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I hope that Lent is rumbling along well for everyone!  I’m checking in here with a Lenten-tinged philosophical/apologetical thought.

I’m just back home from the last, all day pastoral cohort of the ministry year for the Liberti Communion of Churches, where all of us got together for a time of sharing one another’s stories, hanging out, and some professional development.  For that last piece, we spent a chunk of time discussing the ministry ramifications of Derek Thompson’s recent Atlantic article, “The Anti-Social Century.”

The article is a bracing read!  In it, Thompson makes the case that here in the West, people are spending more and more time alone––increasingly and alarmingly so.  That’s not necessarily a newsflash in itself, but even more interesting is Thompson’s added observation that much of the time, our being alone feels not lonely but simply normal.  The new status quo is that people are alone but not lonely.

The silver lining in all of this, Thompson argues, is that there’s a mounting body of research that indicates that if we push ourselves toward more social behaviors, we’ll become much happier.  It takes time and effort to reach out to others, but it’s worth it because we’ll discover more joy and satisfaction that way. Therefore, Rodney, let’s not go gentle into that isolated night!

The big upshot here for our pastoral round table today revolved around the question, “Do our models of ministry mistakenly assume that people are more social than they actually are, and if so, how?”  It was good food for thought, as we consumed fried chicken sandwiches for digestion.

Here’s one other takeaway from that conversation.  At a big picture level, it was remarked that Thompson’s article, for as good and smart as it is, inadvertently betrays the limits of Western secularity in its ability to motivate people towards better behaviors.  In “The Anti-Social Century,” Thompson basically makes an argument from enlightened self-interest: if you think that connecting with other people will stress you out, you’ll discover instead that social behaviors will increase, not decrease, your quality of life.  As a result, it’s in one’s self-interest not to self-isolate.

Being in relationship with others is a Biblical virtue––in fact, community is one of Liberti’s three core values, in addition to worship and mercy––but I read Thompson’s reason as to why we should do community as disappointingly flimsy.  In my view, enlightened self-interest is ultimately self-defeating in two ways.  First, it’s self-defeating psychologically because it’s logically impossible to draw general, society-wide conclusions from self-interest.  What I perceive to be my self-interest is different than what you perceive to be your self-interest!  In addition, enlightened self-interest is self-defeating morally because the whole body of moral discourse since the ancient Greeks and Romans onward takes for granted that self-interest is a moral problem, not a moral good.

Speaking of self-interest, there’s a nineteenth century figure who would have been totally into that concept, namely Charles Darwin.  Take self-interest and scale it up, and you’re left with survival of the fittest––which secular folks will tend to say is good and natural for animals but morally abhorrent for human beings.  Even if we’re just highly developed animals, according to secularity.  

One could say, even, that the big philosophical conundrum here in the West over the past 200 years or so is that we while we accept the premise of Darwinism, i.e., that we come from nothing and are headed nowhere, we deny its conclusion, i.e. that the name of the game is survival of the fittest.  Derek Thompson’s argument against isolation from enlightened self-interest is an example of trying to find a middle ground between the Darwinian premise and the Darwinian conclusion.  But the center does not hold.  In Lenten terms, then, if all we are is ashes to ashes, we may as well treat others like ash in the meantime.

The good news of Jesus gives us a different, better, and truer path.  As opposed to enlightened self-interest as a way to be fully human, Christ commends to us Spirit-filled self-emptying.  (Check out Philippians 2:1-9 to see that dynamic at work.)  We ought to push against isolation and practice community with one another not because we’ll get a kickback reward but because it’s only when we forget ourselves and focus on others that we’re truly free.  It’s self-emptying, not self-interest, brings us in line with both how our Creator has made us and how our Redeemer is renewing us.

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