Nathaniel

Nathaniel launched Difficult Run in November 2012 and ran the website alone until August 2013, when he invited the first Difficult Run Editors to join him in adding content to the site. Nathaniel has a background in math, systems engineering, and economics, and his day job is in business analytics. His real interests are science fiction, and theology, however. He is an avid runner, but not a very fast one. He is married to fellow DREditor Ro and they have two little children. In addition to Difficult Run, Nathaniel blogs regularly for Times And Seasons and writes a lot of reviews on Goodreads.

Spiritual Warfare

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Detail of St Michael defeating Lucifer's army, a common image of spiritual warfare. Painting by Luca Giordano. Wikimedia Commons.
Detail of St Michael defeating Lucifer’s army, a common image of spiritual warfare. Painting by Luca Giordano. Wikimedia Commons.

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

In his talk Be Valiant in the Fight of Faith Elder McConkie is unabashed in his embrace of the rhetoric of war. “Be valiant,” he says, “Fight a good fight. Stand true. Keep the commandments. Overcome the world.” And lest you think that words like “fight” and “overcome” are too subtle to be conclusive, a couple of paragraphs later he is even more clear:

As members of the Church, we are engaged in a mighty conflict. We are at war. We have enlisted in the cause of Christ to fight against Lucifer and all that is lustful and carnal and evil in the world. We have sworn to fight alongside our friends and against our enemies, and we must not be confused in distinguishing friends from foes. As another of our ancient fellow apostles wrote: “Know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.”

This kind of us-vs-them logic is not very popular these days, but Elder McConkie was not shy about it, stating:

We are either for the Church or we are against it. We either take its part or we take the consequences. We cannot survive spiritually with one foot in the Church and the other in the world. We must make the choice. It is either the Church or the world. There is no middle ground. And the Lord loves a courageous man who fights openly and boldly in his army.

I want to make a couple of observations about this. First, it would be a mistake to write off the strong language of Elder McConkie as peculiar to his personality or to the particular time (the Cold War 1970s). The black-and-white view is not unique to his writing. It is a pervasive strain within scriptures. The quote above (“Know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God?”) comes from James 4:4. Another stark example comes from Nephi: “Behold there are save two churches only; the one is the church of the Lamb of God, and the other is the church of the devil.”[ref]1 Nephi 14:10[/ref] And of course Jesus himself made the same kind of dichotomy, as in “If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.”[ref]John 15:19[/ref]

Second, we don’t need to water down these stark statements to avoid crazy extremism like occupying federal buildings. The war is real, but it is “not against flesh and blood, but against… spiritual wickedness in high places.”[ref]Ephesians 6:12[/ref] Or, to cite a couple of non-scriptural sources, we’ve got Sirius Black declaring, “the world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. We’ve all got both light and dark inside us.” Or, even more eloquently, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

There is a war. In that war there are only two sides. At any time, a person is fighting for either the light or for the dark. We do not need to mitigate or explain away or rationalize the teaching that the world is at war, but we do need to understand it.

So, what is the point? If we’re in a war, but that war is not like a historical war with armies and swords or guns, then what’s the point of talking about war? One of the best explanations of this comes from one of my all-time favorite blog posts: The Military Mental Model of Mormonism. In it, MC explains precisely why viewing the conflict as a war is practically relevant in our day-to-day lives, and contrasts the “military mental model” with the “schoolhouse model.” Neither is the complete and total truth—the struggle of our mortal existence does involve leaning—but the military mental model has some particular insights that make it indispensable. I strongly urge you to read the entire post, but I’ll just summarize one of MC’s points (he makes three) which is that the military mental model answers the question: “Am I really going to be kept out of heaven for drinking coffee/wearing a bikini/watching vulgar movies? Is God really that uptight?” MC explains that:

… in the military model it’s a silly question. “I’m really going to get killed for not wearing my helmet during our transport to the base?” Maybe you will, maybe you won’t; depends whether you get attacked along the way or hit a roadside bomb. The rule is there to protect you, not to evaluate you. There will likely be many bikini-wearers in the Kingdom of Heaven (well, former bikini-wearers). But not everyone who makes the choice to dress immodestly will find that decision to be so free of spiritual consequences, as “way leads on to way.” It’s not fair. One guy never wears his helmet and never gets hit. The other takes it off just for a second to wipe his sweat and takes a bullet. That’s war. [emphasis added]

Lastly, I think it’s abundantly clear that Elder McConkie understood all of this, which is why the practical side of his talk is about self-examination. He doesn’t talk about how to identify if someone else is on the right side or not, but how to question if we ourselves are fighting valiantly with a long list of questions we are to use to gauge our own place in the war, not anybody else’s.

