civilization

How to Make Things Harder (And Maybe Better)

There’s an election of some alleged consequence barreling toward us in a couple of days, of course, and though I am trying very hard to keep any mention of external “news” out of this blog, I can’t help but feel like I have to say something, or allude to something, anyway.

My instinct is to find a way to make this whole season easier to get through, but that is probably beyond my capabilities, and besides, it wouldn’t be helpful anyway. The easiest thing to do is, as usual, the worst thing you can do: immerse yourself in “news” coverage, stress about the closeness of the polls, live in perpetual anxiety about what horrible thing might happen should the other side win the election.

That feels hard, but it’s not. It’s so easy, in fact, that it doesn’t require you to do anything: just let the culture do to you what it wants to do, which is to foster stress and outrage and anxiety.

Our culture wants us to believe that “paying attention” to things that we can never control is not only entertaining (yes, if you can’t turn your eyes away, and you can’t stop thinking about it, even if what you’re thinking is how awful it is, that means you’re being entertained), but somehow, in some way, important — like feeling outrage or anxiety is your responsibility as a citizen. Seriously, most consumers watch cable news, or scroll through news feeds, and actually feel like being “informed” means they’re “making a difference.”

Well, they’re not.

Look, cast your vote on Tuesday, certainly — I still cling to the quaint notion that this is a citizen’s responsibility, perhaps the only one — but what in the world is the point of worrying about it beforehand, or after?

I’m not suggesting that the right approach is to go skipping and whistling down the lane, or — more likely — watching reality shows, boxing matches, slasher films, Hallmark holiday movies or anything else the culture offers that feels less anxiety-inducing than the literally-endless, conflict-without-catharsis, movie-without-a-plot we call “news.”

Instead, perhaps the right approach would be for us all to choose, not something easy, but something hard.

Lots of folks now are talking about the need for tolerance toward your political “opponents” (as if ordinary people having particular, differing opinions are somehow your “opponents”), and hand-wringing while pleading for everyone to just be more civil to each other, for God’s sake — but few of them, it seems, are talking about these things in anything more than the most generic of ways.

Tolerance? Civility? I think we ask for these things because they also sound easy, and being human beings, we tend to assume that other human beings are not actually capable of all that much.

What if we asked people to do something difficult, instead? How about, instead of asking them (or ourselves) to be civil to our neighbors, we ask them (or ourselves) to … love our neighbors?

It’s no coincidence that I happen to be reading Kierkegaard’s Works of Love right now, and what makes it feel actually life-changing is exactly how impossible it seems.

Kierkegaard’s approach, even in this work that is designed to be more “direct” than his pseudonymous books, is not to offer summarizable explanations of exactly how he thinks you should live. (“Love your neighbor!”) That’s because he knows that sort of thing doesn’t actually work. (The reason that a self-help book industry exists today is that self-help books are repetitive consumables. You don’t buy just one.)

I think that Kierkegaard’s goal instead is to change the way each individual reader thinks, because the only way to change how someone lives is to first change the way they think. He does this by parsing words and phrases, carefully and expertly, in such a way that they get turned inside out, and the reader starts to think: This sounds impossible, but maybe it isn’t impossible.

After all, what does it mean to love your neighbor? A couple of weeks ago I heard someone say, referring to a well-known person, “I can love him, but I wouldn’t invite him to dinner.” Well then, what does it mean to say that you love him? Is this just another example of the way we reduce everything hard into something easy — in this case, turning love into some sort of vague well-wishing?

Perhaps the only way to change the world is not to watch the “news” or to be “informed”, which obviously doesn’t change anything. And it’s not to tolerate people, or be civil to them, because those are unrealistic and vague things to ask of people — and most people, in everyday situations, already are civil and neighborly toward each other; it only feels like they aren’t when we pretend that online interactions are real.

No, all we can do is stop trying to change the world, and instead learn how to love — actually, honest-to-goodness love — our neighbor, which is whoever is there right in front of us, and in their totality,not just whatever seems most lovable about them. We should not do this in order to change the world, and certainly not to change them, and not even to change ourselves — not even to do anything at all, other than to love.

But that sounds a lot harder than the whole well-wishing thing most of us imagine neighborly love to be. It sounds simply impossible to say, “Don’t be civil to your neighbor, don’t respect your neighbor, don’t try and persuade your neighbor — love your neighbor!” I think that we can make it start to seem a little less impossible [sic] by looking inward and asking: Just what the f*** is love, anyway?

