A Time To Build, A Time To Uproot: A Modest Appeal

To All the Newsletters Devoted to Criticism

Some Brief Housekeeping

Greetings, everyone! I’ve been travelling with family most of July, but we’re back and will be resuming the normal publishing schedule.

Our next book club for paid subscribers will be on September 15th, and I want your input in the poll below as to the title. Poll runs for one week, and the winner will be the next one we read:

A Preface: Great Discontent

In what follows, I want to offer a bit of a reset for my own writing here, and challenge other newsletters to consider the same.

There is a great imbalance in a great deal of writing, in which criticism exists for itself: to gesture endlessly at what is a problem, or what is wrong with this or that phenomenon. But we can only point out what a problem is to the degree that a potentially better world illuminates it: we can only see cracks in the foundation in the daytime, and we can only say what a pathology is if we already have an idea of what a healthy body is.

To devote ourselves to endlessly diagnoses of problems instead of beginning with the world we wish to see—and allowing that to illuminate the problems—is to endlessly perseverate on what is not, instead of being able to appreciate how what is already is not perfect, but might yet anticipate something better.

A Parable: A Tent Leaks in the Woods

While camping in upstate Michigan this month, our family borrowed a tent from my father-in-law. Our family camping splits the difference of the bourgeoise scale by camping in screened shelters for the most part, having only tent camped once prior to having kids. And so, for an eight-day trip into the glories of Ludington State Park¹, we borrowed a tent roomy enough to house our family of four and most of our supplies for the week.

The first night, all was well. The second night, it rained and the waters beat upon our tent and lo, we and all of our belongings became waterlogged. And unto the local Best Western we retreated until daybreak. For the remainder of the week, our family scattered into better suited tents, dry and warm.

The question was what to do with such a failed tent.

As a tent, it really was no good: each time it rained, the tent would leak at the seams, lining the floor with sand and soggy vinyl. But if you’ve ever camped in the wilds, there are more challenges than weather, for the woods are home to creatures other than humans. Our raccoons had quickly developed an affinity for gluten free bread, for fiber-intense tortillas. And so, while uninhabitable for humans, the tent became perfectly fine to house any number of other things: sports equipment, a bag of sweatshirts, a table packed with coolers and dry goods.

For the remainder of the week, the tent served its purpose: unfit for human sleep but perfectly fine for defending our food against the tribes of racoons haunting the woods next to the campsite. The divider between the sleeping portion of the tent was cut out, creating one large room, and our makeshift storage tent lived out the week.

And lo: they asked him “What does this parable mean?”

The Ease of Criticism, The Struggle of Construction

There is a mode which I’ve found my own writing falling into as of late, and it’s one endemic within newsletters: let’s call it the “The Problem with X” mode of writing.

In this mode of writing, a cultural phenomenon is described in detail, often with reference to other analyses, such that the whole of the writing is devoted to enumerating the problems. The newsletter mode of criticism is downstream from the larger ways in which this occurs in book publishing and social media. Twitter/X², by its shortened content format, is built for this: no space to do anything but signal the “Problem With X”, and move on. The more our minds are colonized by this process, the more it feeds into whole genres of books which exist to do this one thing: detail the problems, in more and more fine grained ways which ultimately become repeating versions of the same.³

There is, as Lamentations reminds us, a time for tearing down. There is a need for the prophetic critique, slow and steady and incisive, which uproots the insidious patterns laying beneath the surface.⁴ But the problem is that when a problem emerges, not all tents need to be torn down.

I mean, everyone knows that the thing leaks. And honestly, that’s not really an interesting or helpful observation.

The more interesting and significant question is what might be done with it now.⁵

For the tent is no longer fit for sleeping, but might still be fit for defending other things against raccoons, for housing unused baseball mitts and sweatshirts, ziptied at night to protect against the trash pandas.

It may be that, at the end of the trip, the tent is discarded, but that decision belongs to the end of the trip, the culling at time’s end. To engage in a tearing down before that time is to engage in nihilism, to say that imperfection can only be met with dissertations about the imperfections, instead of asking what good a failed tent might be put to now. For in the woods, there is no new equipment coming, and either you make use of what is at hand, or you abandon the woods.

