My name is Scott Lipscomb. I'm an Episcopal priest, father, and husband living and working in Washington, DC. I blog weekly at www.wrestlingwiththeangel.org, focusing on how our study of scripture and theology can inform our personal and political lives.
At the end of part 2, we found ourselves in a strange place: we found we could talk about God through analogical statements and also through apophatic (negative) statements, though each have their limits. But this results in a strange situation: we can say both that, for example, “God is a mother” (so long as we mean this analogically!) and also “God is not a mother”. But how can this be? In saying this, are we in violation of the law of non-contradiction?
As I said at the outset of part 1: talking about God is weird, and talking about God is hard. To see how it could be the case that God both is and is not a mother (or anything else), let’s employ some more analogy.
Last time, we encountered a curious conundrum: when we try to talk about God, our words shift around on us, and we find that we can’t really talk about God the way we talk about basically everything else. (This post is Part 2 in a 3-part series; if you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend you do before continuing!) When we say that God is the creator or that God is good, we saw that we don’t really quite mean creating or being good in the way that humans might create things or be good. (And the same limitation applies to things like calling God a father, or mother, or a castle, or anything else: for God to do the basic things we think God does, God can’t actually be a father or mother or a castle.)
In other words, we discovered that one way we might talk about God—univocal or unequivocal language—probably won’t work. When we use words that we use to describe things other than God to talk about God, our words will mean something different from what we mean when we talk about that non-God stuff. That’s confusing—and annoying—but I hope that in my last post, I showed that it is nevertheless the case.
Today, though, we get to move on to some good news. Though we probably shouldn’t ever talk about God unequivocally, that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about God at all. But we will need to figure out how we can use language to refer to something (or someone) who seems to defy normal description.
Consider one of the most basic things that theistic religious people say about God: God is the creator of the universe. This statement is so common, so essential to most western religious perspectives, that it may go unconsidered. But what, exactly, are we saying when we say God created1 the universe?
The idea of creating something is not itself strange. We humans create things all the time. Right now, I am creating this substack post. Last night, I created a lentil curry. On two separate occasions, my wife and I have created children. So when we talk about God as the creator of the universe, we are likely thinking that God creates more or less like we do.
But if we think about this for a moment or two, questions—and problems—will arise. While it’s true that I can create texts, food, and even new humans, my creative process is hemmed in and limited in all kinds of ways. Let’s consider my skills as a writer. I can create texts in English, but not any other language. I am also pretty decent (I hope!) at creating non-fiction about philosophy and theology, I have never been able to write fiction, and my poetry is basically just repackaged philosophy and theology.
Last week, we dove into the turbulent waters of dualism. I focused my time there pointing out that “dualism” is, as the smart kids say, an overdetermined term: there are (at least!) four different meanings to dualism: what I called 1) ontological dualism, 2) theological dualism, ditheism style, 3) theological dualism, Barthian style, and 4) phenomenological1 dualism.
Attentive readers may remember, however, that I began that post on dualism asking a question about something else entirely—non-dualism. Although I did touch on non-dualist responses to the various modes of dualism outlined, we didn’t dig deeply into it there—so we shall today.
As I pointed out at the top of last week’s post, non-dualism is a trendy, popular word today, especially in many spiritual-but-not-religious spaces who are looking for alternative approaches to spirituality. Many in the west today, both conservative and liberal, tend to act as if the only options are mega-church Christianity or new Atheism. Non-dualism, with its air of mystery, seems to offer a refreshing alternative to both.
Considering that we offered 4 different modes of dualism, one might assume/worry that we will have to investigate 4 different modes of non-dualism here. Fortunately for you, my intrepid but time-strapped reader, things aren’t as bleak as that. Although there are non-dualist philosophical approaches to all 4 modes of dualism outlined, here I want to focus on just two.
Has anyone ever extolled the virtues of non-dualism to you? Many westerners who are interested in “Eastern” spirituality and mysticism tend to think that non-dualism is the key to unlock spirituality for us mundane Westerners. Anyone interested in Vedanta philosophy, in particular, will surely spend a lot of time considering non-dualism. Richard Rohr, undoubtedly one of the most popular Christian contemplative writers, speaks constantly about non-dualism. Why, even YouTube anarchists are getting in on the action. Non-dualism is interesting and trendy—but what, exactly, is it?
As we will see, that’s both a great question for anyone interested in phenomenology (I’m hoping that’s you!), but it’s also a complicated question. Indeed, I don’t think we can answer this question without first answering a related but distinct one: before we figure out what non-dualism is, surely we first need to figure out what dualism itself is.
Again, though, things get complicated quickly: there is no one thing called dualism. Today, I want to outline the three four common meanings of dualism, and explore how they are both related but also distinct. Only then will we be able to come back and figure out what non-dualism might be.
I have been writing here at Wrestling with the Angel for about 10 years, often only intermittently. It’s changed names and focuses a few times. In the last year, my own interest has moved more and more towards a discussion of some particular topics, most notably phenomenology (broadly conceived) and related discipline like Vedanta and Neoplatonism.
