Living the Answer Blog

From the moment of the Fall, when the forbidden fruit promised an earlier and easier entrance into bliss, growth, and knowledge, one of Satan’s favorite strategies has been to take some promised good and offer his own version; easier, simpler, and always, in retrospect, somehow diminished and corrupted. The golden calf offered Israel a safer, less demanding God. As Abraham waited for the promised son, Hagar seemed a simple solution to his wife’s infertility. Even Jesus himself was offered a far easier path to dominion if he would only bow before the evil one.

It’s not that “easy” is necessarily or even usually bad; merely that the appeal of the easy is a powerful lure into danger. One of the best ways to draw us off the straight and narrow path is with a shortcut.

I bring this up because this feeling of an easier path to a lesser good is a theme of many of the problems and potential problems in our interactions with modern technology. The whole appeal of technology lies in its ability to make things easier, whether in communication, calculation, learning, shopping, or transportation. Of course, as I said above, easier isn’t necessarily bad. In fact, it’s often good, allowing us to be wise stewards of our resources by saving time and money for other uses. (I certainly appreciate being able to type these observations on the keyboard of a handy laptop, rather than pounding away on a typewriter or scribbling with a pen.) With technology as with the rest of life, the danger lies in the appeal of the easier path to draw us away from the better.

Take television, for example. It’s hard to imagine a means of entertainment easier than simply flipping on the TV after a long day–and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But what are we losing when the ease of TV watching makes it our habitual answer to moments of quiet? What about the reading and talking and walking and drawing and dancing and simply watching the fire or the rain or the stars that used to occupy a much more prominent place in our lives? The most dangerous thing about the television is not the programming that flows across the screen, but the fact that the programming flows across a screen that sits comfortably close to the couch.

What television does for leisure, video games do for achievement. For most of human history, a young man driven by the urge to achieve, to overcome obstacles and enjoy the satisfaction of hard-won gains, would have to actually do something. He could start a farm or a business, or a nation; he might lead men into battle, study medicine or the law, or simply carve out a good life for a wife and children in a world where mere everyday life has more than its share of challenges. But regardless of what he did, it would be hard.

Video games changed that dynamic. They offer a truly unprecedented opportunity to feel a real sense of achievement from doing… nothing at all. Increasingly realistic virtual worlds are populated with challenges and dangers tailored to generate a feeling of real struggle and genuine victory, creating a triumphant haze of energy and endorphins to obscure the reality that nothing is actually happening. Watching the guns-blazing trailer for the most recent Call of Duty game, the implicit message of the “There’s a soldier in all of us” slogan is clear: It’s easy to be a hero. As a soft-looking Jonah Hill charges into a hail of gunfire in the video’s finale, expertly wielding rifle, knife, and grenade against oncoming attackers, it’s easy to see why the lure of virtual valor is intoxicating. When we wonder aloud where all the good men have gone, at least part of the answer is simple–they’re busy playing Call of Duty, where, thanks to the marvels of modern computing, it’s easy to be a hero.

Even more than video gaming, perhaps the best examples of the sometimes-deceptive shortcuts offered by technology lie in the field of social media. Television makes leisure easy and video games make achievement easy, but Facebook makes relationships easy. It’s convenient, immediate, organized, and thoroughly controllable; always right there, omnipresent yet unobtrusive, providing a neat little window into our friends’ lives and offering them a window into ours.

In many ways, social networks even manage to convey a sense of greater intimacy than we feel in most face-to-face relationships. Our much-satirized tendency to overshare the mundane details of our lives actually makes perfect sense psychologically: what better indicator is there of the closeness between two people than the extent to which they know the boring minutia of each other’s existence? Nearly everyone knows I’m a teacher. Barely anyone knows how I like my eggs cooked. If I know what you had for breakfast this morning, a part of me smiles with companionable pleasure; and when I “like” your status update letting the world know that your hangnail is feeling better, you know that I really care. Sure, it’s not quite the same as actually seeing you, actually talking to you, but at least it’s something in the midst of a busy day. At least Facebook makes it easy to stay in touch.

But what if staying in touch has become so easy that it’s keeping us apart? What if the very ease of superficial connection dulls the desire for something more? Granted, very few people are going to give up an active, meaningful community life in order to become a hermit with a Facebook account, but in a world where we’re all moving too quickly to just stop and actually know someone else, surely there’s a temptation to sustain our need for human connection and companionship on a fast-food diet of mouse clicks and keystrokes.

Every need or desire given to us by God draws us toward some corresponding good. Whether we’re talking about the need for food and water or our hunger for ultimate meaning, mankind was created with a set of desires that match what we most need. The counterintuitive danger posed by technology is that, by too easily fulfilling certain needs on a superficial level, we lose the drive to pursue a deeper good.

But what are we to do about it? Certainly, much technology has eased our lives in entirely unobjectionable ways. (One finds few who rail against the evils of refrigeration, anesthesia, or indoor plumbing.) The answer isn’t to simply reject technology or blame it for failings that ultimately arise from the human heart. Instead, we need a way to accept the good in modern advances without losing anything better in the process.

