Re: "To me, this looks like a job for some capable synthesizers."
I can't help but be reminded of my own book from a few years back, *The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity.* Christianity has a cohesive worldview, amidst people running around with mix-and-match personal ideologies with no cohesion or logical consistency.
"But at the risk of repeating past mistakes, I still think the sound money is on Christianity as the hardiest survivor. It’s just going to take a little more work and adaptation than, say, Moral Majority social conservatives anticipated."
That seems to suggest that Moral Majority was right, they just didn't work hard enough and long enough.
But I'd say they weren't Christian enough. And the fact that people seem to perceive some continuity with being a Republican in the Moral Majority era and being a MAGA supporter today underscores the point. A lot of the purported Christianity of social conservatives in the past was pretextual. The Christian political left has often angrily said that, and I don't agree with everything they say, but there's a whole lot of truth in the charge that many people were using Christian labels cynically to cover political positioning that had very different motives. That's true today, even more so, to an absolutely obscene extent. The task now is not to perpetuate Moral Majority but to explode it.
I sympathize to a considerable extent. We probably wouldn't fall in exactly the same place, but certainly, the things you have in mind have been very painful for me too.
But. Faith communities have always drawn people of all sorts for a whole range of motives. It's not like entirely pure Christian communities were ever a reality, and I try to remind myself even of ones I'm inclined to view with great cynicism, that it's hard to know what they're doing for people, where they really are working as a conduit for God's grace in particular lives. These things are very complicated.
Beyond that general observation. I do appreciate that the politicization of Christian faith is a real problem, which has been developing in many ways for some time. That said, I do think it reached a whole different order of despair in sort of the early 2010s, for a bunch of reasons but especially the ugliness of the marriage fight, and I think despair "watered" forms of radicalization that previously were, you know, *present*, but far less robust. Again, this is all pretty complicated.
We'll see how it goes, but I'll probably go a little light in this space on calls for people to repent. It's not that easy to combine smoothly with the case for hope. But there can be exceptions (no, certainly will be, especially because I've already I've clearly expressed real disapproval of some people or ideas), and I'm not by any means saying the subject is taboo.
So I'm generally sympathetic, and find it easy to smile and nod, but I tripped over this:
"And yes! Modern people are alienated! Technology, rarified labor, globalization, bad ideology, cheap sex, cheap entertainment, and endless synthetic substitutes, have all left modern people drifting and atomized,"
Specifically a phrase: "rarefied labor." I made several attempts to guess what it meant, and came up empty.
A century ago, there was reason to think that industrialism was making jobs too oversimplified and boring, with less scope for human creativity. But the recent trend is, if anything, the other way: many simple jobs are being automated away, and creative jobs tend to flourish. So what's the complaint here?
Dang it. I was typing too fast and misspelled "rarefied"! Gemini, I count on you to catch those sorts of mistakes!
I largely agree with what you're saying, and yet it's complicated. I think rarefied labor is clearly a factor in alienation. For lots of reasons. High levels of specialization sometimes (not necessarily, perhaps) weaken the relationship between your work and the product of that work. They often keep people "bubbled" in small pockets of other people just like themselves. We rely on strangers we've never seen before to meet a huge range of our needs, which also contributes to atomization and weakens community. Of course, the early industrial period was also extremely alienated and I do think it's fairly silly for people to be yearning for the return of that. Agricultural life is the most obvious way to go if escaping alienation is your priority. But, still. There can be trade-offs, right?
Now, rarefied labor is often quite good at eliminating one form of alienation: alienation from one's own human powers. The change to develop our real potentialities and use them productively is one of the great goods of rarefied labor markets. I'm not really crying *and* even when a particular change makes people more alienated there are often ways to compensate. I mean, nobody in history is ever robustly in touch with *all the possible good things*. Nowadays it's kind of trendy for people to complain about how Covid destroyed office culture. "You never see or know your colleagues anymore, no water cooler chit-chat" etc etc. Well, fine, I can see how there could be losses there, and in some contexts it might make sense to try to regrow forms of office culture. And yet, as someone who's worked out of the office for years, and really never as an adult been part of an "office life," I'm like, well? I could be missing something good, that's okay, I don't have to be defensive about that possibility. But look how much I gain! The chance to do interesting work, but also be right there with my children and family, be able to go running in the woods when I'm taking a work break, or prune my tomatoes if I want, or take a row on the lake... be at all the kids' events and concerts... how awesome is this water cooler chit-chat anyway? For me the gains of remote work are pretty great, in very *not alienated* ways.
To sum up: I do think things have been lost in ways relevant to rarefied labor, but I'm not saying that those harms can't be mitigated, and sometimes the gains richly compensate for the losses.
Re: "To me, this looks like a job for some capable synthesizers."
I can't help but be reminded of my own book from a few years back, *The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity.* Christianity has a cohesive worldview, amidst people running around with mix-and-match personal ideologies with no cohesion or logical consistency.
I still don't really know what "rarefied labor" means.
Well, maybe I’m not being super precise. But the point is, people tend to have very specialized jobs now.
To this:
"But at the risk of repeating past mistakes, I still think the sound money is on Christianity as the hardiest survivor. It’s just going to take a little more work and adaptation than, say, Moral Majority social conservatives anticipated."
That seems to suggest that Moral Majority was right, they just didn't work hard enough and long enough.
But I'd say they weren't Christian enough. And the fact that people seem to perceive some continuity with being a Republican in the Moral Majority era and being a MAGA supporter today underscores the point. A lot of the purported Christianity of social conservatives in the past was pretextual. The Christian political left has often angrily said that, and I don't agree with everything they say, but there's a whole lot of truth in the charge that many people were using Christian labels cynically to cover political positioning that had very different motives. That's true today, even more so, to an absolutely obscene extent. The task now is not to perpetuate Moral Majority but to explode it.
Like Jesus exploded the Pharisees.
I sympathize to a considerable extent. We probably wouldn't fall in exactly the same place, but certainly, the things you have in mind have been very painful for me too.
But. Faith communities have always drawn people of all sorts for a whole range of motives. It's not like entirely pure Christian communities were ever a reality, and I try to remind myself even of ones I'm inclined to view with great cynicism, that it's hard to know what they're doing for people, where they really are working as a conduit for God's grace in particular lives. These things are very complicated.
Beyond that general observation. I do appreciate that the politicization of Christian faith is a real problem, which has been developing in many ways for some time. That said, I do think it reached a whole different order of despair in sort of the early 2010s, for a bunch of reasons but especially the ugliness of the marriage fight, and I think despair "watered" forms of radicalization that previously were, you know, *present*, but far less robust. Again, this is all pretty complicated.
We'll see how it goes, but I'll probably go a little light in this space on calls for people to repent. It's not that easy to combine smoothly with the case for hope. But there can be exceptions (no, certainly will be, especially because I've already I've clearly expressed real disapproval of some people or ideas), and I'm not by any means saying the subject is taboo.
So I'm generally sympathetic, and find it easy to smile and nod, but I tripped over this:
"And yes! Modern people are alienated! Technology, rarified labor, globalization, bad ideology, cheap sex, cheap entertainment, and endless synthetic substitutes, have all left modern people drifting and atomized,"
Specifically a phrase: "rarefied labor." I made several attempts to guess what it meant, and came up empty.
A century ago, there was reason to think that industrialism was making jobs too oversimplified and boring, with less scope for human creativity. But the recent trend is, if anything, the other way: many simple jobs are being automated away, and creative jobs tend to flourish. So what's the complaint here?
Dang it. I was typing too fast and misspelled "rarefied"! Gemini, I count on you to catch those sorts of mistakes!
I largely agree with what you're saying, and yet it's complicated. I think rarefied labor is clearly a factor in alienation. For lots of reasons. High levels of specialization sometimes (not necessarily, perhaps) weaken the relationship between your work and the product of that work. They often keep people "bubbled" in small pockets of other people just like themselves. We rely on strangers we've never seen before to meet a huge range of our needs, which also contributes to atomization and weakens community. Of course, the early industrial period was also extremely alienated and I do think it's fairly silly for people to be yearning for the return of that. Agricultural life is the most obvious way to go if escaping alienation is your priority. But, still. There can be trade-offs, right?
Now, rarefied labor is often quite good at eliminating one form of alienation: alienation from one's own human powers. The change to develop our real potentialities and use them productively is one of the great goods of rarefied labor markets. I'm not really crying *and* even when a particular change makes people more alienated there are often ways to compensate. I mean, nobody in history is ever robustly in touch with *all the possible good things*. Nowadays it's kind of trendy for people to complain about how Covid destroyed office culture. "You never see or know your colleagues anymore, no water cooler chit-chat" etc etc. Well, fine, I can see how there could be losses there, and in some contexts it might make sense to try to regrow forms of office culture. And yet, as someone who's worked out of the office for years, and really never as an adult been part of an "office life," I'm like, well? I could be missing something good, that's okay, I don't have to be defensive about that possibility. But look how much I gain! The chance to do interesting work, but also be right there with my children and family, be able to go running in the woods when I'm taking a work break, or prune my tomatoes if I want, or take a row on the lake... be at all the kids' events and concerts... how awesome is this water cooler chit-chat anyway? For me the gains of remote work are pretty great, in very *not alienated* ways.
To sum up: I do think things have been lost in ways relevant to rarefied labor, but I'm not saying that those harms can't be mitigated, and sometimes the gains richly compensate for the losses.