The centrifugal effect of Christian society which you noted was actually planted as far back as the Hebrew era. The Law of jubilee, putting rural land back into the conquest title holder's hands every so often, coupled with the Law of double portion inheritance of the oldest son, was engineered by God to bring tremendous diaspora pressure on Israel. Land allotment would become so small and impractical for most sons that urban vocations and eventually international travel and trade would become preferable. Israel's societal design was meant to make them cosmopolitan from the get go. Of course, this design could only be unlocked via obedience, as the blessings for obedience described in Deuteronomy 28 would have manifested in a population explosion which would have seemed Malthusian. Israel instead chose the oath of disobedience and depopulation. It took the incarnation to finally unlock that original plan.
Many thanks. Very interesting, and gestures towards another important point that I need to address at some point: Christianity's relationship to Judaism. I keep talking as though they just took all this stuff directly from Jesus, or conjured it out of thin air. Didn't Christians get a whole lot of their ideas from the Jews?
Yes, clearly they did. Deep relationships there.And I don't mean to "deny Judaism credit"; it's just hard to talk about everything at once. But I'll put a pin in that for now and return to the point.
I love this argument, but it actually underscores why I'm so hostile to the concept of "stereotypes," with its gratuitous and misguided pejorative connotation.
Part of the benefit of a vocation is that you can choose how you will be seen. You can take monastic vows and be treated as a monk: trusted in some ways, exempted from some duties but denied some pleasures. Society is recruited as an accomplice in your vocation through its knowledge of certain patterns of life. Become a knight, and you create different social expectations, which facilitate a different kind of adventures and duties.
For your reintroduction of vocation to have its full effect, I think it will need to be supplemented by a radical revaluation of "stereotyping," if the word will serve. It's good to know things about different types of people!!! If society *stereotypes,* so to speak, monks, knights, economists, judges, or whatever in a certain way, those vocations become far more meaningful and impactful. Stereotypes, in this positive sense, make the social landscape more legible, and make people more free to make effective life choices.
We need to unlearn the mental habits we have been taught with respect to "stereotypes."
OK, but the thing is, insofar as "stereotypes" have a negative connotation, a major reason is that people are often stereotyped, and thereby bounded or restricted, by traits they did not choose, like race, sex, bloodline. If it were always about "monks, knights, economists, and judges" that would be far less worrisome; of course it is still possible to make ugly and unfair generalizations, and one can think of cases, e.g. returned veterans of an unpopular war being hated or marginalized even though they didn't necessarily choose to fight. I could think of some other cases; status and real social need surely don't track with great precision. But in general the risks of that sort of stereotyping happening in a damaging and pervasive way are probably less severe. If a particular contribution is needed, it will tend to be respected, and if it's not very needed then it may be just as well if it doesn't command high status. And if you think a group of people is being unfairly maligned, or inadequately valued, you can make that case precisely by stressing the value of whatever they do. (More philosophers! No, we really need them!!!)
When people are stereotyped on the basis of unchosen traits, that's a different kind of thing. Now you're not affirming someone's chosen life's work; you're dictating to them what that is (or at least adjusting the range of proffered choices) based on their genes or circumstances of birth. And I'm not arguing, by the way, that genes and circumstances of birth can't mean anything, or properly have some bearing on our life's work. But when you remove the voluntary element, a lot more potential concerns come into play. There are many non-admirable motives that a person might have for wanting to restrict the range of what a particular group of people can do. And especially when some classes of society do have a vested interest in that (maintaining social myths and other false beliefs about a group), those stereotypes (or "lying generalizations" if you prefer, but clearly "stereotypes" is the more usual word) can diminish people, not in objective terms but in the sense of "leading people within that society to see them as less than they really are." And that's unjust, and contrary to both reason and love.
This is still not to say that stereotyping based on unchosen traits is absolutely disallowed. We still need to lean on generalizations sometimes. But if you share my view that vocations are an important and necessary component of a healthy social ordering, then I think the concept of "the ugly stereotype" will still be extremely relevant. Vocations are good in part because they offer a more dignified and high-minded alternative to bad forms of stereotyping, but to see that we still need to be able to talk about the latter.
I’ve never been an advocate of aggressive efforts to level class distinctions. Some amount of natural, organic class differentiation is fine. However, if classes become so rigid that people are prevented from “multiplying their talents” in ways they otherwise could, being fenced out as it were, that might be a different thing.
So the idea of vocation is a fascinating bridge from the theological individualism of Christianity's affirmation of God's love for each individual, to the social, economic and political individualism to which Christendom eventually gave rise. Vocation provides a biblical starting point.
But does the idea of vocation actually clash with a presumptive assignment of people to roles based on circumstances of birth? Is there a line from God having a plan for your life to equality of opportunity?
The biblical quotations don't seem promising:
"Each person should remain in the situation they were in when God called them... Brothers and sisters, each person, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation they were in when God called them." (1 Corinthians 7:20, 24)
"Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you." (1 Thessalonians 4:11)
God calls everyone to follow Christ, no matter what family and community may think of it. He may call anyone to a more intense life of prayer that crowds out marriage and family. To extend the concept of vocation to include love-marriage is a bit dangerous... but I think, correct-- and that was revolutionary in the long run, as you point out via Henrich.
But does the concept of vocation extend to secular excellence and professional ambition? And does it do so even at the expense of social disruption? The biblical quotations don't seem to favor it, but they might be local rather than global advice.
I think the deciding factor is the Golden Rule, that on which hang all the law and the prophets. What's your motive for pursuing professional ambition or secular excellence-- especially if it's *not* to fulfill your social duties or feed your family, but may get on the East instead? Is it your own pride or enjoyment, your own pursuit of private excellence... Or is it *service,* love for your fellow human beings?
It's quite plausible in many cases that love might be the motive. And that dovetails with the idea of divine vocation.
BUT I don't think it gives any warrant to people objecting to being "stereotyped" based on circumstances of birth, or expected to live a certain way because of circumstances outside your control. I don't think it gives any warrant for equality of opportunity. Vocation might sometimes-- but perhaps not often-- deserve to *override* prescribed social roles. But usually the obvious vocation *is,* it at least starts from, the prescribed social role.
That seems to be what Christians have usually thought. It seems to fit the Bible. And it makes a lot of sense.