While that’s a topic far too broad to be adequately considered here, and one which requires different answers for different situations, there is one generally-applicable and foundational principle. This is the rule that the best protection against desire for counterfeit goods is love of the true. Returning to the very beginning of human history, the answer to the serpent’s temptation in the Garden was not a carefully-cultivated distaste for fruit; nor, more seriously, a disdainful attitude toward the wisdom and knowledge which the serpent offered. The only thing that would have saved Adam and Eve was a desire for God so strong that even the genuine good of greater knowledge shone dim in comparison. And when the second Adam rejected Satan’s offers and passed the test which the first had failed, it was by holding fast to the words, “You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.” As creatures created in the image of the God who is love, even false love is too powerful to be defeated by anything but a better love.

How is this relevant to the right use of technology? Simply in this: that our best protection against losing the good in the easy is to so carefully cultivate a love for what is genuinely good that we instinctively recognize and reject its diminution. If we learn to use our time well and to love the good that results, we are relatively inoculated against the danger of TV. If we cultivate a taste for actual work and true achievement, the virtual triumphs of video games will seem so diminished by comparison that we can safely enjoy them for what they are. When we know the joy of true fellowship, Facebook ceases to be an enemy and may even be transformed into a pleasant eddy in the flow of our real relationships. And if we do find ourselves losing something worthwhile in our use of these or other fruits of technology, a healthy love of what is better will make it easier to find a new balance without being drawn away by the lure of the easy.

“Hipster” is a hard word to define, but a good approximation might run something like this: “An individual whose life serves as a billboard advertising self-aware distaste for the often crude and sometimes contemptible patterns of modern American life.” Coming largely from the middle and upper classes, the hipster knows well the vulgar, unaware consumerism that characterizes his social strata, and he’s embarrassed by it. He’s defined largely by what he dislikes, and he mostly dislikes the sort of things that ought to be disliked by any decent person. When he joins battle–and hipsterism is a sort of continuous, slow-motion skirmish against conventionality–irony and disinterest are his weapons of choice, as if bourgeoisie sensibilities are too loud to be fought with anything but a shrug.

And therein lies the fundamental problem with the hipster. He is not usually for anything in any definite, discernible way.  Admittedly, he is probably quite fond of certain kinds of music and art. But even here, does he really love Sufjan Stevens for being Sufjan Stevens, or does he love Sufjan Stevens because doing so makes a statement about the sort of person who prefers Justin Bieber? Granted, Sufjan Stevens does in fact make much better music than Justin Bieber ever could–as do many other things, some of which are insects–but it seems a disservice to Sufjan Stevens to love him primarily for not being Justin Bieber. It is all very well to ironically drink PBR and smoke cheap cigarettes, wear skinny jeans, and ride a fixed-gear bike, but to what end, once we get past the surface rejection of mainstream American culture?

If hipsterism were to be accused of a crime, the charge would be disloyalty: disloyalty to good things. In itself, there is no virtue in disliking bad things. Any idiot can do that, and most of them do. In fact, hating all the right things may only make the situation worse. We can all agree we ought to reject consumerism, but there are many versions of not-consumerism that would quickly make us long for the bad old days of yore (see for example any moment in the past 100 years of Russian history). Hatred of Communism gave us McCarthyism, and opposition to interminable war in Vietnam yielded the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. “Anything would be better than this” is never actually true.

Any proper hatred must begin with love if it is to be either healthy or effective. My objection to abortion is not primarily grounded in distaste for the procedure, but in love for human life. (If abortion were outlawed tomorrow, to be replaced by infanticide, it could hardly be called a victory.) I hate socialism, not because I am viscerally opposed to shared ownership of the means of production, but because I rather like people and prefer that we starve as few of them as possible, a goal which socialism is notably inferior at achieving. I reject Islam only because it directs people away from the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Our antipathy must be rooted in love–in a primary loyalty to what is good–if we’re ever going to get anything done. We cannot make progress if we don’t know where we’re going. There must be an ideal to guide, even if it’s an ideal too perfect to be achieved in a year, or a thousand. It wasn’t dislike of slavery that ended the institution; it was belief that all men are created equal. And when the abolition of slavery did not fully achieve that ideal, the push for truly equal rights was led by men who had a dream.

If we aren’t for something, something for which we’re willing to work and fight and cry and dance, then we’re good for nothing. One of the few songs which I actually despise is John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change.” He sings, “Me and all my friends / We’re all misunderstood / They say we stand for nothing and / There’s no way we ever could / Now we see everything that’s going wrong / With the world and those who lead it / We just feel like we don’t have the means / To rise above and beat it / So we keep waiting / Waiting on the world to change / We keep on waiting / Waiting on the world to change.” It might be the hipster anthem (if anthems weren’t such unpleasantly decisive things): He wants you to know that he’s very upset about bad stuff, but as long as that’s clear to everyone, he’s quite content to sit around in skinny jeans drinking PBR, waiting on the world to change. He has no loyalty to anything, so he does nothing.