My approach to reading the council of prophets and general authorities is simple: I’m greedy about it. I don’t want to pick and choose. To the extent possible, I want to synthesize all of it into a single, cohesive, harmonious world-view: the scriptures, the General Conference talks, my personal experiences and beliefs, and everything I learn or think I understand about science, philosophy, history, psychology, and everyday life. I don’t have containers or boundaries: I want to incorporate it all.

It’s a tricky, error-prone process, and it’s never finished.[ref]Not in this lifetime, anyway.[/ref] There are always pieces that don’t fit quite right where I’ve placed them, pieces left over with no place to go, and holes in the model I’m building with no pieces that seem to fit there. The errors come from lots of places. Even if we believed scripture were absolutely perfect,[ref]As Mormons, we don’t.[/ref] I would still have to interpret and apply the words I read, and that introduces errors due to my own imperfections and limitations. Add to that the fact that the scriptures were written in languages I don’t know for audiences of cultures that are alien to me, and you can see how my problems multiply. Then, for good measure, toss in the fact that these leaders[ref]I’m thinking of General Conference talks in particular now[/ref] aren’t perfect and, for that matter, are given general rather than specific council.

All of this means we have plenty of excuses to set aside the council that seems outdated, naïve, or even embarrassing. I get it. All I can say is: stay greedy. Hold onto as much of it as you can. And the parts that don’t make sense just yet; set them aside if you must for the time being, but don’t discard them and don’t give up on the hope of one day seeing things in a new light and being able to make sense of them after all.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Appreciating Elder Maxwell

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Mediawiki Commons
Mediawiki Commons

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Before I even finished reading Elder Maxwell’s talk from this session[ref]the Friday morning session of the October 1974 General conference[/ref] I had to fire off an email to my mum, dad, and wife. The subject line was just “I see why everyone loved Elder Maxwell” and the body was just, “This talk is awesome.”[ref]With a link to the talk.[/ref]

As it turns out, Why Not Now? is not Elder Maxwell’s first talk in General Conference. I found a list here, and his first GC talk was in 1970, which is before the first session covered by the General Conference Odyssey. He spoke again in April 1974, but I confess that talk did not leave much of an impression on me. The talk—Response to a Call—was just that: a reaction to his calling as an Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve.

But this talk, Why Not Now?, was something different. I think I highlighted more of the talk than I didn’t. I was bowled over by both his sincere love: “to such individuals [those who “do not participate fully in the Church”]… be assured there is a real craving for your companionship and a genuine need for your unique strengths.” And then I was knocked over again by the passion of his message. Writing that “if… you really do not wish to commit now” he gave a list of things such individuals should avoid if they want to maintain their position half-in, half-out of the Church, including:

Do not look too deeply into the eyes of the pleasure-seekers about you, for if you do, you will see a certain sadness in sensuality, and you will hear artificiality in the laughter of licentiousness.

Do not look too deeply, either, into the motives of those who deny God, for you may notice their doubts of doubt.

Do not risk thinking the unthinkable, lest you find yourself drawn with a deep and powerful pull toward the reality that God does exist, that he loves you, and that finally there is no escaping him or his love!

I’m not going to write anything else about this talk. I’m just going to urge anyone and everyone who is reading this post to make time today to go and read the full talk. It’s worth it.

And as for me? I’m really looking forward to reading many, many more talks from Elder Maxwell in the future.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Trump’s Utah Problem: A Going Concern

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always-never-trump

Like a lot of #NeverTrumpers, I was really excited when Nate Silver’s 538 ran articles like How Evan McMullin Could Win Utah And The Presidency and Polls May Be Underestimating Evan McMullin’s Chances in Utah in late October. Trump’s “Mormon problem” had been an ongoing feature of the 2016 campaign[ref]See McKay Coppins Donald Trump’s Mormon Problem at the NYT for an overview.[/ref] and–back when I was sure Hillary Clinton would win–I wanted nothing more than for Utah to buck the trend and refuse to go for Trump.