The reason for objecting to stereotypes is that they’re untrue. Sometimes they’re “true enough” for particular circumstances, but if they’re untrue of oneself or one’s near loved ones, it’s wrong to pretend like they’re true or be expected to do so for the sake of others’ social comfort. That’s dishonest. And making decisions on that basis is imprudent.
Is it okay to *make* people occupy a social space on the basis of stereotypes that don’t hold for them? Well, I don’t know. Hard to generalize about stuff like that. In a free society like ours we’re not really comfortable with it; it’s not how we roll. So when we *do* try to push people into particular roles we feel a strong need to argue that they belong there by nature.
Vocation isn’t primarily a solution to stereotypes as such. It’s a solution to the potential chaos that can come from taking seriously the real complexity and diversity of persons. We don’t have to obsess over this in absolutely every circumstance, but in general we should want to increase our understanding of persons. The human condition. I don’t really know what “secular” excellence is exactly; certainly we can’t pursue every kind of excellence in life. But in my understanding, “vocation” provides a broad framework, within which we should get to do good in this world. The specifics of what goods and how we pursue them are clearly very individual and circumstantial, but I don’t see any of them simply falling outside the paradigm altogether. There are no “secular” excellences.
Now, to your other point about vocation as a solution to the chaos of individualism: yes, that's a very important point, both historically and practically today.
Post-liberals sometimes complain of "liquid modernity," and they have a point. Some people are just too unattached, at loose ends, drifting. They might want to settle down, but that can't really just be an arbitrary individual choice. We need more structured and socially approved promise making. The idea of vocation-- I tried to discern what God wants in my life, and I realized it's *this,* and I'm sticking with it-- is very promising here. If that could be socially validated and leveraged-- "yes, we think that's likely and we accept your decision, and our institution provides a home for people with that vocation and puts them to good use"-- it would become far stronger and more fulfilling.
Vocation as structure to balance the excessive liquidity to which modernity is prone.
I think that point is wholly separable from the resistance to "stereotypes." It's quite consistent to say (a) people should sell God's will for their lives and then be true to that vocation, and (b) quite often, your vocation is evident from your circumstances and social situation. Vocation ≠ equality of opportunity.
One thing that’s good about vocations is that the rules and guidelines are fairly well defined, leaving room for movement in other areas. That’s one of the points I stress repeatedly in the piece.
You don’t necessarily *have* to reject class affiliation or stereotypes, but you *can*. Vocation provides a source of stability that doesn’t depend (or far less heavily) on rigidly assigning people to classes or relying on dubious and perhaps insulting generalizations to determine how various people should spend their lives.
Yes, and there's a distinction here between (a) individual ethics within the social model and (b) society's moral choice about the social model.
If you're living in a society where roles are rigidly assigned, Christianity would mostly urge people to go with that, accept it, as long as it doesn't directly go against Christian conscience and with exceptions for direct divine guidance, monastic vocations.
But what the social model of Christendom should be is another matter. And over the generations, not just in modern times but in the Middle Ages, too, it had tended to break up rigid social prescriptions in favor of individual freedom. And a sense of vocation has then helped to supply structure in a way that's compatible with freedom.
Modernity has tended to dissolve commitment and community based in vocation. It doesn't help people to bind themselves voluntarily to a role they have chosen. No monastic vows. No knightly oaths. Marriage vows still exist but aren't enforced, giving way to no-fault divorce.
It's an instance of why I think we need a generational obsession with philo-medievalism. :)
I like philo-medievalism. But I think more than you I’m fairly sensitive to places where the toothpaste just doesn’t go back into the tube because putting it there would require active efforts to revivify social myths that just aren’t true enough to be actively defended. Often they do *have* defenders in our time because a lot of people yearn for revivified tradition, a more orderly society etc. But insofar as rebuilding those foundations requires us to intentionally perpetuate what we now recognize to be social myths, we can’t in good conscience do it, nor are we likely to win many people over through the effort. (Only the already-converted actually believe.)
An adapted vocational model might well lead to a soft and organic re-growing of (basically) more stable social classes, and I’m okay with that. I don’t think we need to undertake to aggressively level all playing fields to ensure that opportunities are entirely equal. (Not possible anyway.) However I think modern sensibilities do give us a much stronger sense of it being unjust to prevent people from doing things they both want to, and are capable of, on the grounds that “soft social decision has decreed this isn’t for the likes of you.” Is that bad? Certainly not entirely bad, I would say.
So your "stereotypes aren't true" line just underscores how hopelessly defective the concept is. What does that even mean? That stereotypes (all of them?!) completely lacked predictive power in a Bayesian sense? Or that there are exceptions to every rule? Honestly, I think that question is too subtle for people who use the word "stereotype" to understand. The ethos is: "Don't generalize about people, because people are individuals and might not fit the pattern. Naughty, naughty, if you do!" Of course, that's completely impractical, and people who stigmatize "stereotypes" will apply generalizations of their own, likely without even knowing they're doing it. The whole body of thinking that the word "stereotype" drags into any conversation that it enters is statistical illiteracy grabbing the moral high ground.
Doubtless some stereotypes are false, in the sense of not even being at all predictive and a Bayesian sense. They might still have the merit of being merely fun, but if they are believed seriously at all, it would obviously be a gain in knowledge if those disappeared. Probably most stereotypes are predictive in a Bayesian sense, and in that sense "true," and helpful in navigating the world. But are those stereotypes? Or are stereotypes false *by definition?* Some people talk that way.
"No, that's not a stereotype, that's true!" is a meaningful thing to say. But so is, "Most people for the stereotype."
It's a fatally confused concept, like "grue." It can mean demographic pattern awareness. It can mean slurs and insults. You can throw it in as a term of art now and then, perhaps, without doing your prose any harm, like other fragments of false philosophies, e.g. "monad" or "proletariat." Bricolage. But if you want it to do any work in an argument, you have to make a custom technical definition or, much better, just define a separate term.
You’re making this too complicated. Or perhaps I wasn’t clear, but anyway the central point was, “The right reason to resist a stereotype is because it isn’t true.”
In a rough-and-ready practical sense some stereotypes are okay. When they start to take on the status of norms or expectations, sometimes you have to resist them, primarily on grounds of truth.
So yes, it's fine to say, "This doesn't apply to me. It may or may not be true as a right generalization, but not in my case. Simple fact."