Every time a hipster puts on an ugly shirt simply because it’s an ugly shirt, every time he gets on his fixed-gear bike and congratulates himself because he’s making a statement, he is changing the world; he’s making it just a little bit worse. He’s beating something with nothing. On the other hand, wearing an outfit simply because you like it, or listening to music simply because it’s good, or riding a bicycle (with a fixed gear or multiple gears or no gears at all) simply because doing so is a delight; none of these will accomplish very much in themselves, but they do have this one, essential virtue: they are for something. And if you only love it long enough, you can beat anything with something.

Every so often someone writes an article about the plight of singles in America. It seems everyone wants to be married; they just don’t want to be married to anyone they know. It’s interesting to hear the issue discussed in both Christian and secular circles. While the specific diagnoses and proposed solutions differ, there does seem to be general agreement that an unprecedented number of singles in their 20′s and 30′s would like to be getting married but, for one reason or another, aren’t.

Of course, there are many reasons for this phenomenon, but one root cause that’s often mentioned is the never-ending quest to find The One: the perfect match, the one who completes you like two strands of music that run together in a perfect harmony. I’m male, so I picture it in geometrical terms: two equations so perfectly matched that their graphs will run together, no matter how far the line extends. (What did guys do for pickup lines before Euclid?) On the most popular dating websites, eager members fill out batteries of questions that dwarf most psychological tests, all carefully analyzed by computer algorithms to find your perfect match! We’re so committed to finding the right person that we demand no less than Google as our Yenta.

My point here is not to argue that we ought to swing to the other extreme and immediately dive into marriage with the nearest breathing organism that loves Jesus and has human DNA and a complementary pair of X or Y chromosomes. Nor is it to suggest exactly what balance should be struck between being too picky on the one hand, and being discerning and careful in our choice of the person with whom we pledge to spend the rest of our lives, on the other. If we stipulate, however, at least that it seems American culture in general has swung too far in the direction of “overly picky,” I wonder to what extent such a tendency is generated or reinforced by a lack of confidence in our ability to make marriage work.

If I’m buying a vehicle to take with me to a desert island and I have none of the mechanical knowledge necessary to maintain or fix it, it suddenly becomes tremendously important that I buy one that will never break down. If I take marriage seriously, and really mean it when I say “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part,” but simultaneously realize that on a very basic level I truly don’t know how to maintain or fix the life-long relationship I’m embarking upon, I’d better find the girl who’s such a perfect fit that my marriage will never break down. If those two lines on the graph start to diverge; if the tune falls out of harmony, and I don’t know what to do, that’s it. It’s over.

And so we continue our dogged hunt for something that does not exist, unwilling to accept the truth that no human hands can draw two perfect graphs or play a ceaseless harmony without error. Cinematic romances end with the ride off into the sunset because even the most brilliant screenwriter would struggle to maintain the alchemic fiction that promises lifelong happiness to those who can just find the right ingredients.

In reality, of course, the most important moment for securing the health of any marriage is this one, not some past point when the lucky pair each found their soulmate in the other. We must learn to bend the graphs, to blend the parts into harmony; to become soulmates more and more. If that knowledge has slipped from our cultural store, though–if we are no longer confident in our ability to make marriage work–then it’s not hard to understand those young singles who are reluctant to accept what must appear to be a gamble with nearly impossible odds.

Apologies in advance for what is likely to be a somewhat rambling post. I came across this music video for Twisted Sister’s 1984 hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It” somewhat randomly on a political blog and watched the first bit out of curiosity, then found myself engrossed and rewatching the whole five minute video. The imagery has stuck with me for the last couple days, tying in with a lot of the themes of maleness that I’ve been thinking about recently.

To start off, watch the video. (The whole thing. Seriously.)

What is so striking about this video is the way it echoes, in a dim and rather unwell way, the model of a male initiation. All the requisite players are there: father and family, son, and initiators in the form of the band; but it’s all off somehow, like a portrait done in Silly Putty and mashed almost past recognition.

The portrayal of the father immediately sets things off on a wrong note. He rants and spews incoherent spittle and disdain, but there’s no hint of real strength as he’s harried through his house and repeatedly defenestrated by the menacing band members. Bullying and loud, yet ultimately impotent, he exemplifies our cultural perception of unreconstructed maleness. As such, he is interesting, but the main question at the moment is how this father will affect his son’s initiation into manhood.

A common theme of male initiation is violence on the part of the initiators. They kidnap the boy, take him to a strange place, wound him. The initiation is a thing to be desired, yet feared; entering the fellowship of men is a dangerous thing because a man is a dangerous thing.

Consciously or not, in the video Twisted Sister clearly echoes the image of male initiators. They appear at a critical juncture to pull the boy from his home and family and offer him a new life, represented by the later shot of him at a Twisted Sister concert as they roar, “We’re not gonna take it, no we ain’t gonna take it, we’re not gonna take it anymore.” The band’s stylized, disguised appearance and menacing behavior complete the picture of a band of initiators. Yet the initiators in this story do not kidnap the boy – they rescue him.