So, I have started a Substack, Phenomenology, East & West. I will be posting there weekly. I will be linking those posts here as well (for a while), so if you are curious about that work, you can still check back here, and/or subscribe the Substack directly. I will likely also post some things only on this blog, especially if I want to write on something not really related to phenomenology itself.
(Note: I included links to the first few months’ worth of articles on the Substack here on my WordPress blog. I have since stopped doing so, since I figure anyone who wanted to follow me over there has done so. Rest assured, I have continued publishing over there. You can find all of those articles on my main substack page: https://phenomenologyeastandwest.substack.com/)
Phenomenology is a ten-dollar word for something that you probably already do, at least some of the time. Phenomenon is the Greek word for “appearance”, and so phenomenology is just the study of, or focused ordering of, the appearances. But what, exactly, is an appearance?
The use of this word in its more-or-less post/modern philosophical sense can be traced back to Immanuel Kant, in at least two ways. For one thing, the word “phenomenology” seems to have first appeared in a letter written to Kant. Second, and more importantly, the basic frame of phenomenology was set by Kant himself in his (in)famous Critique of Pure Reason.
In the Critique, Kant introduces a fundamental metaphysical distinction between the appearances (phenomena) and things-themselves (noumena). Kant was pointing out something that is, for most people, pretty obvious, but which we often ignore and which has massive philosophical consequences: the way things appear to us is not the same as the way things actually are, in and of themselves.
I started really reading substack about a month or so ago, and it has quickly colonized much of my time. The fact that it is essentially wordpress combined with twitter—a blog with social media built in—means that it’s easy to find new blogs, and it’s easy to spend hours reading them.
Much of substack, at least the section of substack the algorithm has shunted me onto, is obsessed with politics: political reporting, political commentary, and political development. The more I read, though, the less clarity on political matters I seem to have.
Part of this may be generational: I’m an old millennial; I turned 18 in 2000. The 1990’s were the decade of The End of History, that time when liberal democracy seemed not ascendant, but already utterly victorious and hegemonic. This was before 9/11, before the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, before Obama—before Trump. It was, in many ways, a very different world.
My understanding of politics in my late teens was pretty basic: you had the Republicans, who were conservative on both economic and cultural issues, and you had the Democrats, who were liberal or progressive on both economic and cultural issues. Of course, this understanding was faulty. My understanding of the Republicans was more or less correct, but the Democrats had not really been much of a liberal or progressive party, especially on economic issues, for a while at that point. The big realignment of the parties in 1964/1968 had left a Democratic Party that maybe really was truly left-leaning on economics and social issues, but that version of the party died pretty quickly. Jimmy Carter’s failed campaign in 1980 was both perhaps its apotheosis and its grave.
Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992 was the victory of the “Third Way” of Democratic politics; in other words, it was the victory of neoliberal economic policy with a “wait-and-see” attitude on many cultural and social issues. Despite its name, neoliberalism was (and is!) really a retrenchment of market-friendly economic policies. That is: neoliberalism is really just a new face for conservative economic policy. So: certainly by the 90’s, the Democrats were really a sort of center-conservative party, while the Republicans were a more staunchly and truly conservative party. In a two-party system, this meant that electoral options for voters were narrow indeed.
Unsurprisingly, this situation didn’t last. Pressure continued to mount for progressive cultural and social change from feminist, queer, black, indigenous, critics, just to name some of the most prominent. The Democratic Party came to see that differentiating themselves on social and cultural issues, such as gay marriage and abortion, was a winning strategy at the voting booth—though it’s worth noting that the party followed the lead of others on e.g. gay marriage, and did not lead itself. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were both officially opposed to gay marriage, for example, until the polling showed that a near super-majority of Americans were in favor.
But as the party moved leftward on cultural and social issues—a trend that intensified in the 2010’s—it continued to hold a firm line on neoliberal economic questions. The Obama administration’s response to the Great Recession in 2009 and following is a great example; more than a trillion dollars was allocated to shore up failed corporations, yet millions of Americans lost their homes as the value of real estate plummeted (but the terms of mortgages remained unchanged).
It was into this context that Donald Trump erupted in 2015. Most Americans—of both parties—were sick of neoliberal economic policies (even if they didn’t use that term to describe them). A growing segment of Americans were also increasingly concerned with the advance of liberal and progressive cultural values: while gay marriage rapidly gained supermajority support, questions around transgender identity and rights, as well as questions as to how to address racial inequality, would prove more controversial.
Trump knew how to stoke concern and resentment on both fronts. He presented himself as a populist on economic issues—promising a return of manufacturing jobs, for example—while also doubling down on traditional Republican views of liberal culture, describing black protestors as thugs and deriding trans people.
Trump’s position—and his brash, politically neophyte way of campaigning—meant that most people in power didn’t take his presidential campaign seriously. And then, he won the Republican primary—and not by a narrow margin, but a massive one. His brand of politics (and, presumably, his personality) were exactly what Republican voters were looking for.
It’s hard to say whether Trump is best understood as a cause or as an effect of what has happened to our politics since. Either way, Trump’s presence has only intensified the strange realignment of the parties. The Republicans remain staunchly—even reactionarily—conservative on cultural and social issues, while presenting themselves as populist on economic ones. (The fact that they rarely, if ever, actually work to enact legislation or policy to help the working class, seems to have had little impact on most voters.)
Meanwhile, the Democrats have shifted more and more attention to their liberal and progressive cultural stance, while solidifying a quiet but unapologetic deference to neoliberal economic policy. This was clearly on display in both 2016 and 2020; Bernie Sanders campaigned on an economically left-wing position, but famously presented a more muted stance on social and cultural issues (his ambivalence towards gun control was especially commented-upon in 2016). Clinton did just the opposite, and though Sanders garnered serious support, the culturally progressive but economically conservative position won the primary. Of course, it lost the election (though to be fair to Clinton, she did win the popular vote—a noteworthy if, ultimately, irrelevant caveat.)
So this is what our political landscape looks like today: we can choose a cultural reactionary who pretends to care about working-class people (but who will do nothing to actually help them), or a cultural progressive who is pretty frank about refusing to do anything to help working-class people. (It is worth noting that the Biden administration actually did do some minor, though significant, things to support working-class interests, including supporting unions during strikes. However, his administration has also made a point of downplaying these actions, especially in the case of the FTC’s struggle with tech monopolies. Even when the Democrats do something for working people, they seem to know they need to hide it, lest they spook some of their large donors.)
This situation is sad enough as it is, but it gets worse. Again, I’m an old millennial, and so I had long taken it for granted that the progressive/liberal cultural position was only going to grow in strength as time went by—young people, after all, are almost always more culturally permissive than their elders. But there is growing evidence that this just isn’t the case. Gen Z men, in particular, seem to have taken a sharp conservative turn, at least on some specific cultural and social questions. Of course, this is a generalization, and there are plenty of liberally-minded Gen Z men. But if the victory for gay marriage had seemed to usher in a 2nd sort of “end of history” moment, in which cultural progressivism marched inevitably into victory, that has now been revealed as an illusion. This also means, of course, that if the Democratic Party has built its strategy by tacking left on culture and remaining center on economics, they may discover they made a big mistake.
Now, it must be said that the set of “options” that I outlined above was electorally accurate, but of course the opinions held by voters were more various. In truth, we could probably identify four basic political groupings in the late 90’s and into the 2000’s: you had Republican loyalists (conservative on economics and society), Democratic loyalists (less conservative on both, especially social issues), libertarians (conservative on economic issues, but generally rather liberal on many, though not all, social issues), and a large and diverse group of leftists we can generalize as socialists (leftist on economic issues and quiet liberal on social issues). Even these groupings mask disagreements, of course. But I think this gives us a reasonably accurate, if still imprecise, understanding of American politics 20 years ago.
These 4 basic groupings still describe a decent number of people, but the new political landscape is full of contradictions—or, at least, confusions. Old assumptions about what suite of political positions one would hold are fast fraying. Plenty of substack writers will hold, for example, downright reactionary views on feminism, race, and LGBTQ rights, while also condemning US foreign policy as too aggressive, and wanting a protectionist economic regime. Using the four labels above, how would we characterize such a person? Conservative on culture, isolationist on foreign policy, and populist on economics. They just don’t fit into any of the old categories at all. Now, such a person is very likely to support Donald Trump, and the other politicians who are swimming in his wake (J.D. Vance, obviously, but also Matt Gaetz, Marjory Taylor Greene, and others), so perhaps that is the only category we can assign them to. Does this make them standard-issue Republicans? I’m not really sure; it seems there still is a significant, if often quiet, segment of the Republicans that are pining for a return of the old form of their party. Hence we get people talking about the “alt-right”, and while I do think that term is helpful, it’s not always quite clear who it does or doesn’t describe
I think the rise of this new Trumpist/alt-right position says a lot about the direction that US politics will take in the next 20 years. What has changed, though, such that this new intersection of concerns is a growing demographic? Isolationist views are not new, and have long had a place in the Republican party (even if they were always a marginalized minority). Likewise, paeans to the working-class are nearly as old as the republic, and have been common in both parties. I think it’s the new energy against progressive cultural and social issues that is the main animating force behind this new political position.
Of course, conservative and reactionary attitudes towards cultural and social change are not new. After all, women didn’t even gain the right to vote until 1920, and that took decades of activism. Likewise, the right to marry someone of the same sex/gender was only enshrined at the federal level in 2015, and was—and is—bitterly opposed by many. Civil Rights legislation, first proposed in the 1860’s, didn’t pass until a century later. (Indeed, opposition to genuine racial justice in this country is older than our constitution, and continues with extreme vigor.)
Even so, I think there is a new alt-right mode of conservative cultural politics at hand today. In many ways, the success of this new conservatism is in part due to the failure of the old conservatism, (as well as over-reach on the part of cultural progressives, as I will suggest below). Although there hyper-reactionary conservatives who just want to roll back most or all of the cultural and social changes of the 20th century—one gets the suspicion that J.D. Vance, after all, seems to think that perhaps women shouldn’t vote—the newer, younger conservatives seem to have a narrower focus. I think most of these figures take some of the cultural changes of the last few decades for granted: they generally aren’t opposing gay marriage or women’s role in the economy, but they do oppose trans rights, they seem Black Lives Matter as a threat to social order, and in general they are tired of progressive identity politics (while, of course, simply instantiating their own brand of regressive identity politics).
Now it could be that the fault lines in this new conservatism are simply due to a tactical retreat—after all—women working, even in high-powered positions—and gay marriage are both pretty popular among the electorate, and they are also both realities that have been stitched deeply into society (though as mentioned above and addressed below, debate around women’s rights continues in various ways). In truth, there is no easy way to undo these changes without wreaking havoc on society and the law. Meanwhile, questions around things like reparations for slavery or the status of trans people are still unresolved and much more controversial. Perhaps the new conservatives have admitted defeat on the former issues just so they can focus their energy on the front that they might still win.
I think there is more going on here, though. In large part, many Americans see women’s rights and gay rights as inoffensive—so long as those rights are understood in a limited way. Women wanting to work, for example, seems to many like an issue of basic fairness. If a woman can do a given job, why shouldn’t she be able to, well, do it? Likewise, for most straight people, gay marriage is neither a problem nor a threat: if gay men want to marry men, and lesbians want to marry other women, why should that bother anyone else? Many Americans agree, I think, with the sentiment that “no one should care what other consenting adults do behind closed doors.”
However, the questions which have been central to progressive cultural and social movements more lately have a different character. The movement for reparations for descendants of enslaved people, for example, would presumably involve the transfer of at least many billions of dollars from or through the federal government. That’s a lot of money, and many white people balk at the idea: two men getting married doesn’t cost us anything; but reparations sure seems like it would. Likewise, discussions of trans rights raise a host of thorny questions. Not only are many people concerned about the potential presence of male-bodied people in women’s restrooms, but the difficulties are more fundamental: accepting that transwomen are women would entail a change to most people’s understanding of what the word “woman” means, exactly. Obviously, for many (cis)women, that might feel uncomfortable. But also for straight men, it raises personal, fraught, even embarrassing questions.
In other words, the new lines of culture war would seem to have more at stake, even for people who are generally liberal or simply apathetic to such debates. The momentum towards gay marriage proved inevitable, in part, because most people had nothing to lose by its victory, even while a small but significant minority had much to gain. But the new proposed changes are different: many Americans perceive a threat in the air.
Whether they are right to perceive a threat from the “new” identity politics (of course neither the call for trans rights or for reparations, the two examples I use here, are new at all—but their place in the limelight of American politics and culture is) is a deeper question, and one on which I imagine many people will disagree. But that many Americans perceive a threat here is, I think, pretty much beyond debate. And I suggest this perception is powering a new realignment in political activity.
Whither this new realignment may take us, I won’t pretend to say. It has been interesting—and very sad, in my opinion—to see how the push for genuine economic change reached a real crescendo around 2016—and then quickly crested and collapsed. No one, it seems, is talking any more about Medicare for All. The ultimate failure of both the Sanders and Corbyn campaigns, in the US and UK respectively, does signal the end of real opportunity to see real economic progress for working people of all races, ethnicities, and genders. The recent maneuvering by Emmanuel Macron in France to deny the right of the victorious left-wing alliance to form a government there is another signal that such a movement is likely dead-on-arrival.
What we are left with, then, are two options, each of which seem profoundly disappointing, each in their own way (although they also show quite an overlap of disappointing positions too!) It seems to me that American politics in 2024 is a reminder of the impotence of political action to really fundamentally fix the problems before us. Politics certainly changes things, of course, and it can even make good changes. But over and over, we see that the old problems reassert themselves in new ways. Slavery is defeated, only to be replaced by segregation, lynching, and share-cropping. Of course, this nexus of repression wasn’t as bad as slavery—and that difference matters! Still, it’s hard to see how this process of slow changes through more sophisticated forms of labor discipline ends at a truly just society. This lesson seems even more brutally taught in, for example, the failure of the Arab Spring, or the reactionary turn of politics in Israel. It seems that so often, genuine efforts to right the wrongs of the past just create new wrongs in the present—which someone will try to solve in the future with, at best, extremely limited success.
Of course, this recognition of the failure of liberalizing movements is often invoked to justify conservatism along Burkean lines. And while I am certainly feeling pessimistic, I certainly don’t think any of this means we should be opposed to or even apathetic to a politics of (good) change. I do think it should remind us though, that ultimately, our hope for justice and righteousness can’t rest on political economy. Although I am sympathetic to the long trajectory of the Social Gospel and its heirs, I think it was both theologically and politically bankrupt, promising far more than it could ever deliver and fundamentally misunderstanding the reality of sin. The world is far more broken than secular political analysis, whether liberal, or Marxian, is able to recognize.
To put it simply, I think that genuine Christian theology teaches us that history is a political problem—but without a political solution. But I’ll have more to say on that another day.