But I think contemporary society concedes too much to people who are annoyed at being continually treated as a stereotype. I see why it's annoying if, say, people always assume you're good at basketball because you're black, or that you're good at math because you're Asian, when you personally aren't. But people may actually be getting Bayesian benefits from using stereotypes. It isn't actually reasonable to insist they throw away information for your convenience.
Context matters a lot. If you’re a tall, black, non-athletic man who is constantly being asked whether you play basketball, that might very reasonably start to irritate you but the harms aren’t very severe. What if your real talent is in STEM but you can’t get someone to give you an interview because they assume people who look like you wouldn’t be any good. (I don’t think it would happen, but partly because we have a strong belief that that form of discrimination is wrong.) What if you do get a job but people constantly act all amazed to see a tall black man on an engineering team. “Shouldn’t you be playing basketball or something?” Maybe we’re back to “annoying but not seriously harmful,” or then again maybe it is harmful if it seriously hinders your career progression.
Instilling in people that “we should make a real effort not to let that happen” is in many ways good! It’s complicated and there can be negative consequences, too-aggressive or ill-conceived efforts to increase “diversity” but falling back on “let’s just encourage people to stereotype and not worry about it” doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
I guess I have moved a bit from untruth to injustice… but the two do connect of course. We should resist first and foremost on the grounds of “not true” but the relevant truths matter especially when they lead to injustice. If it were actually true that tall black men basically can’t be any good in STEM fields, we should accept that and allow people to act on that basis even if it ruffles feathers. (Just as it is indeed true that women really can’t compete in the NBA.) But it isn’t true. And allowing that falsehood to stand harms people, so we should dispel it.
I wonder whether you're familiar with the "strength of weak ties" literature.
There's a famous study of how people find jobs, by Mark Granovetter. It was a study of 282 men in a Boston suburb in the late 1960s: limited in scope, but remarkable in methodology, for he carefully interviewed subjects about how they found jobs, and turned it into a data set. And the striking conclusion was that they usually found them through personal connections, at firsthand or second hand. But not close connections, like immediate family. Most often, it was through people that they barely knew, sometimes people whose existence they had forgotten until someone mentioned something to someone, or they were brainstorming... "weak ties." That's how jobs were found, most often.
Purely impersonal channels, like advertisements, were less important and led to less satisfactory matches. It was rarely at third hand or fourth hand, either. Two degrees of separation was the max.
I'm not sure. There's been a lot of follow-up research, because it's a hard kind of research to do. It's not just the interviews but tracking the connections. My sense is that it has nonetheless taken on the state as of a kind of stylized fact. But I'm not sure its exact perceived epistemic status.
Anyway, it's worth understanding why.
First, why *weak* ties? Because you have a lot more of them. For a job search, you're looking for something specialized, and for opportunities that arise only intermittently in any given space and are probably needed urgently. So you want to cast a wide net.
Second, why rely on social connections at all, if they're so weak? It feels odd, yet. I think the impression one might have made socially somewhere along the way is still both richer and more authentic than one's response to an anonymous advertisement. A job contact is *too motivated*: You will be trying to represent yourself as a better match than you are. Even a very weak social tie can be better than that, or at least a very valuable supplement.
And most jobs need virtues as well as skills. Virtues can't really be put in a resume, but you can hear about them through social networks.
And then there's reputation. If you hire a close friend, you may be too reluctant to fire them. But if you hire a weak tie, You're not too worried about burning a bridge if things go wrong, and yet the relationship does have some ongoing value on both sides. Your weak tie will be motivated to perform in part because you know some of the same people, and because you were part of his social capital, a perfect stranger is less motivated to perform.
Once you grasp this principle, it follows that it's socially important for people to size each other up very quickly. When you need to cast a wide net, knowing hundreds of people a little bit, then you can't know any of them very well.
The principal is also inimical to equality of opportunity. Everyone has a different social network, and it will depend a lot on job-irrelevant aspects of identity. If you try to push diversity too much, if you try to level the playing field and ensure formally meritocratic hiring, if you try to impose equal opportunity, then you 10 to stigmatize or outright disallow the kinds of organic, social network-based hiring processes that are actually the most effective, in favor of bureaucracy and credentialism.
Most people don't have careers. They just have jobs. And jobs that are interesting, wheeled, significant power, and are fulfilling and prestigious will never be more than a small minority of people. Access to those jobs will always be highly unequal because of talent, connections and happenstance. If you try to get conscientious and rigorously reform access to elite jobs, the lower orders' chances of getting them might rise from, say, one in 10,000 to 1 in 100. That's worth very little.
What's worth far more is that elites actually be effective and virtuous, managing large organizations and cultural institutions and communities well. The quality of opportunity gets in the way of that. Social norms have changed so that we mistake Justice for equality of opportunity, and try to substitute formal meritocracy for organic class stratification and noblesse oblige. Retailed disadvantaged people that they can be anything they want to be, and often induce them to waste their time chasing dreams that won't come true.
It's more beneficent to someone from a troubled background to stereotype them out of the prestigious job from the beginning, than to preach equality of opportunity, and encourage them to rack up crippling educational debt chasing that prestige job, only to miss it in the end because they can't navigate the highly obfuscated protocols that organizations develop to stay functional in a society saturated with impractical ideologies.
Weak ties are strong. The signals that sustain them can be stigmatized as "stereotypes" if you like. But it's by such protocols and quick decision rules that effective and virtuous elites operate. Equality of opportunity isn't feasible, and the pursuit of it doesn't conduce to the common good. The justice that matters is whether a working man can earn a living wage, not whether different groups have equal representation in elite professions. And there's little reason to think that elite diversity favors living wages. If anything, it probably does the opposite.
I pray for the church to get a handle on the sexual revolution, so that it can update its vocations accordingly, because they're going to keep collapsing otherwise. A big problem with the rules around the traditional vocations--strict monogamy for the married, celibacy for the religious--is that it didn't ultimately guide sex in a healthy direction, so much as it moved it into the shadows. Modern openness to discussing these things, combined with modern technology to better control consequences, have made the old ways untenable.
As a young gay guy, the church's general admonishment against gay sex just left me completely without guidance, because the rules didn't match the reality. But the folks who allowed my homosexuality to be in the open, but then told me to approach my partners with love, had a real positive effect. And then, more recently, with the reality of gay marriage, it truly has had the same sort of stabilizing effect on me as it does on heterosexuals. My relationship with my husband is my closest experience of Christlike love in this world. And my life has become ordered because of it.