As the boy faces his threatening, angry father, the band rushes in to confront the man. Their challenge is for the father, and he becomes an object of mockery as they reveal his true weakness. Rather than a danger, these initiators represent safety and excitement, away from the unpleasantness of dealing with challenging maleness. Saved, the boy joins the ranks of their headbanging fans, cheering enthusiastically while the band cries, “Oh you’re so condescending / your gall is never ending / we don’t want nothin’, not a thing from you / your life is trite and jaded / boring and confiscated / if that’s your best, your best won’t do.”

While it’s certainly possible to read too much into an 80′s glam rock production, I would argue that the video offers a vivid picture of the state of male initiation in America. Today, the cultural energy that might go toward ushering boys into manhood is instead directed at rescuing those boys from a manliness that is seen as brutal and loutish, or at best merely outdated and unnecessary.

In a culture where child custody cases end with sole custody for the mother 70-80 percent of the time, manliness is not seen as beneficial, but as an inconvenient or offensive obstacle to teaching a boy to be gracious, orderly, studious, sensitive, open, patient, and civilized. Because of this, boys must be saved from masculine tendencies and influences by schools, family, and media. As Harvey Mansfield writes in Manliness, “Even when ‘man’ means only male, ‘manly’ still seems pretentious in our new society, and threatening to it as well. The manly man is making a point of the bad attitude he ought to be playing down.” Like the band in the video, these would-be saviors rush in to separate the boy from masculinity and set out to shape him according to their ideal in a sort of soft, amoeba-like initiation.

Such pressure creates several different types of young men. Some simply absorb the message, give up, and cease to be manly in any meaningful sense. Fight Club and Wanted are anthems to the awakening and late initiation of such men. They are usually very nice and very civilized; women often like them because women tend to be fond of children. Though these men sometimes become more manly as they age, even then there is always a hint about them of someone who is trying to remember where he left something important.

Other men absorb the message but do not quite cease to be manly, so they respond as a man does when confronted with badness: they fight. Of course, the badness they confront and fight is maleness itself. They become Twisted Sister: “This is our life, this is our song / we’ll fight the powers that be, just / don’t pick our destiny ’cause / you don’t know us, you don’t belong.” They stand up in manly disdain to disdain manliness. Much of the American intelligentsia – among them, perhaps, President Barrack Obama – falls into this category.

And finally, some men reject the devaluation of manliness and, in the absence of mentors, initiators, or instruction, try to make themselves manly. Sadly, they usually become some variation of the father in the video, desperately aping the most obvious characteristics of masculinity without the solid inner core that only comes by absorption through long contact with true manliness, and without which the superficial attributes of manliness easily cave into wrongness. The hip-hop culture, with its loud rebellion, glorification of meaningless violence, and hypersexualization of women, is the result of boys trying to create their own masculinity. Less dramatically, our society is full of fathers who respond with everything from withdrawal to violence as they come to the choking realization that they have no idea, on a level deeper than mere intellect, of how to actually be the man their wife and children need.

“If that’s your best, your best won’t do,” declares the song, and it’s hard to disagree. Yet, as the father asks, “What kind of a man are you?” “What do you want to do with your life?” there’s a thinness to his son’s defiant response, “I wanna rock.” He is looking for identity and meaning, but there is no one to guide him; only well-meaning rescuers who pluck him away from the danger, challenge, and responsibility of becoming a man.

This week’s Weekend Interview in the Wall Street Journal features Temple Grandin, “easily the most famous autistic woman in the world.” It’s a fascinating read, particularly for anyone with an Aspergers child. Growing up in the 1950′s, doctors pushed to institutionalize Grandin as her autistic qualities became obvious. Instead, her mother hired a speech therapist and a nanny and forced her daughter to interact with adults and spend hours practicing basic social skills.

Today, Temple Grandin is a doctor of animal science at Colorado State University and the designer of more humane slaughterhouse systems that are used worldwide. She also writes and lectures internationally as a first-person expert on autism.

Her cadence is unusual, staccato-like, and her pale blue eyes sometimes drift off into the distance. But she seems a different person from the young woman in the film, for whom being hugged, let alone schmoozing at a cocktail party, seemed physically painful. What’s changed?

“The thing about being autistic is that you gradually get less and less autistic,” she says, “because you keep learning, you keep learning how to behave. It’s like being in a play; I’m always in a play.”

As I said, the whole article is well worth reading, but I was particularly struck by Grandin’s advice on how to help an Aspergers child learn to function more comfortably in the outside world. Doubtless influenced by her own mother, who “insisted that Temple practice proper etiquette, go to church, [and] interact with adults at parties,” Grandin says,

It’s about hard work. Young children need 20 or 30 hours a week of one-on-one time with a committed teacher or mentor. Money, Ms. Grandin says, should not be an obstacle. If you can’t afford a professional teacher, find volunteers through your church or synagogue, she says. Parents need to teach 1950s-style social rules “like please and thank you, basic table manners, how to shop.”

“1950s-style social rules.” Back then, The Rules were explained pretty clearly and explicitly, by parents, teachers, neighbors, or even random passerby when necessary. There was a basic, shared understanding of how one ought to behave, and an expectation that society had a responsibility to pass that understanding along to the next generation. “Do this. Don’t do that,” as the 1971 hit “Signs” rather unenthusiastically put it.