In July, Donald Trump announced J.D. Vance, freshman senator, venture capitalist, and author of Hillbilly Elegy as his Vice Presidential running-mate. Vance achieved national recognition (and plenty of controversy) for the aforementioned book, and rode that attention to a political career, being elected as a senator from Ohio just last year. Vance’s politics can, I think, be fairly (if vaguely) summarized as alt-right; he puts forward economically populist positions combined with socially conservative, even defiantly reactionary, ones. Obviously, his position as Trumps’ running-mate has only increased attention and scrutiny on his record and past statements. Multiple incendiary revelations have come forward in the past few weeks. I won’t go into them all here, but there’s plenty of salacious commentary online. Your search engine of choice can aid you if you so choose.1
I do want to spend some time on the most recent revelation, though, for reasons I think will become clear pretty quickly. On August 14, WCPT820 Radio’s Heart Signalpublished an article on Vance’s appearance, in 2020, on The Portal, a podcast run by fellow venture capitalist Eric Weinstein. Now, what is getting the most attention is a statement that Weinstein made, and the Vance seems to have agreed with (multiple times) that caring for grandchildren “is the whole purpose of the post-m[e]nopausal female.” Obviously, this statement raises a vast number of questions, and Vance’s electoral opponents have been quick to jump on this as evidence of his misogyny and general weirdness.
I have no argument with such critiques, but you can find plenty of takes, both hot and substantial, on this one quote all over the web. But there is plenty of additional worrying material on the 2-hour recording—indeed, this odd and troubling view of older women is just the tip of the iceberg.
First things first—I did not listen to the full 2-hour podcast. Luckily for me, other intrepid souls have. I came across this story on Jonathan M. Katz’s The Racket newsletter; you can find his article here. It is well-worth reading in its entirety. I will be relying on Katz’s summary in my discussion below.2
Katz addresses the grandmother comment(s), but goes on to dig into the rest of the podcast. What caught my attention was Weinstein’s and Vance’s discourse on equality. Here is Katz’s summary:
…Vance and Weinstein complain about “political correctness,” which they seem to think is the scheme that is holding them (and by extension the human race) back from their ultimate destiny. It will surprise no one familiar with this style of self-congratulatory tech-bro “contrarianism” that what they are referring to is the denial of inherent genetic differences between different groups of people, including based on gender and nationality. To cut to the chase: This pseudo-biological determinism is the full context for the “post-menopausal females” lines. Or as Vance says, “I mean, obviously, like, I’m not uncomfortable with the idea of biological differences.”
Weinstein takes it further. He claims at one point to not “like the IQ in race or IQ in gender stuff.” (“Sure, neither do I,” Vance replies.”) Then he immediately continues on a rant, already in progress, about how women are inherently inferior in the game of chess . At another point, Weinstein says: “I love the idea of ‘all men are created equal.’ [But] I know from marathon running that Ethiopians and Kenyans are not quite created equal.” “Right,” Vance replies.
When Weinstein explains that his brother, the disgraced evolutionary theorist Bret Weinstein, thinks that maybe East Africans “radiate heat really efficiently,” Vance seems ready to believe it. “Is that true?” he asks.
“That’s what his belief is,” Weinstein says. (To which Vance replies simply: “Oh.”)
Weinstein rounds this out by calling the idea of inherent human equality one of “our founding fictions.” “Every smart person is supposed to know that our founding fictions are fictions,” he says. Vance offers no disagreement here either, offering his belief in “biological differences” — specifically that “that men and women are better at some things” in response as soon as he is given a chance to talk.
Here we see that the grandmother comment(s) signaled a deeper ideological position: Vance and Weinstein are annoyed that they have to pretend to believe in the “founding fiction” of human equality. Against this fiction, they point to a number of cases in which people are just not equal: women and men are, apparently, better or worse at various tasks; likewise, they point out that people from different countries tend to succeed at different sports more than others, also implying that those people must have inborn genetic differences that give them advantages.
There’s obviously a lot to dig into here, so let me begin by addressing one or two obvious issues with their reasoning that aren’t the main issue I want to address, but I think need to be commented on:
Vance argues that men are better than women at certain tasks, but apart from chess, he doesn’t go into detail about which activities men are superior at. Meanwhile, Weinstein argues that East Africans are the best distance runners in the world, and that this must be because of inherent, genetically-derived physical differences.
There are lots of biologists, anthropologists, and other specialists who can address these comments with much more erudition than I can, so I’m not going to get in the weeds of these comments—but let’s point out the obvious: while the absolute best chess players may indeed be men, there are obviously elite women chess players who are better than the vast majority of men in the general population. So if we are saying that men are just better at chess than women, we would need to be much clearer about precisely what we are saying: that the best men may be better than the best women, but that obviously the best women are much better than the average man.
It should also be obvious, too, that we don’t really know why the best players are men. Is this because of some innate genetic difference? Or is it rooted in the way young boys and girls are enculturated and socialized differently? Or perhaps some other reason? I don’t know! But simply assuming that a gap in chess performance is due to innate genetic difference isn’t science. It isn’t even an argument. It’s just a bare assertion, without, as far as I am aware, any actual evidence.
Likewise, when it comes to Kenyans and Ethiopians winning in distance running: is this due to some innate genetic advantage that they have? Again, let’s begin by pointing out the obvious: if we compare elite Kenyan runners to, say, elite Chinese or American runners, the Kenyan runners do seem to be more accomplished, statistically speaking. However, if we compare elite Chinese or American runners to the average Kenyan person, the Chinese and American runners would obviously win. It is not the case that every Kenyan is a better runner than every Chinese person.