I've spoken with enough religious priests through the years to know that gay sex is not uncommon in monasteries, it's just kept on the down low. In a world where it doesn't have to be hidden, that just means only the gay guys willing to lie about their celibacy are going to sign up for that vocation, while those with more honesty choose secular marriage over the Church. But I tell you, there is a simmering potential for monastic revival if we can bring this into the light and order it properly within the Church.
I agree with you about vocations in principle, but the Church's framework for them is in need of a major overhaul to be appropriate for the modern world.
Thanks for your thoughts. I appreciate it, and I definitely opened a door to this line.
So I myself am an unapologetic traditionalist on this subject. Let’s say “unapologetic but not without compassion.” I do believe in strict monogamy for the married and celibacy for the religious. For me personally, as a married woman, the “monogamy” demand isn’t very hard, but I do also subscribe to a full-fledged, Humanae Vitae-embracing natural sex position, which is not a piece of cake. (I have five kids! Those childbearing years were a wild ride.) I’m pretty sure the demands of Christian morality are hard for everyone in one way or another, which is not to say many people don’t have it harder than me. These are hard teachings! And it’s true of course that because it’s hard, there will always be a lot of people who reject or don’t live up to those demands.
I acknowledge this and try not to be too judgmental about it, and certainly not to be specially hard on gays and lesbians when, after all, so very many people today (probably most?) aren’t living up the demands of traditional Christian morals.
But I guess I would ask two questions to the “let’s update our view of Christian vocation to be more permissive about sex” set. As I discuss in the post, traditional “rules” about sex really haven’t been a failure at all historically. They’ve worked extremely well. Sure, no doubt a lot of people didn’t follow them, we always knew that, but rules don’t necessarily fail just because people break them. They still give people a sense of how they *should* live, what behavior is sanctioned or recommended, and that can be helpful even when some fall short.
The second question is: What have we actually discovered that would render traditional rules obsolete? The hardness of the demands was recognized from the start. The Romans saw it as totally over the top too! But there’s a deep logic in the Christian sexual ethic, which basically recognizes the importance of disciplining sex through preserving both the nature of the sexual act itself and real commitment to one’s lover (and people created through that love). That *is* “healthy sex” in the Christian paradigm. Who else has come up with an adequate alternative? What did we learn in modern times that would show us why that view is wrong?
Sorry, I was phone typing in a restaurant, so that wasn’t the clearest comment ever. The first question is, “Why think that the traditional rules didn’t work?” I think they worked rather well. They were bedrock to Western Civilization. Whatever we’re doing now sure isn’t working well.
It's not just that a lot of people didn't follow the rules, its that the "effectiveness" of the rules relied on tolerating downright abusive behavior in the shadows. And I don't think you can just say, "no doubt there would be abuse anyway." No, actually. Bringing sexual desire into the light and directing (let's be honest here) men's sex drives in a more loving manner ends the abuse. But if the shadows are their only outlet, if the rules are so strict that they are only permitted to "burn in lust", abuse proliferates. One thing about modernity is that it has no tolerance for those shadows. Which is undoubtedly a good thing. But it means we need vocations that actually channel the sex drive lovingly, instead of just maintaining the appearance of morality while allowing abuse to run rampant in the shadows.
The other thing modernity introduced is birth control and medicine. That makes your five kids (honestly--applause, no criticism) a choice you made in relative safety. Purely as a practical matter, before these scientific breakthroughs, a certain level of strictness around sex was simply a practical requirement for safety and to have any control at all over procreation. Without birth control and medicine, your five kids would've been impressive, not for the responsible choices you've made--you wouldn't have had much choice in the matter anyway--but simply for the fact that you lived through them all. Sex simply no longer carries the consequences it once did.
So we have less need for strict rules, and less tolerance for not following the rules. We have the possibility for looser rules, but a greater need than ever for rules that will actually be followed. And, really, we're already coming up with the adequate alternatives. Gay marriage is at the forefront of this, and likewise the younger generation of heterosexuals are themselves wising up to the downsides of promiscuity; I think they'll work it out without everyone going full-on trad-Catholic. People want rules, and they understand that living responsibly takes real effort. But they don't want wink-wink-nudge-nudge rules where it's a given that they'll be broken, nor are they willing to burden themselves with unnecessary rules, when life is hard enough. I'd consider it the responsibility of any religious leadership to give them the lightest yoke necessary, and ensure it is one that can actually be borne. Otherwise, the failure isn't the flock's, it's the shepherds'.
Thanks. This is helpful to me. But you know, I started mapping out a response and then realized, "This is basically an essay in its own right." If you'll excuse me then, I think I'll make it an essay in its own right. I'll try to post it soon. Obviously your feedback and commentary would be very welcome! I appreciate the inspiration.
I will just say this for now. This, for me, was an "astonished gasp" sort of line:
"One thing about modernity is that it has no tolerance for those shadows."
Do you really believe that? How many people, even just in America, do think are sitting in the dark watching porn right at this minute?
And that's just one of many forms of "shadows." Modernity is rife with sexual abuse. At this point there's a whole contingent of "converts" to Christianity/conservatism who are basically refugees from modernity's "sexual shadows": Louise Perry, Christine Emba, Mary Harrington, list could go on awhile.
Modernity still has shadows, but not like before. The very fact that you list out prominent women speaking out against it is proof enough of that. A good thing! But also, a new thing, enabled by our modern ability to talk about these things openly--and our very modern regard for women.
Marital rape was legal in the US until the 1970's and 80's. That's the "traditional" rules that "worked." And that's what I mean by tolerating the shadows.
I think you may be allowing what I think of as the Assumption of Total Oppression to color your judgment here. We shouldn’t idealize the past but neither should we assume that their abuse and oppression was obviously much worse than ours. There’s something very funny about simultaneously saying “it’s wonderful that these women can speak” and “the fact that they can proves they’re wrong.” Does it? (I’m laughing wanting to label this “the world’s most tortuous case of mansplaining.” Haha. I’m not being very serious, don’t take it wrong.)
And I don't know about mansplaining, but you're the one condescendingly explaining to the homosexual you think should be celibate that "Sometimes, depending on one’s circumstances, the demands can be very, very hard."