Today, instead, American society depends much more upon a sort of peer-to-peer absorption approach to social norms. With the traditional venues for social instruction (family, community, church) fading in their authority and significance, most youth learn basic social norms through entertainment or from their peers, through observation and adaptation. Gallons of ink have been spilled chronicling the underwhelming results of this approach, and my point here is not to add thereto. Instead, I’m interested particularly in how this approach affects those with autistic tendencies.

Reading the interview with Temple Grandin, it seems that our lack of explicit social instruction must be doing a tremendous and particular disservice to Aspergers children. Gradin isn’t the first I’ve heard liken living with Aspergers to being in a play. You learn how you are supposed to behave, and you fill that “role”; it’s actually a considerable relief, avoiding the frustration and confusion of continually violating norms you didn’t know existed.

The instruction must be explicit though. By definition, a child with autistic tendencies isn’t going to pick up on the cues that his peers use to learn social norms. He needs to actually be taught what other children might be able to unconsciously pick up. And yet, more than ever before, our society tends to avoid offering the clear, specific guidance that such a child needs.

I’m not suggesting that a greater social willingness to articulate and teach the rules of social behavior would be some magic bullet to make life easy for those with Aspergers. However, I do wonder how much it would help, not so much in broad strokes but with those brief little interactions that could help create the explicit, clear roadmap that is so important to individuals with Aspergers.

And… I feel like I should conclude with some insightful commentary, but I’m really just throwing this out here as food for thought. I was struck by it while reading the article, and hoped some of my readers would find it similarly interesting.

Throughout the ancient hunter societies… and throughout the hunter-gatherer societies that followed them, and the subsequent agricultural and craft societies, fathers and sons worked and lived together. As late as 1900 in the United States about ninety percent of fathers were engaged in agriculture. In all these societies the son characteristically saw his father working at all times of the day and all seasons of the year.

When the son no longer sees that, what happens? After thirty years of working with young German men, as fatherless in their industrial society as young American men today, Alexander Mitscherlich… developed a metaphor: a hole appears in the son’s psyche…

We know of rare cases in which the father takes sons or daughters into his factory, judge’s chambers, used-car lot, or insurance building, and those efforts at teaching do reap some of the rewards of teaching in craft cultures. But in most families today, the sons and daughters receive, when the father returns home at six, only his disposition, or his temperament, which is usually irritable and remote… Fathers in earlier times could often break through their own humanly inadequate temperaments by teaching rope-making, fishing, posthole digging, grain cutting, drumming, harness making, animal care, even singing and storytelling. That teaching sweetened the effect of the temperament…

[T]he father as a living force in the home disappeared when those forces demanding industry sent him on various railroads out of his various villages… When a father now sits down at the table, he seems weak and insignificant and we all sense that fathers no longer fill as large a space in the room as nineteenth-century fathers did.

Robert Bly argues in Iron John that the diminishment of the father’s role in family life is destructive to both daughters and sons, but particularly to the son. With his principal image of manliness reduced to a half-stranger whose regular appearances every evening do little to impact the real life of the family, the son is left with terrible deficiency: “How does he imagine his own life as a man?”

Bly suggests this absence leads to two different types of men. The first “fall into a fearful hopelessness, having fully accepted the generic, diminished idea of father. ‘I am the son of defective male material, and I’ll probably be the same as he is.’” The second type become what Bly calls “ascenders,” striving with a hint of mania to redeem a maleness they do not really know. “The ascensionist son is flying away from the father, not towards him. The son, by ascending into the light, rising higher on the corporate ladder and achieving enlightenment, to some extent redeems the father’s name… Society without the father produces these birdlike men, so intense, so charming, so open to addiction, so sincere, as those great bays of the Hellespont produced the cranes Homer noticed that flew in millions toward the sun.”

What can be done to try to cure this father-deficiency? Well, first we must understand the problem, which goes well beyond mere lack of time spent with the father. After all, throughout history fathers have been busy, off hunting, or farming, or in the shop. So while the quantity of time spent with the father is certainly important, more important are the qualities of the father which are on display during that time.

In the modern family, the competencies of the father are almost entirely centered in a workplace that remains utterly opaque to his children. His experiences, his skills, his struggles, failures, and victories, and the respect of his associates are all hidden from his family.

A few weeks ago, while spending the night at my father’s house I could not help overhearing him leading a conference call in the next room. As I half-listened to him confidently directing colleagues on the other side of the globe, I was struck by the fact that my father is, in fact, quite good at what he does. It’s not that I hadn’t known that before, but the intensity with which I realized it while actually listening to him conduct business – something I’d never done before – was actually quite startling.

Instead of observing their father’s competencies, children are usually treated to a view of him at his most limited, treading more-or-less awkwardly in a realm in which the mother is the expert. (Generalizing to the family structure which remains most common in America, of course.) She knows where things are, what must be done, and how to do it, and, through no fault of her own, quite outshines the father in her command of most domestic situations. The man who might be capable of programming supercomputers, commanding battalions of soldiers, or performing lifesaving operations is reduced to hollering, “Honey, do I need to cover this dish when I put it in the microwave?”