It didn’t happen. When the dust settled, not only had Trump carried the presidency, but he’d also carried Utah by a wide margin: he took 46.8% of the vote, compared to 27.8% for Clinton and 20.4% for McMullin. So much for the “Mormon problem,” I guess.

Not so fast.

As my friend Nate Oman wrote a couple of days ago, one way to look at how Trump fared in Utah this year is to compare how much of the vote he got in 2016 vs. how much the Republican candidate (Mitt Romney) got in 2012. You could call this gap the “vote swing,” and if you really want to know if there’s any substance to the idea of a “Mormon problem,” you’ve got to compare Utah’s vote swing to the vote swings for the rest of the country. This is how that looks:

The data from this table came from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016

This is definitely an interesting chart. You can see, for example, that Clinton had a negative swing in almost every single state, whereas Trump had a mixture of positive and negative swings. But–for the question at hand–we can see quite clearly that Trump’s negative swing in Utah is unlike anything else (for either candidate) in this election.

Quick technical note before we move on. If there were only two candidates in 2016 and in 2012, then one candidate’s negative swing would equal another candidate’s positive swing, but that’s not the case. Although third parties didn’t have a major impact on the national level, McMullin took over 20% of Utah’s votes. That’s why Trump has such a starkly negative swing for 2016, but Clinton’s positive swing is quite small.

Now, before we move on, you might be suspicious. After all, Mitt Romney wasn’t just any Republican candidate in 2012. He was a specifically Mormon candidate, so maybe it’s not so much that Trump has a huge Mormon problem as it is that Mitt Romney just did unusually well in 2012. Well, based on the data, that’s not really the case. Romney took 74.6% of Utah’s votes in 2012 and McCain took only 64.5% in 2008, but in 2004 Bush did just about as well as Romney with 73.3% of the votes, and he also did quite well in 200 with 68.3%. So the Romney-Trump swing was 27.6%, but if we used the average of non-Romney Republican candidates over the previous few elections, the swing is still 21.7%, much higher than any other swing in 2016. In short: Mormons disliked Trump a lot more than they liked Romney.

Nate was curious to get a bit more historical context, however, and so he sent me a data set containing the electoral results for every presidential election going back to 1828. I ran some very quick analysis at the time, and he posted an addendum here. I’ve had a bit more time to go through the data since then, however, and so I want to share a few more observations of my own.

First, a couple more notes. I couldn’t actually use all of the data from 2016-1828 because in several cases there were third parties (or even fourth parties) that attracted significant votes. The whole idea of “vote swing” only works if you’re dealing with basically two candidates from the same parties. So I only included pairs of consecutive elections where:

  • Third parties captured 5% or less of the national vote in both elections
  • The candidates from the primary two parties were from the same party in both elections

Doing this left me with 20 pairs of elections to look at. Since the data is older than some states, I ended up with 971 individual elections. Finally, to keep things a little simpler, I only used one vote swing for each year. In those years where there were no third party candidates at all, this was simple, because whatever votes one candidate gains come from the other candidate, and so the vote swings are equal anyways. (One is positive, one is negative.) Since I included some elections where third party candidates took up to 5%, I couldn’t rely on the vote swings being identical, so instead I just took the absolute value of the maximum vote swing.

OK, methodological notes aside, here’s what the histogram of vote swings looks like for all the eligible elections between 2016 and 1828:

same-party-vote-swing-histogram

From this chart, you can see that the vast majority of vote swings are less than 10%, and that a vote swing of over 27% is very rare but not unprecedented. To be exact, there were 932 vote swings less than Utah’s 2016 swing and 38 vote swings more than Utah’s 2016 swing. That puts Utah’s vote swing this year in the 96th percentile.[ref]If we use the average of the last 4 elections without Romney and get a Utah swing of 21.7% instead of 27.6%, that’s still in the 92nd percentile.[/ref]

So that makes the 2016 defection from Trump very unusual, but far from unprecedented. There were larger swings than Utah’s 2016 swing in elections from 1976, 1964, 1952, 1948, 1932, 1920, and 1900. However, when we look at those years, something else pops out of the data that makes the Utah swing this year even more unusual.

save-party-vote-swings-1976-1948

 

same-party-vote-swings-1932-1900

So the thing that should be sticking out in both of these charts is that in the other years with major vote swings, these were national or regional phenomena. I’ll make a few annotations to see if I can draw that out:

same-party-vote-swings-1976-1948-ann

So, in the years where there were bigger vote swings than Utah’s in 2016, there were much bigger vote swings across the nation as a whole and there were significant spikes in multiple states (usually states in the Deep South, for obvious historical reasons.) What sets Utah apart is not just that the anti-Trump vote swing was very high, but also that it happened in a year where the rest of the vote swing was actually pretty mild and that it was localized in just a single state.

