Introduction
Recently, talking to myself in the car – which I do often – I asked myself a question. I asked, “soul, you have so many things to say and so little time to say it; instead of writing one or two essays a week, maybe fewer, why not just record yourself talking about the ideas you have, and at least then you’ll have an outlet.”
And that question bugged me. It bugged me because it brought up and interesting and powerful point…one I’ve thought on often. It’s best expressed in a little Latin aphorism: ars longa; vita brevis. Art is long; life is short. The point of this curious piece of Roman wisdom is that to be truly good at something is going to take a long time; to be great at something is the work of a lifetime. Moreover, it points out the simple truth that is so difficult for so many to accept which is that, “you can’t be an expert in everything.” As writers have oftentimes retorted to critics (many times in exasperation): you can’t write a book about everything. All history is selective history; all writing is selective writing.
I know it’s hard to believe in the podcast era, but truly good and meaningful thinking takes time. It takes time not only to think through issues, but to even be aware of them. It takes vast amounts of time if you want to say something intelligently and to then critically assess your own arguments so that you don’t sound like a fool.
Again, in the podcast era, in the time of hot-takes, it’s easy for us to forget that real thinking, real scholarship, to do well researched, well thought-out speaking and writing takes vast amounts of time. Granted, some people are content-machines. But people who are content-machines tend to be very widely read, are enormously intelligent, and have a gift for gab. Writing isn’t easy, but for some people it is natural, and for a very few people they have the natural talent and they’ve invested the work and dedication required to write well. They publish. They publish often. They seek-out and carefully consider criticism. They seek to improve.
But again, all this takes time, and the older I get the more I realize that time is the most valuable thing I have.
So I return to my question, since writing takes time, since I have so many ideas, so many concepts I want to explore and share and publish and get into conversation on, why bother writing? Why not just record podcasts or audioblogs?
The answer is simple. The answer is that writing, at least in our culture, is still the most precise and careful monologuing medium we have for sharing ideas. Podcasts and audioblogs and radio are excellent. But they tend to be disposable. They tend to lack precision. They tend to be live. And a live monologue can never be as well researched, as carefully prepared, and powerful as writing. Writing has the advantage of time. I can have an idea and spend years thinking through it, having conversations with friends and colleagues, researching, pondering, wondering, critiquing. I can start a writing project and not return to it for months, or even years.
Now, I’ll grant, that people who write like I do tend to be very time-bound. Essayists tend to be forgotten and a bit disposable. But essayists and their essays tend to survive and be relevant far longer than live monologuing. To this day, we still talk about and read Lord Acton. In fact, if you just do an internet search for famous essayists you’ll find a Who’s Who list of great writers and thinkers!
And the great thing about essays is that they can be a way for writers to experiment and explore ideas that are too novel or too radical to put into book form, but which would pass out of existence if they weren’t written. Tolkien and Tolstoy wrote wonderful essays on writing and theory. Samuel Johnson and Ben Franklin held the world in their hands with their experiments in writing. Essays, while less durable than magnum opus books can and do survive the test of time, because essays rarely attempt to provide the definitive answer on any topic – they’re invitations, they’re the appetizers to the intellectual and spiritual Babette’s Feast that we’re all invited to.
But that’s not the only reason why I write.
I write because well researched prose is not only the most powerful, durable, and experimental form of communication; but it also puts constraints on the author – namely me.
And all of us are aware of this. We tend, at least those of us with any impulse control, tend to communicate more carefully if the medium is long-form prose than if we’re spitting hot-takes or vomiting verbiage on the twitterbox. We tend to think more carefully not only about WHAT we say, but HOW we say it.
And I, for one, need the controls placed upon me. I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to let my mouth run away with me. I have a tendency to speak a bit too quickly. Maybe you’re better than me about that – indeed, I hope you are! But I need controls placed upon how I communicate.
Writing has the morbid power of reminding me of my own limitations and mortality. If I write I am prevented from talking about everything I want to talk about. I simply can’t say everything I want to say, if I have to type it out. And this almost certainly keeps me from saying some things that might be very interesting. It also keeps me from becoming a dilettante – the scourge of the intellectual world, and a species that has been blessed with the blessings of the breast and womb, because they are legion!