Nihilism begets nihilism. Its fosters sloth within our thinking and living, teaching us that we never have to rise to the occasion and offer some solution, but only need to damn the tent for what it is not fit to do now. It fills our souls with sloth, as we are slowly soaked by the rain, giving into the weight of intertia, pointing out the ways in which this seam and that seam are giving way, instead of asking what good the tent might serve now.

Photo by Scott Goodwill on Unsplash

Three Brief Theses on Moral Criticism

What follows here is an attempt not only at charity, assuming that problems bear within them an inchoate sense of something good, but an attempt to help us identify not just problems but what is to be preserved in the midst of the problem. Rather than throw out the tent, what might it still give us?

1. What here is good? By beginning with the assumption that the problem is a problem because it betrays something about the good, we must begin our analysis not by enumerating the problem, but by venturing something about what that good is. It’s not enough to say, for example, that the Southern Baptist Convention’s decision regarding women pastors is unjust if we’re unwilling to have a definition of what counts as justice, or willing to ask about what ends justice serves. To tear down the whole thing is, it seems to me, not only dismissive of what goods might be in play (even if I disagree with the decisions), what such a decision wants to preserve, and ultimately treats the moral reasoning of entire groups as irreducibly corrupted forms of power.⁶

2. What here is true? By beginning with the assumption that the problem is a half-truth, or a corrupted truth, we are in a better place to be able to not only have appreciation for what true things are present in the problems, but how their intent might be repaired or repurposed, how a leaky tent is no good for human dwelling, but might be good for defending against carb-loading racoons. Falsehoods are only falsehoods because they are in opposition to that which true, in part or in whole: they do not exist out of whole cloth and cannot gain traction in the long haul. Like all sin, falsehoods depend on there being something true which can be distorted. And it makes all the difference whether we can acknowledge the kernels of truth which have been distorted.

3. What here is beautiful? The Problem of X frequently approaches us as a golem to be destroyed, a swamp to be dried up full stop. But this is the most difficult question, I think, for that which is a problem frequently creates so much damage that asking how it might tell us something about artfulness or creativity or aesthetic pleasure is hard to countenance. But again, even terrible things bear a kind of terrible elegance or horrific simplicity about their solutions. Turning to AI to resolve our moral disputes is both horrific in its dehumanizing processes, and commendable in its desire to see the core of an issue, behind the rhetoric and buzz which frequently obscures our pursuit of good things. The harder work is to ask what kind of beauty these efforts are portraying, deficient as they might be.

1. Reader, when I say that Ludington State Park is glorious, I mean that you’re within a ten minute walk from Lake Michigan, and equally close to fishing, canoeing, hiking, sand dunes, and zero wi-fi. Eight days wasn’t long enough to absorb this kind of beauty and natural glory.

2. This is the dumbest rebrand in the history of rebrands.

3. Whether your favored crime of modern life is “expressive individualism” (I’m looking at you, Gospel Coalition), or “nominalism” or “technological encroachment”, everything looks like a nail when your primary tool is a hammer.

4. It occurs to me that, in this genre, there are two sub-genres: you can either kill the weed at the root, by slow-grained analysis of the issue, or pave over the field of weeds, dumping concrete on top of the problems until whatever soil was fruitfully growing weeds is destroyed along with the problem. This second one is, I think, what happens when publishing and speaking demands force speakers into overstatement, rhetorical bluster, and overreach: bulldoze the whole thing rather than recognize that there is a reason the weeds grow, and that it was that the soil you just demolished was good soil.

5. This is a more fulsome version of this basic complaint.

6. TO BE CRYSTAL CLEAR, I have been pastored by women, whole-heartedly affirm women pastors, and serve on the board of an organization devoted to women in ministry. But I think that the question of justice short-circuits a much better conversation about what it means to pastor well and whether male-female gender parity is the end of justice which is sought. It is not clear, for example, that women are somehow less susceptible to vice than men or that the skills necessary for pastoring exist along gendered lines. As such, while excluding women a priori from the pastorate is one injustice, it doesn’t follow that installing women instead of men as a rule is the appropriate remedy, but to begin asking questions about what moral qualities comprise a good pastor and looking for those in whom they are appearing, cultivating, supporting, and hiring those persons.