There’s another way to measure that, by the way, which is to look at the difference between the maximum vote swing and the 2nd highest vote swing. So the all-time greatest vote swing was in Mississippi in 1948 at 83.5%, but during the same election Alabama had a vote swing of 81.7%.[ref]Other states were involved as well: South Carolina with a vote swing of  71.0% and Louisiana with a vote swing of 47.9%.[/ref] So the gap between the highest vote swing and the second-highest was really small: just 1.8 percentage points.

Contrast that with 2016. Utah had a 27.6% swing and the next-highest was 11.9% in North Dakota. The gap between the two was 15.6%. It turns out, that was higher than the gap between the largest and second-largest swing in any other election year.

So that “Mormon problem” that everyone was talked about? Even though Trump managed to take Utah, it’s still totally a thing. He suffered a historically large election-over-election vote swing as Utah voters abandoned the GOP for third parties, for the Democrats, or to just stay home. It’s not the resounding repudiation I’d hoped for with an Evan McMullin win, but it’s still a pretty clear signal.

And, before we wrap this up, it’s worth noting that when it comes to Mormons’ anti-Trump sentiment, the feeling is mutual. Just yesterday, Trump picked Steve Bannon as his senior adviser (think: Karl Rove). Bannon was the CEO of Trump’s campaign and, before that, he took over Breitbart after founder Andrew Breitbart passed away and turned it into the alt-right mouthpiece it is today. Along the way, he’s taken pot-shots at Mormons more than once, including calling Mitt Romney’s sons out for serving full-time missions and running an anti-Mormon, anti-immigration piece from Tom Tancredo. With Evan McMullin continuing his conservative insurgency and Trump placing anti-Mormon advisers in top positions, the Mormon/Republican rift is unlikely to narrow–let alone heal completely–any time soon.[ref]Jonah Goldberg of the National Review has some cogent thoughts on this one.[/ref]

never-trump

Get to Work

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

If there was a theme to the closing session of the April 1974 General Conference, this was it: get to work. I can’t think of a better way to summarize a series of talks that really focused on just going out to do the hard things that we’re supposed to do: paying tithing, going on missions, and bearing testimonies. Towards the end of this session, (then) Elder Spencer W. Kimball shared an anonymous quote that went along with that theme:

Someone said, “Many people are willing to plod along for 16 to 20 years, from grade one to a Ph.D., to learn medicine or engineering or psychology or mathematics or sociology or biology—to study, research, attend classes, pay tuitions, accept help from teachers and professors—and yet to learn about God, the maker of all, the author of it all, in a few intermittent prayers and some very limited hours of research, they feel they can find the truths about God.”

It was a good reminder for me to check my priorities, especially on this week. We’ve been doing the General Conference Odyssey for almost a year now, and one of the most consistent and consistently surprising things I’ve learned is how much I can like or dislike a session almost entirely based on my attitude when I read it.

This past Sunday I taught two lessons (Gospel Doctrine and also Elder’s Quorum) and—with all the lesson prep—I didn’t get to my General Conference talks until later than I wanted to. I has zero desire to be reading the talks. I knew—as I was going through them—that I wasn’t getting very much out of them. I did it anyway.

The best case scenario: you do the right thing, for the right reasons, with the right spirit. Next-best case scenario: you just do the right thing any old way you can. I prefer that to quitting. I’m glad I frog-marched myself through those talks so that I could keep going. But I’m even more glad when I can approach the talks with some time, some real attention, and be open to learning.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Leaders Who Are Not Very Righteous

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“I do not want you to think that I’m very righteous, for I am not. There was one good man, and his name was Jesus.” – Joseph Smith

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

From the Sunday morning session of the April 1974 General Conference, it was Elder Boyd K. Packer’s talk We Believe All That God Has Revealed that caught my attention. Elder Packer has a reputation for being stern and doctrinaire that—to my mind—seems undeserved. In this talk, for example, he not only quotes from Hugh Nibley but also states flatly that Joseph Smith—aside from acting as a conduit for revelution—“was otherwise an ordinary man, as were the prophets in ancient times and as are the prophets in our day.”