Like I said, Kierkegaard defies summarization, so I’m not going to extend this already-too-long-and-rambling blog post by trying to answer that question with some bullet points from Works of Love.

But here is one thing I’m going to try and remember during the craziness of this election — and I would encourage the same for anyone who thinks it is their responsibility to “stay informed”: As stated in 1 Corinthians, knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.

Kierkegaard wrote:

“Love builds up by presupposing that love is fundamentally present. Therefore love also builds up when, humanly speaking, love seems to be absent and where, humanly understood, the first and foremost need is to tear down … To tear down is the opposite of building up. The contrast never appears more clearly than when the discourse is concerned with love as building up: for in any other discussion about building up there is a similarity to tearing down — it means to do something with another. But when the lover builds up it is the very opposite of tearing down, for the lover does something about himself: he presupposes that love is present in the other person — which is quite the opposite to doing something about the other person.”

So instead of to trying to make the craziness of the next week easier, I will actually make it harder, and challenge myself (and maybe you, the single individual) to think before and during every interaction: Am I tearing down, or building up? Am I trying to do something about this person instead of doing something about myself?

It’s a start, anyway.

(Also, read Works of Love.)

Ellul on Christian Freedom

This entry is part 17 of 28 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Having declared that “everyday facts” should be approached through the lens of a specifically Christian realism, rather than any nonexistent “Christian principles,” Ellul concludes chapter two by pointing out that this realism must also extend to more than just those “facts.”

Christians, as Ellul said earlier, are always in a state of permanent revolution against the world, and that includes the civilizational structures (the bureaucratic state, technique and efficiency, etc.) that shape the modern world. In the present situation, “Christians no longer act according to this unconscious impulse that has made them, at all times in which the church was alive, the bearers of a profound revolution.” (emphasis added)

Instead, they act as if they are merely the the same “sociological beings” as the rest of the world, and “no longer seem to understand Christian freedom.” They simply accept contemporary underlying structures (the bureaucratic state, technique and efficiency, mass society, etc.) without question, believing that all they have to do is choose the “right ideas” and then try to implement them with political power. Churches themselves, Ellul writes, “have been bogged down in the lowest politics or the highest ‘spirituality’.”

Since Christians are no longer “unconscious” in their reaction against the world’s reality, Ellul says they must become conscious revolutionaries. Note an important footnote from David Gill, on page 37, referring to later clarifying writings from Ellul: “The only true and authentic revolution of today is that of the individual against mass society.”

But how can Christian individuals, as conscious as they may become, going to be able to change these fundamental structures? It will be, Ellul concedes, a “long effort.”

First, he says that Christians must become aware of the present reality and the ways in which it is manifesting the world’s will toward suicide. Then, they “must pursue a way of life that does not differentiate them from others but enables them to elude the influence of structures.” Instead of rejecting the modern world outright, Ellul calls for Christians to “sift” it; success will not come from trying to attack the structures directly, or to try and reconstruct the world “from every fragment.”

Ellul has been very clear in this book that he is not calling for either monastic withdrawal from the world, or some sort of violent struggle against it. Instead, Christians must be realistic about their situation, become conscious of the ways in which the world is working to control them, and try to lead lives of “Christian freedom” to the greatest extent possible within that world.

Perhaps communities that follow this sort of thinking will provide the “seeds of a new civilization,” but Ellul says that Christians shouldn’t even think about that. Such thoughts are mere “enticing vistas” that will distract Christians from taking “up a revolutionary stance” and divert their attention into utopian thinking.

Ellul admits that this sounds like “an intellectual or spiritual process” but it is much more than that; he says that “it is an extremely difficult decision to make — this decision to break with the ways of the present age.”

In short, Christians are here to preserve the world, not to save it.

Ellul on Living into the Future

This entry is part 15 of 28 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Imagine you suddenly found yourself transported into the world of your favorite book or film, a new character in the midst of a story whose ending you knew very well. You would be surrounded by characters for whom that ending may not even be conceivable. Accepted by those characters as one of their own, with your own agency and role to play, would you involve yourself in the story’s action, or simply stand and observe, awaiting the inevitable outcome?

This is essentially the situation in which Christians find themselves, according to Ellul, as we continue in Chapter 2. But simply observing the story unfold, smug in our own knowledge of the ending, is not the choice we are called to make. It’s not even an option for faithful Christians, Ellul says.

Essentially, Christians know that history has a direction, and they know how it’s going to end, in the coming of Christ and the Kingdom of God. “Without this direction,” Ellul writes, “history is an explosion of insanity.”