A part of the solution to this deficiency can be found in introducing children to their father’s work, taking them, in Bly’s words, “into his factory, judge’s chambers, used-car lot, or insurance building.” The difficulty, of course, is that many jobs just don’t lend themselves to observation, particularly by children with limited attention spans. Today, I could appreciate my father’s teleconference, but try to sit me down to listen to a lengthy meeting or analyze a spreadsheet back when I was ten, and I probably would have called Social Services. With the exception of a fortunate few, the average worker today faces a similar dilemma. What child would be excited to learn about C++ functions or the intricacies of actuarial calculation?

That being said, the typical office worker should not assume his children would not benefit from some exposure to his work. Seeing where Daddy works and observing the respect of coworkers is not insignificant for a young boy or girl. However, today’s worker usually needs to do more than simply exposing his children to his working environment. This is one of the reasons why I believe it is so valuable for men to cultivate handyman or outdoor skills.

The man who can change his car’s oil, fix a leaky faucet, put up a shed, skin a deer, or gentle a horse has a precious opportunity to display the competence and confidence that his children, and particularly his sons, have such a deep need to experience. There are other venues for displaying ability, of course: through the arts, or community leadership, or technological prowess for example. However, few things can beat simple manual skill to interest and impress children of all ages. (I still chuckle at the memory of two small children standing wide-eyed and on tip-toes next to the bathtub in a friend’s house while I simply changed a showerhead.) Anyone who has observed a little boy trailing along after his father, plastic tools in hand and ready to “help,” knows that herein lies a powerful avenue to a child’s psyche.

Whatever avenue one chooses – and it should be unique to each man and his interests, family, and work – the structure of the modern world means that today’s “hidden” fathers must put extra thought and extra effort into allowing their children to experience a maleness they can respect, appreciate, and, in the case of sons, emulate.

Rereading G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy recently, I was struck by the essential distinction he draws between the balanced, moderate Aristotelian idea of virtue and that of Christianity. Discussing “the paradoxes of Christianity,” Chesterton writes,

Nevertheless it could not, I felt, be quite true that Christianity was merely sensible and stood in the middle. There was really an element in it of emphasis and even frenzy which had justified the secularists in their superficial criticism. It might be wise, I began more and more to think that it was wise, but it was not merely worldly wise; it was not merely temperate and respectable. Its fierce crusaders and meek saints might balance each other; still, the crusaders were very fierce and the saints were very meek, meek beyond all decency…

All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium; that one may be mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little… But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept. That was the problem with Paganism tried to solve; that was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very strange way…

Paganism declared that virtue was in balance; Christianity declared it was in conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously.

The tempered, moderate virtue of the Greeks ends up respectable but lifeless.  Seeking, for example, the virtuous balance between pride and abasement, the Greek “would merely say that he was content with himself, but not insolently self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse, that his deserts were limited, but he would see that he got them. In short, he would walk with his head in the air; but not necessarily with his nose in the air.” “This is a manly and rational position,” Chesterton agrees, but, “Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things; neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full color.”

This proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets; you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this. On the other hand, this mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make it clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and searching humility) make a man as a little child, who can sit at the feet of the grass… Thus it loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble.

In contrast, Christianity manages to save both. “In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners… Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the gray ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard.”

Chesterton argues that this paradoxical wedding of extremes goes to the heart of Christianity; a religion which promises, after all, that “whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it,” and founded upon the Christ, who “was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God.”

In fact, this principle characterizes Christian ethics. Take, for example, man’s relationship with the natural world. On the one hand, a wondering joy, alternately exuberant and hushed, at the beauty of creation; on the other, a gritty hatred for the evil and wrong intermingled with the good. Or Augustine’s Just War theory, which holds that violence can be right and good… so long as it is motivated by love of our neighbor.

And what of romantic love? Commenting on Christ’s command to “hate” one’s own wife (Luke 14:26), C.S. Lewis writes in The Four Loves, “He says something that cracks like a whip about trampling them all under foot the moment they hold us back from following Him… To hate is to reject, to set one’s face against, to make no concession to, the Beloved when the Beloved utters, however sweetly and however pitiably, the suggestions of the Devil.” And yet, this submission to a higher love in no way diminishes the love that Scripture anticipates between man and wife. After all, they are told to love one another “as Christ loved the church;” an overwhelming idea even when considered only in light of his sacrifice on her behalf, which is itself a mere expression of the inexplicable delight which led prophets from Isaiah to John of Patmos to speak of Christ “rejoicing” in his bride. And of course, the vast majority of scriptural discussion of marriage takes the form, not of commands or propositions, but of a book of love poetry considered so inflammatory by colonial Americans that their youth were not allowed to read it until they reached adulthood!

Why does all of this matter? Two reasons. First, there is the obvious fact that a better understanding of our God and our faith is always valuable. Secondly, a renewed attention to that element within Christianity “of emphasis and even frenzy… the collision of passions” which Chesterton notes might serve as a corrective to the tendency within comfortable American Christianity to be exceptional largely for our dullness. This is not to suggest an artificial fanning of passion, but rather a simple recognition that, contra the intuitive, classical view, virtue is not necessarily found in moderation, in a Goldilocksian “not too hot and not too cold;” that the faith which Dorothy Sayers called “the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man” has not lost the spirit of the Creator who decided to stage a play, and spun a universe from nothing to serve as the set.