Now, that point is pretty obvious, and I am sure that Weinstein (and Vance) would readily admit it. But it’s one of those obvious points that easily gets overlooked, despite the fact that it should sharpen our analysis of the issue: a few Kenyans are really good at distance running, but most are more-or-less average—just like every other ethnic group!3
Furthermore, when we see specific Kenyan individuals winning more marathons, for example, we are seeing people of other nationalities and ethnicity finishing very soon after them. It is not the case that Kenyans are, say, 10% faster than people of other nations. They are something more like 0.01% faster. Now, in a marathon, such a small margin of victory matters! But if we are trying to understand why they are faster, the very small margin should give us pause. Such a small advantage will be very hard to actually tie to any given cause. Maybe it is genetic. Or maybe it has something to do with diet. Or maybe it has to do with the fact that distance running has become a very popular sport in East Africa in the last few decades. Or maybe it has to do with the fact that many parts of East Africa are mountainous, and so these runners are able to train at higher elevations than some others, which we know gives a real advantage to their cardiovascular performance. Indeed, perhaps there is some other reason we aren’t even aware of.4
Any of these explanations—and many more—are plausible. Indeed, it’s likely that the explanation is multi-faceted, with more than one cause contributing to this slim margin of victory. But we just don’t know! For Weinstein to reference Kenyan and Ethiopian dominance of this one sport as evidence that obviously there are innate genetic differences between different ethnic groups that determine outcomes in life is a bare assertion—again, it’s not just that it lacks evidence, it’s that it isn’t even a proper argument at all.
OK, but above I said I wasn’t going to focus on all of the above, so that I could talk about what I really wanted to address. Whoops! Well, the above conversation about supposed inequalities does lead into what bothered me most about the Vance/Weinstein conversation (which, considering how annoyed I got above, is saying something).
We need to step back and clarify our terms. Let’s make sure we understand what we mean by one of the main words in the discussion. Vance and Weinstein claim that belief in equality is nothing but a convenient fiction, something that insidious political correctness forces us to pretend to believe, but that it’s actually counterfactual nonsense. Now, as I pointed to above, I’m not sure they actually have an evidence-backed argument in favor of this position, but!, my main concern is that I don’t think they understand what we mean when we say people are equal.
When we talk about human equality, no one is claiming that all people are actually equally good at every task humans do. This is obviously, trivially untrue. Professional chess players are better than me at chess. Professional runners are better than me at running. People who speak Spanish are better than me at speaking Spanish (lo siento, no hablo Español). Meanwhile, I am probably better than most people at preaching sermons and writing theology (at least, I hope so!)
In this sense, of course, humans are not equal. But this is not news, nor is it relevant to discussions of human equality.
When we say we are all equal, we aren’t talking about equality of ability, but equality of moral value; that is to say: my life is equally valuable to other people’s lives. My desires are equally important to others’ and should be considered when making decisions that impact me, etc.
Needless to say, (although the very fact that I am writing this suggests that it is actually rather needful) our inequality of ability does no damage to our equality of value. I don’t know of anyone who argues that a 1-year old’s life is less valuable than a 20-year old’s, even though the 20-year old obviously can do just about everything better than the 1-year old. We believe that there is something about being a human being, in and of itself, that just makes us have innate and inalienable value.
Now, such a view can be (and has been! Looking at you, Nietzsche) contested. One could craft an argument against the idea that all humans have equal moral value. Indeed, one of my major concerns is that although most of us indeed believe in the equal value of all human beings, I don’t know that we have a fully coherent theory to explain this (hence my intense interest in theological anthropology!) However, even in the absence of such a theory, we need to point out that what Vance and Weinstein are arguing against just isn’t what their supposed interlocutors actually are arguing for. (I am reminded of the many atheists who define God in such a way that the vast majority of theists would also not believe in). They have conflated one meaning of equality with another. This is, at best, intellectual sloppiness.
Of course, it might not be sloppiness at all. It might be an intentional elision. But I won’t hazard any speculation on that issue here. I would, however, like to remind Mr. Vance, who was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church in 2019, that scripture tells us that “ …God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27). All humans are made in the image and likeness of God, and therefore all humans share in God’s infinite value.
It’s worth noting that scripture specifically says that both males and females are (equally!) made in God’s image. Women have value not only in their ability to care for children (or perform any number of other tasks) but because they share, completely and equally, the inherent dignity that we males also have in our being created and sustained by God (I should add here that scripture does not mention intersex people here; but let me say for the record that they share equally and completely in this dignity too. I think this is obvious, but…).
To believe in this fundamental value of all humans, and to believe that we necessarily share this value equally, has nothing to do with how skilled or capable we are at various tasks. I would hope that J.D. Vance, my brother in Christ, would defend this idea as essential to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.5
We are unequal; we are equal. It depends on how we use that word. Let us use our words wisely; indeed:
“Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” (Ephesians 4:29-32)
I have begun using DuckDuckGo, as Google’s quality has precipitously declined in the last few years. For this reason, I’m also trying to stop using “google” as a verb meaning “to use a search engine”. Hence my awkward wording above. ↩︎
A hearty thanks to Katz for his work on this; that said, of course, any errors in what appears in my post are my own. ↩︎
Perhaps the average Kenyan is better than the average American or Chinese person at running marathons. But I don’t think that question has been experimentally tested. And, as we will dig into below, even if such a difference exists, we would then need to do much more work to figure out the cause(s) of that difference. ↩︎
It’s also worth noting that East Africans don’t professionally excel at all endurance sports. For example, the vast majority of elite long-distance cyclists are European (Biniam Girmay of Eritrea did just win the green jersey (which is for sprinting, not endurance riding!) in the Tour de France—he is, I believe, the first African of color to do so). Belgians, in particular, have a strong record of victories. Does anyone believe that Belgians have some natural ethnic advantage over, say, the French or the Germans? It is worth noting that these discussions about innate ethnic differences almost always seem to focus on black people of African descent. It probably won’t take you long to realize, historically, why we white people are so interested in making these kinds of arguments about these particular folks. ↩︎
I have noticed lately that non-Christians seem to be using the phrase “my brother/sister in Christ” as an intensifier when wanting to correct someone online. Let me assure the reader that I mean the expression here in all sincerity. After all, we are one Body… ↩︎
What do you do when you finish work in the evening? There’s statistically a very high chance that your answer is “go home and watch Netflix (or insert your streaming platform of choice instead). Why do you do this? Let me rephrase that: I certainly spend most nights either watching a show on Netflix/Peacock—often a show I’ve already seen 3 times before. Why do I do this? Why do we do this?
Let’s begin with what the answer just can’t be; let none of us delude themselves. Can we agree that the answer is not “because this is undeniably the best use of my time, the most fun I could possibly have”. Sure: there are some nights where I really do just want to (literally) Netflix and chill. But surely most of us, most of the time, would rather be doing something else: board game night with the neighbors, pickup soccer with friends, a pint of beer with classmates at the local bar. So why do we, most of us, most of the time, end up on the couch, bored with what we’re watching but unwilling—indeed, seemingly incapable—of doing anything else?
Like most important questions, there are many answers to this question, many angles from which to approach this question. One could consider the question as a psychological one, a sociological one, a political question, an economic one, a neurological one, or a biological one. Each discipline,, would add its own nuances, clarity, and share of the truth. But let’s try to keep it simple.1 If we just pay direct attention to our own feelings, our own motivations in the moment, what do we discover?
It seems to me that the reason we sit, bored on our couches, with the TV on but also scrolling through our phones, and feeling extremely bored with both screens, yet simultaneously unable to get up and go do anything else, is nothing more or less than Convenience.
We might be bored with what we find on Netflix. But finding it is so easy, so frictionless. It takes next to no effort, no risk, and involves no uncertainty. Ditto with our phones: I scroll Substack not because I expect to find something new to read, but in spite of the fact that I know, with near-certainty, that I won’t. And yet…I keep doing it. Because opening the app and scrolling costs me next to nothing.
On the other hand, organizing a board game night takes calls, texts, planning, cleaning, cooking…and more than that, it involves asking other human persons to agree to spend time with me. What if they say “no!”? That will feel defeating. That whole process involves at least an order of magnitude more work, and it very well may end in futility, to boot. Meanwhile, being bored on the couch with Netflix on the TV and substack (and/or reddit, twitter, etc.) may be, well, boring, but I also know exactly what I’ll get. No risk. No uncertainty. No risk of rejection or defeat.
At least, no sense of acute, immediate defeat. But surely I’m not the only one to have felt that in this effort to avoid one night’s worth of futility, we are falling into a lifetime of it. Technology provides us with very convenient modes of entertainment. But the actual entertainment value of these products seems inversely proportional to their convenience: watching Netflix on the couch is super easy, but it’s not really all that fun. And yet, we find ourselves there far more nights than not.
Convenience may feel like a trivial property, something nice but not essential, something we like but don’t need, and therefore it may seem inconsequential to the big decisions of human life. But I think our engagement with newer entertainment technology reveals that convenience, and the quest for convenience, plays a larger—and more pernicious—role in our lives than perhaps we had noticed, or would want to admit.
To get a better sense of the role convenience plays in our lives, we could approach things a bit differently. Try to imagine yourself living in the year 1900. When work ended, what would you do? You certainly weren’t going to go home and stream Netflix. Nor were you going to watch network TV, or listen to the radio. Because none of those things existed. It was very unlikely that you even had a telephone in your home, or on your block.
So if you wanted to have fun after work, your options were pretty limited: you could read a book (again, most people would have only a few of these in their home, at most, and a good chunk of people were not literate anyway), you could go on a walk—or you could go do something social. And that’s the crucial point. For tens of thousands of years, the answer to the question “what do I do when I don’t have to labor to survive?” was spend time with other people. Chatting, or playing a sport, or drinking, or going on a walk, whatever—having fun almost always meant being social.
And I mean really being social. We talk today of “social networks” online, but of course there is very little real social activity going on there. In 1900, being social meant physically being in the same space as someone else, face to face. You had to look at them, you had to make space for their body, you had to think about if they were hungry or thirsty, you had to meet their gaze and you had to just deal with them, in the full weight of their spiritual and animal being.
Having fun in this way has all kinds of limitations, and it wasn’t always convenient. Sometimes the people who happened to live near you were people you didn’t like or didn’t share any interest or hobbies with.2 And sometimes they were just boring, or unneighborly.