We have according to a quick Google search about 2.4 million podcasts out there, with 66 million podcasts available. Of those 2.4 million, how many of them are well-researched; which is a different question than how many need to exist? How many of them are the thoughts and ideas of someone who has something well-thought-out and meaningful to say? I am hesitant to hazard a guess, but I would, if forced, say fewer than half.
Social media have made all of us journalists – and the “like” and “share” buttons have made all of us overnight experts in any issue that tickles our fancy. Now, if you’re like me and you’re always right, this seems like a terrific boon! Because I have so many right things to say. The world is my oyster, as the kids say, all I have to do is to let my brilliance shine forth.
Except not really. I have a lot of dumb ideas. I have a lot of ideas that aren’t fit for print. I have some real stinkers. I sometimes answer in haste – to my shame. And yet it seems that the podcast has come and has replaced the blog or the essay and long-form journalism. And while there are some great podcasts out there, I don’t think this is a good thing. And I don’t think that this is something that’s good for our society – not because podcasts are bad, but because transitioning from an article-reading society to a podcast-listening society is not a transition without costs. Surrendering the written word for the spoken comes with a price. And that price is high.
Now, I’m all for orality! I think the spoken word is powerful and has benefits the written word hasn’t – I mean, I’m a preacher, for crying out loud! Obviously I believe in the spoken word. But we simply don’t perceive, receive, or integrate what we hear with the same level of criticism and care as we do the written. And moreover, because podcasts are so disposable, they are produced to so be. Which means they lack the precision and care that the essay has.
If I were told I needed to speak for three hours on a topic I know well, I would do very little preparation. If I were told to write a 500-word essay I would pore over every word! When you have all the time in the world you simply aren’t as careful. And it’s almost impossible, ask anyone who speaks for a living, to speak for 3 hours and not make a mistake. It’s almost impossible to speak for 3 hours and not say something you’re embarrassed about or regret or look back on later and realize that it was hasty, or ungenerous, or open to criticism because it was poorly defended, or poorly framed.
I have to write because writing provides guardrails that prevent me from giving in to the worse angels of my nature. I need to write because I need the discipline. I need to write because it keeps me honest.
Hot-takes
One of the worst parts of living in a culture of instant gratification and instantaneous communication is that it rarely excites the calmer, more well-reasoned, carefuller side of our cognition. Instantaneity is impulsive and impulsivity (while not necessarily bad) is always unplanned, and in the undisciplined, or even the disciplined who have a lapse in character, it reveals the worst parts of our nature. Impulse can also reveal the best parts of our nature. But most of us don’t have a whole lot of best to offer. Most of us haven’t cultivated the character to always act impulsively and morally reliably simultaneously.
And hot-takes feel good. Just responding impulsively rewards our dopaminergic system and gives us those sweet, sweet brain-juices. But, like many impulsive things that get involuntary juices flowing, it also leaves us cold and shamed, lying naked on the floor (metaphorically speaking…and literally).
And that’s my fear, or at least one of them, and perhaps the primary one, is that hot-takes and impulsive responses to “thing-that-happened” is leading us down the primrose path to functional idiocy. It’s not simply that it’s making us ruder and less tolerant. That’s bad enough. But the bigger, more long-lasting problem is that it’s training us to no longer even be capable of long, careful considered thought on any subject.
We lack the intellectual discipline to read something that’s well prepared. The existence of the expression TL;DR is itself a commentary on our culture. We want everything in soundbites. We want everything summarized. We want to just know the main-idea and the broadstrokes. We’re oh, so smart, and we’re so wise that we don’t need to actually consider an entire argument.
Worse than that, this is our pedagogical model, on top of everything else. We live in the internet age and so there has been a move away from learning facts. We despise the classics because we can summarize them. We don’t need to read Shakespeare because we know the narrative tropes. We don’t need to read Augustine, because we have our theology sorted. We think – if you can call it thinking, and if it ever rises to the level of actual cognition! – that we are so wise that we don’t need to actually read anything, but that we can simply hear a someone else’s version of the main idea and that’s enough to pass judgment.