Apparently, a lot of people think the world is going to end in 2012. The ancient Mayan calendar ends in 2012, you see; also, a hidden planet named Nibiru is about to crash into the earth, destroying all life.

The apocalyptic warnings are being spread online through email and pseudo-scientific websites. A NASA scientist tells the LA Times that two different teenagers have told him they are considering suicide to avoid facing the end of the earth. “‘I’m getting more and more questions from people who are upset and scared,’ he said. Some people say their children are refusing to eat.”

Because earth is about to be whacked by stealth-planet Nibiru.

The seeming ease with which significant numbers of Americans fall for conspiracy theories like the 2012 scare, despite clear evidence to the contrary, is a disturbing phenomenon, particularly in a democratic nation. The thought that large numbers of American voters are actually convinced that the government orchestrated 9/11, to pick one example, makes one slightly queasy. It’s true that popular delusions are hardly a new phenomenon, but surely in today’s age of widely available information such large numbers should not fall for claims so easily refuted?

The problem is that Americans are no longer taught how to think critically, how to evaluate an idea on its merits or lack thereof. Today’s education is almost entirely centered around accumulating information, rather than evaluating truth claims. (After all, it is intolerant to point out that someone else’s truth, isn’t.) Even at the university level, the educator’s job is to present students with a set of facts, and their job is to assimilate and remember those facts.

Having become accustomed to uncritically accepting the statements of authoritative figures, is it any wonder such habits persist beyond school? Politics becomes a battle of slogans, because we rarely think to look deeper and ask, “Why?” Internet rumors and conspiracy theories are given credence, because we have not been taught how to evaluate claims before accepting them.

Like any other skill, critical thinking must be taught and practiced before it can be used effectively to distinguish between the plausible and the implausible. In a world buzzing with an unprecedented supply of facts and information, claims and counterclaims, it is small wonder that unpracticed judgments are often less than reliable.

I visited a new church today and thought the pastor’s message was worth a comment. He suggested that “the Fed, the politicians, and the bankers” were not ultimately responsible for the recession, the true cause of which was our own selfish race to acquire ever more material comforts and pleasures. I found myself strongly agreeing with his comments on the insufficiency of anything less than God to bring true happiness, while disagreeing equally strongly with his argument that selfish consumption was the primary cause of our current economic woes.

Certainly, selfishness was a contributing factor, but blaming it for the recession is like blaming gravity for plane crashes. Gravity is always a factor, and it can cause a crash, but only when something goes wrong in the plane itself. Similarly, human selfishness helped create our current mess, but only because government distortions of the free market created perverse incentives that eventually built up too much pressure for the economy to bear. Bad economic policies caused the recession; human self-interest contributed only insofar as it has contributed to every economic phenomenon, whether good or bad.

Why does this matter? After all, any message opposing selfish consumption and trust in worldly values should be encouraged, should it not? Well… no. Not if the heart of the message is false. God is never honored, nor his kingdom advanced, by falsehood – even well-meaning or unknowing falsehood. In this particular cause, blaming the recession on human greed poses a number of dangers. To begin with, ignoring the real causes of the recession increases the likelihood that it will deepen or recur.

As Christians, we ought to love our neighbor, which means seeking his best. I only state the obvious in observing that losing one’s job, seeing one’s life’s savings evaporate, or losing one’s house due to an unsustainable mortgage is hardly best. If we are commanded to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, surely we ought to do our best to prevent their becoming hungry and naked in the first place! The Christian duty of loving our neighbor translates into a responsibility to seek the economic policies which are most conducive to social wellbeing. When we ignore the true causes of economic failures, we neglect this responsibility and set the stage for further suffering.

Some might argue, though, that the recession offers long-term benefits which outweigh its costs. By undermining our financial wellbeing, it creates a de facto curb on greed and envy; an ironic twist in which our society’s selfish consumption undermines itself. By taking away the material flimflam on which we have glutted, the recession forces us to value what truly matters.

Or not. Does selfishness come from the outside? If we could only wipe away big screen TV’s, luxury cars, overpriced McMansions, and all the other vestiges of conspicuous consumption, would selfishness trail away with them? Of course not. Take your generic selfish modern man, strip him of everything he owns, drop him in a primitive hunter-gatherer society, and he’ll soon be envious because the bone through Gorgog’s nose is fancier than his. Selfishness, greed, and envy exist independent of their objects; they are entirely subjective. So long as I am I, I can be selfish. What I am envious of is more or less immaterial. (After all, it isn’t as if greed is ever satisfied, even by the most outrageous consumption. The richest billionaire is no closer than the poorest subsistence farmer to filling the black hole of selfishness.)

What was needed before the recession, what is needed now, during the recession, and what will be needed after the recession, is a change of heart. Consumption is merely a symptom. Even if guilt or necessity leads a Christian to cut back his consumption, nothing is gained unless the selfish and disordered affections that lead to conspicuous consumption are eradicated.