Now, it’s important that we don’t get confused as we consider this hypothetical social scene in 1900. First, as I’ve already implied, we had better not romanticize the past, for a vast number of reasons. Second, I am definitely not suggesting that people in 1900 were somehow better than people today. In fact, my meditation on the power of convenience suggests just the opposite: the only difference between them then and us today is that we have these very convenient entertainment technologies, and they didn’t. If they had had Netflix in 1900, my guess is that they would have spent countless bored hours on the couch, too. We have the technology that they didn’t, and that’s what makes the difference.
We have this technology, and we use it, and it dominates our time—but I just don’t think we’ve thought through its implications enough, we haven’t really thought whether the kinds of lives we’ve built in and around and on this technology are actually the lives we want. Our dependence on them feels more or less inevitable. But it might be helpful for us to consider whether we have other options.
The temptations of convenience shape more than our entertainment choices, of course. Consider the food we eat. It’s not just fast food, but also the prepackaged food we often buy in the grocery store. Few people actually think either fast food or prepackaged food tastes better than, say, a home-cooked meal or an apple pie made from scratch. But fast food and prepackaged foods are extremely convenient. And when we are busy, or just tired, that convenience provides an allure that few of us can resist. And again, let it not be thought I accuse others of crimes I am innocent of: I often find myself seeking out relatively bland, boring food just because I can unwrap it and eat it without any further work or thought.
But again: I don’t actually enjoy this food more! And that’s the rub: if we ate fast food or prepackaged food once every few weeks, when things were busy or we were just absolutely exhausted, I think most would agree that’s perfectly fine. But many of us are eating convenient food every day, multiple times a day. Many of us are eating almost nothing but such convenient food. We don’t really want to, but we do. That obvious and simple point is one I think we should dwell on further.
And again, if we are looking to understand the full set of causes of this situation, we will find ourselves in an interdisciplinary jungle. Psychology, sociological, neurology, biology—these and many more disciples could offer their own verdicts. For example, many people might point out that they, in fact, only eat convenience foods when they are very busy and exhausted—it just so happens that they are very busy and exhausted every day of their lives. And I don’t doubt this.
My point is certainly not that we, as individuals, are wholly or even primarily to blame for this situation. Nor do I have any well-formed thoughts on a solution. I just felt a need to name this situation, to announce it, to write it down, because it strikes me as a massive aspect of modern life, and a very tragic one as well.
Part of this tragedy is that, even if one of us, as an individual, realizes they don’t really like spending their free time bored by streaming shows, they don’t really have the ability to unilaterally free themselves. Well, of course, in one sense, the individual can do this. We could always turn the TV off. We could even throw it away, and cancel our Comcast service. But then what? If everyone on your block continues to watch Netflix, and you no longer do, what do you do?
Certainly, you could read more (and that might be a good choice!) But if you wanted to try to re-create something like the inherently local-social community that we imagine in the (admittedly stylized and simplified) circa 1900 neighborhood imagined above, you’d pretty much be shit out of luck. That’s the thing about being genuinely social: you can’t do it alone. If you want to stop looking at your phone while you walk the dog, you can certainly leave it in your pocket (or even at home! Though…can you imagine that? Not having your phone on you, just in case!?) But if every other person walking their dog is staring at their phone as they pass by…what difference does it make?
I don’t want to be overly defeatist here. Of course, even if everyone else has their phones out while they walk their dogs, even if you can’t really get a genuinely social interaction when you walk yours, putting your phone down is still certainly a certified Good Idea. You can look at the trees, you can look at the sky. You can pay attention to the cracks in the sidewalk, how each is utterly unique, and how each hosts its own colonies of ants and rolly-poly bugs, how there is a whole little world going on under each slab of concrete, and how amazing and genuinely interesting that is.
In other words: choosing, as an individual, to “opt out” of at least some of these convenience technologies, is possible, and is almost certainly a very good idea. But! But: it won’t fix everything. If we come to the conclusion that what we are missing, what we need, what would fill that void of boredom at 9pm with Netflix on the TV and substack on the phone and boredom, boredom, boredom in the brain is some community, then individual acts of opting-out—as valid and worthwhile as they are!—simply won’t get us there. What will? Well, as I said above, I don’t have any neat and tidy set of well-thought ideas. Like many online thinkpieces (and actually, most human expression, in my experience), I am full of critiques, sure of what isn’t working, but much less sure of what we could do that could actually fix the problem or replace what’s broken. But, my guess is that you do have some ideas of your own. I am sure you’ve noticed the pernicious influence of convenience in your life—even if, until now, you wouldn’t have phrased it that way—and my guess is that you have already begun, in perhaps rather small ways, to try and find ways to spend your time more valuably. And so I will end by simply encouraging that: be honest with yourself about the hold convenience has on you, and if you can think of ways to do things that are less convenient, but more worthwhile, well, do them! Do them now.
By which, of course, I mean: do some basic phenomenology! ↩︎
And of course, if you were a woman, a person of color, or a member of the LGBTQ community, life in 1900 was demonstrably worse for you in many ways. ↩︎
Wrestling with the Angel 