that we have to resign ourselves to cluttered minds and disordered souls. We can choose a short list of worthwhile things – reading, writing, hiking, and thinking, for instance – and begin the hard work of discarding the clutter.

 

The Case for Wonder

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Why did humans ever begin to philosophize, to create literature, or to make scientific experiments? What has been the animating force behind this remarkable project known as civilization? Among the many possible answers, consider the case for wonder.

Philosophy was, from the start, awe-inspired. Plato said that, “philosophy begins in wonder.” Aristotle agreed that “it is owing to their wonder that men…philosophize.” Martin Heidegger claimed that “astonishment carries and pervades philosophy.” And Alfred North Whitehead believed that, “philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.”

This sentiment is not exclusive to philosophers. Thomas Aquinas saw that poetry and philosophy arise from the same impulse. “The reason why the philosopher can be compared to the poet,” he said, “is that both are concerned with wonder.” And the writer Annie Dillard insisted that the work of literature is to, “give voice to this, your own astonishment.”

The scientist can also be driven by a wide-eyed admiration with the world. Albert Einstein remarked that, “he who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.” Isaac Newton once described his own inspiration as that of, “a boy playing on the seashore…whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

It’s no surprise that civilization should be the fruit of wonder, nor that conversation would be enriched by its presence. It is a posture towards the world – one that acknowledges that this planet is odd, unexpected, and yet intelligible. This posture creates the conditions for the genuine curiosity upon which good discussion depends.

Such curiosity is in short supply. On one side we meet people so disenchanted with the world that they think there is nothing interesting left to discover. Someone else has already climbed all of the mountains and plumbed all of the oceans. The person sitting across from us, familiar and ordinary, couldn’t possibly surprise or intrigue us. Best to stick with safe, predictable pleasures. An endless stream of diversions become the tawdry successor to the longings of youth.

On the other side we meet people so fearful of curiosity that they dare not ask honest questions. They are strict partisans, anxious to draw lines around their politics or theology, and to banish anyone who falls outside of those lines. In so doing, they exile themselves to an island of their own narrow point of view. It’s an island well armed against heretics, but vulnerable to demagogues.

The surest way back to curiosity is around a coffee table. It is at a pub table, or on a walking path. As individuals silence their phones and attend to one another, they can’t help but court wonder. As they enter honestly into discussion, their disenchantment begins to dissolve. The bizarreness of this world, after all, is hard to conceal.

When the partisan leaves the echo chamber of social media, he encounters the forms upon which his straw men were based. People are not so ridiculous, as it turns out. Or, at least, they are not ridiculous in the way he had expected. He is likely, over time, to soften on some positions. He will have confronted the complexity of reality and been changed by it. He is also likely to believe some of his positions even more strongly. But in those instances they will be, more than before, his true opinions. His former fear and disdain for his political enemies will have been replaced with honest intellectual conviction.

We have spent too much time with our heads buried in screens. That is a world full of diversion and certainty, but too often devoid of wonder. We would do well to lift ourselves up, leaving behind disenchantment and fear, and confront other living human beings. And in such encounters we could expose ourselves to that civilizing force known as wonder.

 

This is the third post in a series on the topic of conversation. Links to the first two posts are below:

1. How to Impress a Teenager

2. A Feast for the Soul

A Feast for the Soul

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Allow me to give you a piece of marriage advice: things will be easier if only one of you cares about food. Otherwise, planning for dinner parties becomes a battle of wills. Your spouse feels that a double-crusted turkey pot pie would be nice, while you want very badly to make 48 hour short ribs. It is unlikely that you will make two entrees, which means that at least one of you will not get your way. The likelihood of pouting is significant.

Of course, you both mean well. You want to present your guests with good food in a welcoming environment. You are imagining a scene of conviviality, where everyone is comfortable, happy, and nourished. You are driven by hospitality, that noble old human instinct. But is it possible that good conversation, even more than good food, is the heart of hospitality?

Augustine seemed to think so. Once, for his birthday, he invited a group of people to join him for a meal. “I had already provided a little feast for the body,” he said, adding that “it was fitting that I should also provide them a feast for the soul.” Just as he had chosen a meal to fit the occasion, he took it upon himself to prepare a topic of conversation.

Augustine understood that people are embodied souls. Our bodies are important, certainly, and hospitality requires that we consider the comfort of our guests. But we aren’t simply animals, interested only in what we can taste and smell. If we leave the table with famished souls, then we have not really feasted. “There are two kinds of food for the soul just as there are two kinds of food for the body: one, wholesome and helpful, the other, unwholesome and harmful.”

The good host is thoughtful. She considers the occasion, her guests, and her own resources. She knows whether the event is formal or casual. She keeps in mind how many children will be present, or that one of the attendees fancies himself allergic to gluten. Her hospitality is a dialectic between her own creative expression and the situation at hand. These same factors have to be considered in the preparation of a discussion. I should know, because I have suffered the consequences of ignoring them.

I once tried to lead a conversation with a group of friends on a Saturday morning. We were packed into a living room, struggling to hear each other over the din of crying babies. As toddlers stumbled between breakfast plates, I cleared my throat. I was determined to make some point about Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher. This alone should tell you how oblivious I was to the situation at hand. One of the young mothers had her child in a headlock, trying to extract an alien object – perhaps a watch battery or a cyanide capsule – from his stubborn maw. I thought it a good time to ask her for an opinion on Kierkegaard’s concept of the teleological suspension of the ethical. She replied with a glare, the meaning of which is unprintable. I had misunderstood the situation, and my mistake was a failure of hospitality.

I like to think that I have improved over the years. I’ve tried to be a generous host and a gracious guest. I’ve even been known, with great effort, to hold back a bawdy, inappropriate joke. I still want to make those 48 hour short ribs, and maybe I will. But, I suspect I can be a better host when I attend to people’s souls as well as their bellies.

How To Impress a Teenager

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I recently read Paper Towns by John Green. The novel, which focuses on two high school students, was entirely inappropriate, demographically speaking. It departed significantly from the sorts of things that a family man in his late 30s is supposed to read. But I was inspired nonetheless. It challenged me to think about the art of discussion and how our conversations reveal what we care about most.

The book tells the story of Quentin and Margo, two teenagers who are pulled by their longings into adventure. Margo longs for an exciting life and Quentin longs for Margo. There’s a scene in which our protagonists sneak into the top floor of an office building in the middle of the night. They make their way into a dimly lit conference room as the lights of their Florida suburb twinkle outside. Gazing through the large windows, Margo says, “I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.”

As Margo sees it, all of the people in her life, young and old alike, are distracted by triviality. They obsess over grades or chores, or distract themselves with gossip. But no one seems to be engaged in that most human of activities: thinking about and discussing things of real importance.

I sympathize with Margo. As a being made in God’s image, it would be a kind of sacrilege to live out my days in diversion. I wouldn’t do justice to God’s image if my sole concerns in life were football scores or home renovations. People like Margo should notice something different about me. In fact, they should be able to say, “I’ve never come across anyone who cares about anything that matters, except for this weird Christian.”

So, what can we do? I propose the radical act of talking to one another, live and in person, about real things. Between bad jokes and embellished stories, we could discuss justice, education, cosmology, and linguistics. We could stay up too late for the sake of real fellowship, and in so doing remind ourselves that we are in this world, but not of it.

Hopefully our conversations will be an encouragement to those around us. But, even if they go unnoticed, they will not have been in vain. Good conversation is valuable in and of itself. It is a humanizing activity and a welcome antidote to our current state of distraction and political polarization.

Look for more thoughts on this in the weeks that follow.

SEX ED.

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I know that I need to talk to my daughter about sex. She’ll be nine, and if I don’t say something soon, someone else will. A health teacher will broach the subject, explaining it all in medical terms. Or a classmate will whisper something confusing. In neither case will they tell her about intimacy proceeding from a vow and leading to life. In neither case will they tell her about consummation.

They aren’t likely to tell her about a wedding day. And why would they? Why would they mention my role in walking her down the aisle; in giving her away? What could be more regressive and old fashioned than suggesting that I had protected her thus far and that her new husband was supposed to protect her now?

The health teacher might talk about consent. He or she might explain that sex should be an agreement, that all parties should be free and willing participants. Or maybe a video will explain it all with crisp editing and upbeat music. But who will tell her that the fullest consent is given in marriage? It would be unusual and unmodern to talk about wedding vows as specific and public consent. To talk about families and friends participating in that consent and promising to buttress it.

A teacher might tell a classroom about intercourse. Friends might talk about screwing. But I doubt either would tell her that the wedding night is an embodied experience of unity, without which the wedding is incomplete. That becoming one flesh is a physical reality as well as a spiritual one.
Who would dare to mention that in this peculiar consummation each participant is consumed and consumes. And in being consumed they are not diminished. They become more, not less. That in this act, and in this act alone, exists the possibility of new life.

That kind of talk is suspect, after all. It sounds suspiciously exclusive. It is impolite to point out that a man and a woman alone together hold the key to life. The facts of biology are in the path of history, and who can stand before such a force?

Weddings are old ceremonies leavened by youth. Individuality is displayed through the common rituals of humanity. The participants have joined a historic liturgy, and in so doing they have not lost their individuality. They display uniqueness and freedom, submission and membership. The dancers are young but the song is ancient.

I want my daughter to know the old and ordered Christian view of sex. I want her younger brothers to know it too. And I worry that, if I can’t find the nerve to bring up the subject, then they will miss out on the Church’s view of humanity. They’ll learn about sex as though men and women could be understood in purely biological terms. They will have a view of themselves and of others that is impoverished. They will be less dignified, less free.

FEEDBACK! – Faith and Politics Forum

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Thank you to all those who came out to our Faith and Politics Form on Wednesday.

We heard some great positions explained (as much as time would allow) and defended, but we’re sure we didn’t cover everything! To that end we are working on MORE ways to foster good conversation at Reason Together. But before we start burning the midnight oil on some of the ideas we have, WE NEED TO HEAR FROM YOU!

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