And it simply isn’t. It isn’t for many reasons. One of the most important reasons being that even if we disagree, and even if we’re right to disagree with someone’s conclusions, they may give us insight into new ideas worthy of exploration; they may show us a new, and better method; they may help us discover ourselves – sometimes they simply are able to put in words something that we’ve only grasped at weakly and had premonitions and intuitions towards. And being able to put a word to an idea is the critical stage in having mastery over an idea and making it ours – of integrating something into our selves.
We need to read.
Also, there’s the added benefit that sometimes our minds will be changed for the better!
But if we only have arguments distilled and summarized into formats we’re familiar with, we can discard anything that challenges our preconceived notions because they aren’t really a challenge – they’re straw-men. Granted, strawmen make the best effigies, but that’s only a benefit if you’re an incindiarist. Alien (to use the technical term) modes of thought allow us, in some ways, to become someone else. That’s a very dangerous thing. But nothing good is risk free. Christianity, the gamble I’ve staked my entire life and eternity on, is fundamentally and irreducibly built on becoming someone else and allowing Someone Else to live in me and to live in Him.
As Christians, we should be on the forefront of careful reading. We should respect the notion of needing to become the other to truly understand the other. And yet Christians, and I’m including…nay, I’m confessing, that I fail to do that.
And when we allow the alien to remain alien we tend to be cruel.
You’ve forgiven a lot of self-indulgent autobiography if you’ve gotten thus far, so indulge me a little further. Believe it or not, I am a pretty compassionate person (at least for a man!) I truly do care about people. But I’m also the kind of person who believes that when something threatens the people I love it is my responsibility to kill it, to suffocate it, to strangle and throttle it and to post its head on a pike to warn off any other threats. And that’s not always a combination of personality traits that come off as winsome and caring.
I know myself well enough, and I’ve witnessed others enough to know that I and they – the word I’m looking for is “we” – often present our worst selves when we reply in haste. We manifest our most ignorant selves when we refuse to consider and simply dismiss.
Critical and Considered
What I’m not suggesting is that we put our guard down. We need to be sober and vigilant.
FAR too much that comes from the cool-kid pastors is just bad shepherding masquerading as being culturally sensitive and compassionate. We have the Word of God. We have the faith, once for all delivered to the saints. We have truth. And that means that we can and should read with a critical eye. We should be sober and vigilant…because lions, you see.
But sobriety and wakeful, watchfulness do not preclude reading. They preclude being a chump. They don’t prevent us from reading and writing with thoughtfulness and care.
Neil Young, a man I’ve never complimented before, has a brilliant line. He, mocking the Reagan era and what he perceived as greedy, militaristic, religious-right, moral majoritarianism said this:
We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
And that’s pretty clever. That line, a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand has always stuck with me. And I’m afraid that that’s all hot-take Christianity is. We have an army of soldiers waving weapons and protesting their good intentions. We’re all out there using our verbal vorpal-blades, hoping to dispose of our adversaries snicker snack, while we simultaneously rush to the moral high ground.
Now, I will say that there is, indeed a moral high ground in this culture and traditional Christianity is firmly footed on that plateau. And while there is no lack of problems in our culture I wonder if we’re struggling because, in some sense, we’re losing the messaging and marketing in the moralizing.
Don’t mistake me. I’m not saying abandon the moral high ground. I’m not saying we should back down one inch from Biblical truth. I’m simply saying that we can’t JUST be against things. Yes, be against things. We need to oppose baby-murder and genital mutilation and all the other ghoulish horrors going on. But we need to not only present the don’ts but the dos. We need to demonstrate that God’s way is the best way.
We need to show how there is flourishing and peace and prosperity in the way we wish people to go.
So, in light of these observations, let me propose a few proposals.
First, let’s have actual face-to-face conversations as often as possible.
Second, let’s seek to spend more time reading than viewing or listening.
Third, let’s support Christians who are taking the time to write careful, thoughtful, long-form essays.
Fourth, let us seek to simultaneously be inflexible on truth and compassionate to those who err.
Fifth, let us never give a moral don’t without explaining the blessings of obedience.
In closing, let’s consider the words of Jude:
But you, dear friends, by building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.
Be merciful to those who doubt; save others by snatching them from the fire; to others show mercy, mixed with fear—hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh.
To him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy— to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen.