Since the Fall semester started back up, I’ve been stuck. Part of it is just the busyness of the ongoing semester, but that can’t be all there is to this. It’s not as if this is my first semester, or that this is the first time busyness has crept in. But it’s meant a slowdown to my public writing here in a way that has puzzled me until today.
Simply put, I think my slowdown has had to do with a feeling of modest despair. So much of the world is dominated—in the news cycle, in pressing conversation, in pastoral concern—with what. The what of the moral life—the commitments we hold, the postures we take, the habits we pick up—are of great importance. But they have become of nearly exclusive importance.
So much of what has been occupying my mind in the last few months is not the what, however, but the how. But—with respect to readership, cultural narratives, and church expectations—it feels almost pedantic to keep on picking at this scab, to keep asking why and how instead of what. And so, it becomes a continual question about why I bother.
A Brief Narrative of Why How and Not What
I indicated last week that I was putting the finishing touches on a manuscript, to be published with Eerdmans Publishing in 2027, on the Christian moral life. When I first conceived of this idea a few years ago, I wrote it as an experiment not in “what should Christians think about X”, but “how do we become the people that Christians aspire to be? Why do we struggle to get a handle on this?”
Along the way in the manuscript, I ground these more seemingly abstract questions in practical ones: how not fearing death affects how we approach assisted suicide, how the love of enemies affects what we say about antagonism. But as I wrote the manuscript, the how and why questions moved to the center.
Over the last two years, as I was working out this series and drafting these chapters, I was also spending time on a couple of projects with the Templeton Foundation. In that, I was learning how psychology and theology might interact, and particularly, how things like desire, disgust, and affection shape the moral decisions we make. The next book project that I hope to do was birthed out of this long period of asking how scarcity affects the way we think, desire, and choose.
All of this, of course, was on the back of the basic commitment of this Substack: to refuse having hot takes, and to explore what makes the Christian moral life tick. Four years ago, when I adopted that mantra, it was out of a desire to learn and to grow, instead of becoming a hot take machine. It was, again, a pursuit of the more basic questions of how and speculation about why rather than what.
This is not to say that the substance of ethics is irrelevant, so long as you have the method down. For most of my adult life, I have reluctantly voted with the Democrats, and one of the things that drives me crazy about them is their obsession with process and protocol: so long as you defend democratic process, you can get to terrible but democratically-legitimated places, or have moral victories because at least you followed the rules.
But the world we inhabit is outcome-obsessed. Whether it is the Congressional majorities laying waste to substantively good things (like public aid, PBS, and international assistance), educational policy obsessed with outcome-driven metrics, or churches drowning in sheer pragmatism, that what questions dominate the how questions at every turn. At every juncture, how becomes a servant to the what.
All of this has made it more important, I think, to ask the how and why questions: the world will not, of its own accord, stop accelerating1. In that acceleration, questions of what rise to the surface, precisely because the how and why seem to be so irrelevant to a fast-moving world. There’s no point in asking about process when people are going hungry, or asking about how we got to a place when the planet is heating up.
But this is precisely when you should ask about these things: because there will be an end to madness at some point, either because everything collapses, or because people cannot keep up with it and are compelled to ask about why we do what we do. As long as things function, the how and why don’t regularly get asked. But I think that’s precisely why we must ask them: apart from these questions, the what of our lives lose their reason.
The objection here is that turning to the how and why is just navel gazing: people are busy and need something actionable. I get that. But the obsession with action is, arguably, what makes us less human.
There is a venerable tradition, Byung-Chul Han writes, of looking to purposive action as what distinguishes the human from other animals. Hannah Arendt, drawing on Aristotle, proposed that free action is what makes for political life; those things which are free actions help give meaning to a world which would otherwise just be pure drudgery and necessity. In the ancient world, she writes, slaves were those defined by necessary work, and citizens defined by free, purposive action. To recover free action—to do this and not the other, to create and not simply to make routine copies—is tied up into being fully human.
The problem that Han identifies is that once action becomes that which defines us as humans, we have (to use my language) given ourselves entirely over to what: actions, and their intended outcomes, become not just that which are prized by societies, but those things which define us as freely acting humans. The contemplative—the stopping, having spaces of intended inactvity, of seeking out that which can only come to us but not be made to appear—is what helps the why and how to reappear as necessary partners. Stopping from action allows uneasy questions to appear, and for us to see the loose threads in the what that are hard to see when the what is flying by in a ceaseless blur. Without ceasing from activity, without space to allow questions with no immediate answers to bubble to the surface, we become ceaseless actors. And in that ceaseless action, all that matters is the what.
At that point of frantic activity, is there really a difference—as Arendt wanted to make—between necessary and free labor, between those things which must be done to keep the wheels on and those things which we do because they are deliberately arrived at? When action spins fast enough, it becomes mechanical, and it doesn’t matter whether you’ve assented to the action or not: the distinction between “free action” and “necessary action” is immaterial if you move things fast enough.
In an age dominated by what, where everything is an emergency, banging the drum on why and how feels very retrograde. But on we go: it is this, and not relentless action, that makes us human.
This, to my mind, is why Hartmut Rosa has one the most compelling accounts of the modern world and how secularization happens: acceleration of change makes older ways more easily dispensable, and we feel their loss less acutely the more things accelerate.
I've been writing a little bit more about agency and personal responsibility in recent years, and while I very much agree that "what" can never be divorced from "how," I'm curious about the kind of victimhood and passivity we're seeing on a massive scale in our digitally spectated world. "What" isn't everything–but it's certainly something, especially when we would prefer to believe we're victims of everything from algorithm to parental faults and failings to environmental disaster. How does "what" help us live actively into hope, rather than despair?
I think one of the reasons why I appreciate your public writing is precisely that you aren't a hot take machine, and you are doing the hard but important work of thinking through the why question, and drawing us back to it. The world of what is loud, insistent, and ever necessary, but there are also endless amounts of people writing about what every second. Why sits much deeper, like a current beneath the surface, but attention to the why shapes the course of not just the ephemera of our lives, but the whole of them, and the passages of the ages.
Keep at it.