The centrifugal effect of Christian society which you noted was actually planted as far back as the Hebrew era. The Law of jubilee, putting rural land back into the conquest title holder's hands every so often, coupled with the Law of double portion inheritance of the oldest son, was engineered by God to bring tremendous diaspora pressure on Israel. Land allotment would become so small and impractical for most sons that urban vocations and eventually international travel and trade would become preferable. Israel's societal design was meant to make them cosmopolitan from the get go. Of course, this design could only be unlocked via obedience, as the blessings for obedience described in Deuteronomy 28 would have manifested in a population explosion which would have seemed Malthusian. Israel instead chose the oath of disobedience and depopulation. It took the incarnation to finally unlock that original plan.
Many thanks. Very interesting, and gestures towards another important point that I need to address at some point: Christianity's relationship to Judaism. I keep talking as though they just took all this stuff directly from Jesus, or conjured it out of thin air. Didn't Christians get a whole lot of their ideas from the Jews?
Yes, clearly they did. Deep relationships there.And I don't mean to "deny Judaism credit"; it's just hard to talk about everything at once. But I'll put a pin in that for now and return to the point.
I love this argument, but it actually underscores why I'm so hostile to the concept of "stereotypes," with its gratuitous and misguided pejorative connotation.
Part of the benefit of a vocation is that you can choose how you will be seen. You can take monastic vows and be treated as a monk: trusted in some ways, exempted from some duties but denied some pleasures. Society is recruited as an accomplice in your vocation through its knowledge of certain patterns of life. Become a knight, and you create different social expectations, which facilitate a different kind of adventures and duties.
For your reintroduction of vocation to have its full effect, I think it will need to be supplemented by a radical revaluation of "stereotyping," if the word will serve. It's good to know things about different types of people!!! If society *stereotypes,* so to speak, monks, knights, economists, judges, or whatever in a certain way, those vocations become far more meaningful and impactful. Stereotypes, in this positive sense, make the social landscape more legible, and make people more free to make effective life choices.
We need to unlearn the mental habits we have been taught with respect to "stereotypes."
OK, but the thing is, insofar as "stereotypes" have a negative connotation, a major reason is that people are often stereotyped, and thereby bounded or restricted, by traits they did not choose, like race, sex, bloodline. If it were always about "monks, knights, economists, and judges" that would be far less worrisome; of course it is still possible to make ugly and unfair generalizations, and one can think of cases, e.g. returned veterans of an unpopular war being hated or marginalized even though they didn't necessarily choose to fight. I could think of some other cases; status and real social need surely don't track with great precision. But in general the risks of that sort of stereotyping happening in a damaging and pervasive way are probably less severe. If a particular contribution is needed, it will tend to be respected, and if it's not very needed then it may be just as well if it doesn't command high status. And if you think a group of people is being unfairly maligned, or inadequately valued, you can make that case precisely by stressing the value of whatever they do. (More philosophers! No, we really need them!!!)
When people are stereotyped on the basis of unchosen traits, that's a different kind of thing. Now you're not affirming someone's chosen life's work; you're dictating to them what that is (or at least adjusting the range of proffered choices) based on their genes or circumstances of birth. And I'm not arguing, by the way, that genes and circumstances of birth can't mean anything, or properly have some bearing on our life's work. But when you remove the voluntary element, a lot more potential concerns come into play. There are many non-admirable motives that a person might have for wanting to restrict the range of what a particular group of people can do. And especially when some classes of society do have a vested interest in that (maintaining social myths and other false beliefs about a group), those stereotypes (or "lying generalizations" if you prefer, but clearly "stereotypes" is the more usual word) can diminish people, not in objective terms but in the sense of "leading people within that society to see them as less than they really are." And that's unjust, and contrary to both reason and love.
This is still not to say that stereotyping based on unchosen traits is absolutely disallowed. We still need to lean on generalizations sometimes. But if you share my view that vocations are an important and necessary component of a healthy social ordering, then I think the concept of "the ugly stereotype" will still be extremely relevant. Vocations are good in part because they offer a more dignified and high-minded alternative to bad forms of stereotyping, but to see that we still need to be able to talk about the latter.
This post of mine is relevant too: https://lancelotfinn.substack.com/p/the-christian-case-for-class-stratification
I’ve never been an advocate of aggressive efforts to level class distinctions. Some amount of natural, organic class differentiation is fine. However, if classes become so rigid that people are prevented from “multiplying their talents” in ways they otherwise could, being fenced out as it were, that might be a different thing.
So the idea of vocation is a fascinating bridge from the theological individualism of Christianity's affirmation of God's love for each individual, to the social, economic and political individualism to which Christendom eventually gave rise. Vocation provides a biblical starting point.
But does the idea of vocation actually clash with a presumptive assignment of people to roles based on circumstances of birth? Is there a line from God having a plan for your life to equality of opportunity?
The biblical quotations don't seem promising:
"Each person should remain in the situation they were in when God called them... Brothers and sisters, each person, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation they were in when God called them." (1 Corinthians 7:20, 24)
"Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you." (1 Thessalonians 4:11)
God calls everyone to follow Christ, no matter what family and community may think of it. He may call anyone to a more intense life of prayer that crowds out marriage and family. To extend the concept of vocation to include love-marriage is a bit dangerous... but I think, correct-- and that was revolutionary in the long run, as you point out via Henrich.
But does the concept of vocation extend to secular excellence and professional ambition? And does it do so even at the expense of social disruption? The biblical quotations don't seem to favor it, but they might be local rather than global advice.
I think the deciding factor is the Golden Rule, that on which hang all the law and the prophets. What's your motive for pursuing professional ambition or secular excellence-- especially if it's *not* to fulfill your social duties or feed your family, but may get on the East instead? Is it your own pride or enjoyment, your own pursuit of private excellence... Or is it *service,* love for your fellow human beings?
It's quite plausible in many cases that love might be the motive. And that dovetails with the idea of divine vocation.
BUT I don't think it gives any warrant to people objecting to being "stereotyped" based on circumstances of birth, or expected to live a certain way because of circumstances outside your control. I don't think it gives any warrant for equality of opportunity. Vocation might sometimes-- but perhaps not often-- deserve to *override* prescribed social roles. But usually the obvious vocation *is,* it at least starts from, the prescribed social role.
That seems to be what Christians have usually thought. It seems to fit the Bible. And it makes a lot of sense.
The reason for objecting to stereotypes is that they’re untrue. Sometimes they’re “true enough” for particular circumstances, but if they’re untrue of oneself or one’s near loved ones, it’s wrong to pretend like they’re true or be expected to do so for the sake of others’ social comfort. That’s dishonest. And making decisions on that basis is imprudent.
Is it okay to *make* people occupy a social space on the basis of stereotypes that don’t hold for them? Well, I don’t know. Hard to generalize about stuff like that. In a free society like ours we’re not really comfortable with it; it’s not how we roll. So when we *do* try to push people into particular roles we feel a strong need to argue that they belong there by nature.
Vocation isn’t primarily a solution to stereotypes as such. It’s a solution to the potential chaos that can come from taking seriously the real complexity and diversity of persons. We don’t have to obsess over this in absolutely every circumstance, but in general we should want to increase our understanding of persons. The human condition. I don’t really know what “secular” excellence is exactly; certainly we can’t pursue every kind of excellence in life. But in my understanding, “vocation” provides a broad framework, within which we should get to do good in this world. The specifics of what goods and how we pursue them are clearly very individual and circumstantial, but I don’t see any of them simply falling outside the paradigm altogether. There are no “secular” excellences.
Now, to your other point about vocation as a solution to the chaos of individualism: yes, that's a very important point, both historically and practically today.
Post-liberals sometimes complain of "liquid modernity," and they have a point. Some people are just too unattached, at loose ends, drifting. They might want to settle down, but that can't really just be an arbitrary individual choice. We need more structured and socially approved promise making. The idea of vocation-- I tried to discern what God wants in my life, and I realized it's *this,* and I'm sticking with it-- is very promising here. If that could be socially validated and leveraged-- "yes, we think that's likely and we accept your decision, and our institution provides a home for people with that vocation and puts them to good use"-- it would become far stronger and more fulfilling.
Vocation as structure to balance the excessive liquidity to which modernity is prone.
I think that point is wholly separable from the resistance to "stereotypes." It's quite consistent to say (a) people should sell God's will for their lives and then be true to that vocation, and (b) quite often, your vocation is evident from your circumstances and social situation. Vocation ≠ equality of opportunity.
One thing that’s good about vocations is that the rules and guidelines are fairly well defined, leaving room for movement in other areas. That’s one of the points I stress repeatedly in the piece.
You don’t necessarily *have* to reject class affiliation or stereotypes, but you *can*. Vocation provides a source of stability that doesn’t depend (or far less heavily) on rigidly assigning people to classes or relying on dubious and perhaps insulting generalizations to determine how various people should spend their lives.
Yes, and there's a distinction here between (a) individual ethics within the social model and (b) society's moral choice about the social model.
If you're living in a society where roles are rigidly assigned, Christianity would mostly urge people to go with that, accept it, as long as it doesn't directly go against Christian conscience and with exceptions for direct divine guidance, monastic vocations.
But what the social model of Christendom should be is another matter. And over the generations, not just in modern times but in the Middle Ages, too, it had tended to break up rigid social prescriptions in favor of individual freedom. And a sense of vocation has then helped to supply structure in a way that's compatible with freedom.
Modernity has tended to dissolve commitment and community based in vocation. It doesn't help people to bind themselves voluntarily to a role they have chosen. No monastic vows. No knightly oaths. Marriage vows still exist but aren't enforced, giving way to no-fault divorce.
It's an instance of why I think we need a generational obsession with philo-medievalism. :)
I like philo-medievalism. But I think more than you I’m fairly sensitive to places where the toothpaste just doesn’t go back into the tube because putting it there would require active efforts to revivify social myths that just aren’t true enough to be actively defended. Often they do *have* defenders in our time because a lot of people yearn for revivified tradition, a more orderly society etc. But insofar as rebuilding those foundations requires us to intentionally perpetuate what we now recognize to be social myths, we can’t in good conscience do it, nor are we likely to win many people over through the effort. (Only the already-converted actually believe.)
An adapted vocational model might well lead to a soft and organic re-growing of (basically) more stable social classes, and I’m okay with that. I don’t think we need to undertake to aggressively level all playing fields to ensure that opportunities are entirely equal. (Not possible anyway.) However I think modern sensibilities do give us a much stronger sense of it being unjust to prevent people from doing things they both want to, and are capable of, on the grounds that “soft social decision has decreed this isn’t for the likes of you.” Is that bad? Certainly not entirely bad, I would say.
So your "stereotypes aren't true" line just underscores how hopelessly defective the concept is. What does that even mean? That stereotypes (all of them?!) completely lacked predictive power in a Bayesian sense? Or that there are exceptions to every rule? Honestly, I think that question is too subtle for people who use the word "stereotype" to understand. The ethos is: "Don't generalize about people, because people are individuals and might not fit the pattern. Naughty, naughty, if you do!" Of course, that's completely impractical, and people who stigmatize "stereotypes" will apply generalizations of their own, likely without even knowing they're doing it. The whole body of thinking that the word "stereotype" drags into any conversation that it enters is statistical illiteracy grabbing the moral high ground.
Doubtless some stereotypes are false, in the sense of not even being at all predictive and a Bayesian sense. They might still have the merit of being merely fun, but if they are believed seriously at all, it would obviously be a gain in knowledge if those disappeared. Probably most stereotypes are predictive in a Bayesian sense, and in that sense "true," and helpful in navigating the world. But are those stereotypes? Or are stereotypes false *by definition?* Some people talk that way.
"No, that's not a stereotype, that's true!" is a meaningful thing to say. But so is, "Most people for the stereotype."
It's a fatally confused concept, like "grue." It can mean demographic pattern awareness. It can mean slurs and insults. You can throw it in as a term of art now and then, perhaps, without doing your prose any harm, like other fragments of false philosophies, e.g. "monad" or "proletariat." Bricolage. But if you want it to do any work in an argument, you have to make a custom technical definition or, much better, just define a separate term.
You’re making this too complicated. Or perhaps I wasn’t clear, but anyway the central point was, “The right reason to resist a stereotype is because it isn’t true.”
In a rough-and-ready practical sense some stereotypes are okay. When they start to take on the status of norms or expectations, sometimes you have to resist them, primarily on grounds of truth.
So yes, it's fine to say, "This doesn't apply to me. It may or may not be true as a right generalization, but not in my case. Simple fact."
But I think contemporary society concedes too much to people who are annoyed at being continually treated as a stereotype. I see why it's annoying if, say, people always assume you're good at basketball because you're black, or that you're good at math because you're Asian, when you personally aren't. But people may actually be getting Bayesian benefits from using stereotypes. It isn't actually reasonable to insist they throw away information for your convenience.
Context matters a lot. If you’re a tall, black, non-athletic man who is constantly being asked whether you play basketball, that might very reasonably start to irritate you but the harms aren’t very severe. What if your real talent is in STEM but you can’t get someone to give you an interview because they assume people who look like you wouldn’t be any good. (I don’t think it would happen, but partly because we have a strong belief that that form of discrimination is wrong.) What if you do get a job but people constantly act all amazed to see a tall black man on an engineering team. “Shouldn’t you be playing basketball or something?” Maybe we’re back to “annoying but not seriously harmful,” or then again maybe it is harmful if it seriously hinders your career progression.
Instilling in people that “we should make a real effort not to let that happen” is in many ways good! It’s complicated and there can be negative consequences, too-aggressive or ill-conceived efforts to increase “diversity” but falling back on “let’s just encourage people to stereotype and not worry about it” doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
I guess I have moved a bit from untruth to injustice… but the two do connect of course. We should resist first and foremost on the grounds of “not true” but the relevant truths matter especially when they lead to injustice. If it were actually true that tall black men basically can’t be any good in STEM fields, we should accept that and allow people to act on that basis even if it ruffles feathers. (Just as it is indeed true that women really can’t compete in the NBA.) But it isn’t true. And allowing that falsehood to stand harms people, so we should dispel it.
I wonder whether you're familiar with the "strength of weak ties" literature.
There's a famous study of how people find jobs, by Mark Granovetter. It was a study of 282 men in a Boston suburb in the late 1960s: limited in scope, but remarkable in methodology, for he carefully interviewed subjects about how they found jobs, and turned it into a data set. And the striking conclusion was that they usually found them through personal connections, at firsthand or second hand. But not close connections, like immediate family. Most often, it was through people that they barely knew, sometimes people whose existence they had forgotten until someone mentioned something to someone, or they were brainstorming... "weak ties." That's how jobs were found, most often.
Purely impersonal channels, like advertisements, were less important and led to less satisfactory matches. It was rarely at third hand or fourth hand, either. Two degrees of separation was the max.
I'm not sure. There's been a lot of follow-up research, because it's a hard kind of research to do. It's not just the interviews but tracking the connections. My sense is that it has nonetheless taken on the state as of a kind of stylized fact. But I'm not sure its exact perceived epistemic status.
Anyway, it's worth understanding why.
First, why *weak* ties? Because you have a lot more of them. For a job search, you're looking for something specialized, and for opportunities that arise only intermittently in any given space and are probably needed urgently. So you want to cast a wide net.
Second, why rely on social connections at all, if they're so weak? It feels odd, yet. I think the impression one might have made socially somewhere along the way is still both richer and more authentic than one's response to an anonymous advertisement. A job contact is *too motivated*: You will be trying to represent yourself as a better match than you are. Even a very weak social tie can be better than that, or at least a very valuable supplement.
And most jobs need virtues as well as skills. Virtues can't really be put in a resume, but you can hear about them through social networks.
And then there's reputation. If you hire a close friend, you may be too reluctant to fire them. But if you hire a weak tie, You're not too worried about burning a bridge if things go wrong, and yet the relationship does have some ongoing value on both sides. Your weak tie will be motivated to perform in part because you know some of the same people, and because you were part of his social capital, a perfect stranger is less motivated to perform.
Once you grasp this principle, it follows that it's socially important for people to size each other up very quickly. When you need to cast a wide net, knowing hundreds of people a little bit, then you can't know any of them very well.
The principal is also inimical to equality of opportunity. Everyone has a different social network, and it will depend a lot on job-irrelevant aspects of identity. If you try to push diversity too much, if you try to level the playing field and ensure formally meritocratic hiring, if you try to impose equal opportunity, then you 10 to stigmatize or outright disallow the kinds of organic, social network-based hiring processes that are actually the most effective, in favor of bureaucracy and credentialism.
Most people don't have careers. They just have jobs. And jobs that are interesting, wheeled, significant power, and are fulfilling and prestigious will never be more than a small minority of people. Access to those jobs will always be highly unequal because of talent, connections and happenstance. If you try to get conscientious and rigorously reform access to elite jobs, the lower orders' chances of getting them might rise from, say, one in 10,000 to 1 in 100. That's worth very little.
What's worth far more is that elites actually be effective and virtuous, managing large organizations and cultural institutions and communities well. The quality of opportunity gets in the way of that. Social norms have changed so that we mistake Justice for equality of opportunity, and try to substitute formal meritocracy for organic class stratification and noblesse oblige. Retailed disadvantaged people that they can be anything they want to be, and often induce them to waste their time chasing dreams that won't come true.
It's more beneficent to someone from a troubled background to stereotype them out of the prestigious job from the beginning, than to preach equality of opportunity, and encourage them to rack up crippling educational debt chasing that prestige job, only to miss it in the end because they can't navigate the highly obfuscated protocols that organizations develop to stay functional in a society saturated with impractical ideologies.
Weak ties are strong. The signals that sustain them can be stigmatized as "stereotypes" if you like. But it's by such protocols and quick decision rules that effective and virtuous elites operate. Equality of opportunity isn't feasible, and the pursuit of it doesn't conduce to the common good. The justice that matters is whether a working man can earn a living wage, not whether different groups have equal representation in elite professions. And there's little reason to think that elite diversity favors living wages. If anything, it probably does the opposite.
I pray for the church to get a handle on the sexual revolution, so that it can update its vocations accordingly, because they're going to keep collapsing otherwise. A big problem with the rules around the traditional vocations--strict monogamy for the married, celibacy for the religious--is that it didn't ultimately guide sex in a healthy direction, so much as it moved it into the shadows. Modern openness to discussing these things, combined with modern technology to better control consequences, have made the old ways untenable.
As a young gay guy, the church's general admonishment against gay sex just left me completely without guidance, because the rules didn't match the reality. But the folks who allowed my homosexuality to be in the open, but then told me to approach my partners with love, had a real positive effect. And then, more recently, with the reality of gay marriage, it truly has had the same sort of stabilizing effect on me as it does on heterosexuals. My relationship with my husband is my closest experience of Christlike love in this world. And my life has become ordered because of it.
I've spoken with enough religious priests through the years to know that gay sex is not uncommon in monasteries, it's just kept on the down low. In a world where it doesn't have to be hidden, that just means only the gay guys willing to lie about their celibacy are going to sign up for that vocation, while those with more honesty choose secular marriage over the Church. But I tell you, there is a simmering potential for monastic revival if we can bring this into the light and order it properly within the Church.
I agree with you about vocations in principle, but the Church's framework for them is in need of a major overhaul to be appropriate for the modern world.
Thanks for your thoughts. I appreciate it, and I definitely opened a door to this line.
So I myself am an unapologetic traditionalist on this subject. Let’s say “unapologetic but not without compassion.” I do believe in strict monogamy for the married and celibacy for the religious. For me personally, as a married woman, the “monogamy” demand isn’t very hard, but I do also subscribe to a full-fledged, Humanae Vitae-embracing natural sex position, which is not a piece of cake. (I have five kids! Those childbearing years were a wild ride.) I’m pretty sure the demands of Christian morality are hard for everyone in one way or another, which is not to say many people don’t have it harder than me. These are hard teachings! And it’s true of course that because it’s hard, there will always be a lot of people who reject or don’t live up to those demands.
I acknowledge this and try not to be too judgmental about it, and certainly not to be specially hard on gays and lesbians when, after all, so very many people today (probably most?) aren’t living up the demands of traditional Christian morals.
But I guess I would ask two questions to the “let’s update our view of Christian vocation to be more permissive about sex” set. As I discuss in the post, traditional “rules” about sex really haven’t been a failure at all historically. They’ve worked extremely well. Sure, no doubt a lot of people didn’t follow them, we always knew that, but rules don’t necessarily fail just because people break them. They still give people a sense of how they *should* live, what behavior is sanctioned or recommended, and that can be helpful even when some fall short.
The second question is: What have we actually discovered that would render traditional rules obsolete? The hardness of the demands was recognized from the start. The Romans saw it as totally over the top too! But there’s a deep logic in the Christian sexual ethic, which basically recognizes the importance of disciplining sex through preserving both the nature of the sexual act itself and real commitment to one’s lover (and people created through that love). That *is* “healthy sex” in the Christian paradigm. Who else has come up with an adequate alternative? What did we learn in modern times that would show us why that view is wrong?
Sorry, I was phone typing in a restaurant, so that wasn’t the clearest comment ever. The first question is, “Why think that the traditional rules didn’t work?” I think they worked rather well. They were bedrock to Western Civilization. Whatever we’re doing now sure isn’t working well.
It's not just that a lot of people didn't follow the rules, its that the "effectiveness" of the rules relied on tolerating downright abusive behavior in the shadows. And I don't think you can just say, "no doubt there would be abuse anyway." No, actually. Bringing sexual desire into the light and directing (let's be honest here) men's sex drives in a more loving manner ends the abuse. But if the shadows are their only outlet, if the rules are so strict that they are only permitted to "burn in lust", abuse proliferates. One thing about modernity is that it has no tolerance for those shadows. Which is undoubtedly a good thing. But it means we need vocations that actually channel the sex drive lovingly, instead of just maintaining the appearance of morality while allowing abuse to run rampant in the shadows.
The other thing modernity introduced is birth control and medicine. That makes your five kids (honestly--applause, no criticism) a choice you made in relative safety. Purely as a practical matter, before these scientific breakthroughs, a certain level of strictness around sex was simply a practical requirement for safety and to have any control at all over procreation. Without birth control and medicine, your five kids would've been impressive, not for the responsible choices you've made--you wouldn't have had much choice in the matter anyway--but simply for the fact that you lived through them all. Sex simply no longer carries the consequences it once did.
So we have less need for strict rules, and less tolerance for not following the rules. We have the possibility for looser rules, but a greater need than ever for rules that will actually be followed. And, really, we're already coming up with the adequate alternatives. Gay marriage is at the forefront of this, and likewise the younger generation of heterosexuals are themselves wising up to the downsides of promiscuity; I think they'll work it out without everyone going full-on trad-Catholic. People want rules, and they understand that living responsibly takes real effort. But they don't want wink-wink-nudge-nudge rules where it's a given that they'll be broken, nor are they willing to burden themselves with unnecessary rules, when life is hard enough. I'd consider it the responsibility of any religious leadership to give them the lightest yoke necessary, and ensure it is one that can actually be borne. Otherwise, the failure isn't the flock's, it's the shepherds'.
Thanks. This is helpful to me. But you know, I started mapping out a response and then realized, "This is basically an essay in its own right." If you'll excuse me then, I think I'll make it an essay in its own right. I'll try to post it soon. Obviously your feedback and commentary would be very welcome! I appreciate the inspiration.
I will just say this for now. This, for me, was an "astonished gasp" sort of line:
"One thing about modernity is that it has no tolerance for those shadows."
Do you really believe that? How many people, even just in America, do think are sitting in the dark watching porn right at this minute?
And that's just one of many forms of "shadows." Modernity is rife with sexual abuse. At this point there's a whole contingent of "converts" to Christianity/conservatism who are basically refugees from modernity's "sexual shadows": Louise Perry, Christine Emba, Mary Harrington, list could go on awhile.
Modernity still has shadows, but not like before. The very fact that you list out prominent women speaking out against it is proof enough of that. A good thing! But also, a new thing, enabled by our modern ability to talk about these things openly--and our very modern regard for women.
Marital rape was legal in the US until the 1970's and 80's. That's the "traditional" rules that "worked." And that's what I mean by tolerating the shadows.
I think you may be allowing what I think of as the Assumption of Total Oppression to color your judgment here. We shouldn’t idealize the past but neither should we assume that their abuse and oppression was obviously much worse than ours. There’s something very funny about simultaneously saying “it’s wonderful that these women can speak” and “the fact that they can proves they’re wrong.” Does it? (I’m laughing wanting to label this “the world’s most tortuous case of mansplaining.” Haha. I’m not being very serious, don’t take it wrong.)
The marital rape laws are simple fact, not myth.
And I don't know about mansplaining, but you're the one condescendingly explaining to the homosexual you think should be celibate that "Sometimes, depending on one’s circumstances, the demands can be very, very hard."
I'm done here.