The role of Christians is to bring this eschaton into the present day. Christians are able to view current political and social realities, somewhat objectively, in the light of what is “more authentic, more real” — Christ’s imminent return. (As noted earlier, as far as Christians are concerned, the end times are always imminent.) And they are supposed to live out this reality in their daily lives.

This does not mean, as has already been said over and over again in these chapters, that Christians are supposed to try and turn the world into the Kingdom of God. It won’t work, and it’s not their role anyway — instead, Christians play a prophetic role. Note that prophets did not merely announce the coming events, Ellul writes: “Prophets are those who live out the event now and who make it real and present to the world around them.”

Which means what, exactly?

Well, so far Ellul has told us that Christians live in a state of permanent revolution — one that may indirectly lead to government or economic changes, but not “necessarily lead to direct conflict with authority” — by virtue of the fact that their ultimate loyalty lies with the Kingdom of God, and not the world. Yet they they still must live and work and act within the world’s present realities. Now we see that Christians must do this living and working and acting, with an orientation to the future — the future coming of the Kingdom of God.

Christians are not to be oriented toward the past. Ellul writes that “those who know they are saved by Christ are not people attached jealously or fearfully to a past, however glorious it may be.” (So, it’s a big “no” to the right-wing movements openly longing for the culture and economy of 1950s America, no matter how distorted their vision of that decade.)

Instead, Christians are to “judge the present time by virtue of a meta-historical fact. This fact’s intervention in the present time is the only thing capable of freeing civilization from the suffocating social and political structures under which it is slowly weakening and dying.”

In a world where we have seen that all existing institutions, parties and governments accept the underlying structures of modern civilization, then one wonders exactly how Christians can live their lives challenging these structures. And not privately challenging them, but challenging in such a way that they “make it real and present to the world around them.”

Perhaps it will become clearer as we continue with Chapter 2.

Ellul on Living into the Future

Imagine you suddenly found yourself transported into the world of your favorite book or film, a new character in the midst of a story whose ending you knew very well. You would be surrounded by characters for whom that ending may not even be conceivable. Accepted by those characters as one of their own, with your own agency and role to play, would you involve yourself in the story’s action, or simply stand and observe, awaiting the inevitable outcome?

This is essentially the situation in which Christians find themselves, according to Ellul, as we continue in Chapter 2. But simply observing the story unfold, smug in our own knowledge of the ending, is not the choice we are called to make. It’s not even an option for faithful Christians, Ellul says.

Essentially, Christians know that history has a direction, and they know how it’s going to end, in the coming of Christ and the Kingdom of God. “Without this direction,” Ellul writes, “history is an explosion of insanity.”

The role of Christians is to bring this eschaton into the present day. Christians are able to view current political and social realities, somewhat objectively, in the light of what is “more authentic, more real” — Christ’s imminent return. (As noted earlier, as far as Christians are concerned, the end times are always imminent.) And they are supposed to live out this reality in their daily lives.

This does not mean, as has already been said over and over again in these chapters, that Christians are supposed to try and turn the world into the Kingdom of God. It won’t work, and it’s not their role anyway — instead, Christians play a prophetic role. Note that prophets did not merely announce the coming events, Ellul writes: “Prophets are those who live out the event now and who make it real and present to the world around them.”

Which means what, exactly?

Well, so far Ellul has told us that Christians live in a state of permanent revolution — one that may indirectly lead to government or economic changes, but not “necessarily lead to direct conflict with authority” — by virtue of the fact that their ultimate loyalty lies with the Kingdom of God, and not the world. Yet they they still must live and work and act within the world’s present realities. Now we see that Christians must do this living and working and acting, with an orientation to the future — the future coming of the Kingdom of God.

Christians are not to be oriented toward the past. Ellul writes that “those who know they are saved by Christ are not people attached jealously or fearfully to a past, however glorious it may be.” (So, it’s a big “no” to the right-wing movements openly longing for the culture and economy of 1950s America, no matter how distorted their vision of that decade.)

Instead, Christians are to “judge the present time by virtue of a meta-historical fact. This fact’s intervention in the present time is the only thing capable of freeing civilization from the suffocating social and political structures under which it is slowly weakening and dying.”

In a world where we have seen that all existing institutions, parties and governments accept the underlying structures of modern civilization, then one wonders exactly how Christians can live their lives challenging these structures. And not privately challenging them, but challenging in such a way that they “make it real and present to the world around them.”

Perhaps it will become clearer as we continue with Chapter 2.