Selfish consumption didn’t cause the recession, and the recession won’t cure selfishness. Pretending otherwise merely increases the likelihood that neither problem will be properly understood or effectively combated.

A recent discussion in one of my classes regarding video games inspired me to summarize my thoughts on the topic here. There are two issues that must be considered when evaluating if and to what extent a video game is acceptable.

The first area to be evaluated relates to the content of the game itself. Any game in which a player is rewarded for behavior which would be wrong in real life should not be tolerated. Grand Theft Auto, in which players are encouraged to shoot police officers and prostitutes, is an obvious example of this sort of game. Some might argue that the rules are different in virtual reality – after all, you aren’t actually shooting anybody, and a computer pixel is just a computer pixel. Nobody is actually hurt when you beat up the prostitute or line up your sights on the back of the police officer’s head.

And that’s true. The problem, though, is not what you are doing to the policeman; rather, what shooting the policeman is doing to you. Every choice we make inexorably changes who we are on a fundamental level. We create our character by the choices we make, and no choice is without consequence. Every time I look away when someone is in trouble, I become a little more of a coward; every time I ignore the bank error in my favor, I become a little more of a cheat; every time I kick the dog, a little more cruel. Our choices make us. Hoping otherwise is like wishing that gravity would relent.

How does this apply to video games? Because video games make us choose as well. We must choose to beat the prostitute or shoot the policeman. Of course, doing so in virtual reality is less-worse than doing so in real life, but it’s merely a question of degree. American soldiers train with video-game-style simulators because experience in virtual reality transfers so easily to real life.

Beating the prostitute draws you a little closer to being the sort of man who beats women. Shooting the cop makes you value innocent life a little bit less. Obviously, this does not mean that everyone who plays GTA will becoming a cop-killing woman-beater. However, their soul has been nudged a bit farther in that direction. It is simply impossible to choose evil – even virtually – without effect. Do we really want to make the argument, “Well, yes, my soul is becoming more and more the soul of a man who would beat a woman, but I wouldn’t ever actually beat women, so it’s okay”?

It should be noted that the foregoing is not intended to be an argument against all violent video games. After all, violence is not inherently evil. Who would not want a man to be ready to defend those in need, or fight against an invading enemy, or perhaps braid a scourge of cords and clear the Temple courts? Now, I’m not suggesting that video games are the best training for such acts of appropriate violence, but a game in which players battle a legitimate enemy while following specified rules of engagement (like many war games, for example), would at least not carry the same inherent moral danger as a game in which the violence is unequivocally immoral. On the other hand, there are other concerns to be raised against even a game with unobjectionable content, which brings us to the second issue that must be considered in a discussion of the value of video games.

In a nutshell, the interactive, immersive quality of video gaming (one that will only increase) creates the possibility of its serving as a sort of “life placebo.” Why bother with the challenges, struggles, and hard-bitten victories of real life when you can pull up a game and experience the same feelings of triumph without the trouble and with the added benefit of a “reset” button if things get out of hand? In Boys Adrift, Dr. Leonard Sax writes,

It’s not hard to see how boys motivated by the will to power might have been successful in earlier generations. They might have grown up to be successful entrepreneurs, daring innovators, explorers, politicians, or soldiers. They could readily create a productive niche for themselves. [...]

If these men were reborn today, it is less likely that they would undertake a meaningful career. I suspect that a boy born today with the DNA of General Patton or Howard Hughes would more likely become a video game addict. He might have a job, but there’s a real risk that his drive and his energy would be directed into the video games rather than into his career. [...]

Football coach Greg Sullivan, Mr. Welsh’s colleague, says that he sees fewer and fewer boys playing outside when he drives around northern Virginia. “They are inside playing video games,” he says. “More kids are finding real sports too demanding.”

I’ve talked with other football coaches who describe, with amazement, teenage boys who think that because they can win at Madden NFL, they therefore know something about playing the real-life game of football. “These guys are five-minute wonders,” one coach told me. “They get out on the field, run around for a few minutes, and then they’re done. They have no endurance. They’re in pathetic shape. And they don’t want to do the work that they would have to do, to train the way they would have to train, to get in shape.”

Virtual success is much easier than real life, and no less satisfying if one doesn’t think about it too much. The flood of endorphins from a virtual touchdown or a virtual military victory is just as real, even if the accomplishment itself is not. Because video games so effectively mimic the rewards that once could only be achieved by actually living, they can divert the drive that pushes a young man toward lasting and meaningful accomplishment. If a boy has been too busy developing his skills in virtual reality to learn how to grit his teeth, dig his heels in, and do something real, when will he ever learn?

Of course, a few hours of Halo aren’t going to destroy a boy’s life, and most boys who play video games are able to do so in moderation. Picking up a joystick doesn’t immediately condemn you to a life in which your greatest accomplishment is saved on a hard drive. However, video games should be approached with the cautious awareness that they offer a powerful draw to invest too much of ourselves into struggles which are ultimately without meaning. As Plutarch observes in his Lives, “He who busies himself in mean occupations produces, in the very pains he takes about things of little or no use, an evidence against himself of his negligence and indisposition to what is really good.”