This is an important perspective to keep in mind, especially when the other talks sometimes verge on the hagiographic. I dislike it when folks use needlessly complex words, but I like “hagiography.” It means “the writing of the lives of saints” or, in common usage, “biography that idealizes its subject.” So, it’s a useful word to employ when it comes to how Mormons sometimes interact with our leaders. There is a tendency to hero worship that we don’t always do a good enough job of avoiding.

Whenever new General Authorities start waxing poetic about how much they love each other and how great they all are, I confess to feeling a little alienated. It makes me uncomfortable when they testify to each other’s positive qualities, much as I’m uncomfortable when people get up and bear testimonies of their friends or family in the ward. I honestly don’t care that much if the General Authorities are good people. Joseph Smith said, “I do not want you to think that I’m very righteous, for I am not. There was one good man, and his name was Jesus.” That is my concern.

I believe in loyalty to the Church and in obedience to the leaders, but they can neither earn nor disqualify themselves from that loyalty and obedience because it has nothing to do with them. I owe everything to my Savior. When He calls representatives to serve in His Church I follow them out of my devotion to Him, not because I think they are particularly wise or spiritual people. I hope they are, but it’s not really my concern one way or the other.[ref]The Catholic writer Graham Greene expressed this concept eloquently in one of my favorite novels: The Power and the Glory.[/ref]

But before anyone gets too excited about agreeing with me or disagreeing with me on this point, I think it’s wise to keep in mind that it’s almost always possible to miss the mark in either of two directions. Speaking of acquiring a testimony of the scriptures, Elder Packer said in the same talk that:

There are those who have made a casual, even an insincere effort to test the scriptures and have come away having received nothing, which is precisely what they have earned and what they deserve. If you think it will yield to a casual inquiry, to idle curiosity, or even to well-intentioned but temporary searching, you are mistaken. It likewise will not yield to the overzealous or to the fanatic.

You can miss the mark by not trying hard enough, by being casual, insincere, or even lazy. But you can also miss the mark by trying too hard, by being overzealous or fanatic.

If you preach a sermon only on the peril of blind belief and fanaticism, you’re going to risk misleading or enabling those who already have a tendency towards taking an insincere interest in their testimonies. If you preach a sermon only on the peril of casualness and insincerity, you’re going to risk providing ammunition to the zealots.

So I am more bothered by the tendency towards hero-worship in the Church. But it seems plain to me that there’s also a problem—and probably a far larger problem—of members who don’t take the leaders and their council seriously enough. It’s not an either-or. It’s even quite possible that I go too far in my sense of alienation and in my skepticism towards the hagiographic approach to our leaders. If that’s the case, then I rely on the Savior to bring me into line as I continue to follow Him and sustain His leaders.

There are two more quotes I want to mention from his talk. First, he said that in order to learn of the scriptures, “one must, of necessity, move from criticism to spiritual inquiry.” Our society is hyper-critical and drowning in irony. That is because irony and criticism are safe. A critic is always detached from and opposed to the thing he considers, and never risks being accused of foolishness because he never fully accepts or embraces anything. This is short-run wisdom and long-run folly. In the end, if you have not fully given yourself to anything in this life, then what was the point?

The pretext of superiority that comes with an attitude of cynical detachment or hardened irony is just that: a pretext. Understanding requires love, and love requires risk. We have to be willing to venture if we want to gain.

Then:

When a humble man bears testimony based on spiritual inquiry and righteous living, be careful before you repudiate his witness because he is otherwise unlearned. Many an academic giant is at once a spiritual pygmy and, if so, he is usually a moral weakling as well. Such a man may easily become a self-appointed member of a wrecking crew determined to destroy the works of God.

I’ve got an uneasy relationship with the term “intellectual.” I like to analyze and think and ponder and talk about ideas. If I could get paid to do it, I would do nothing but take classes in linguistics and philosophy and history and physics and math and computer science and psychology for the rest of my life. So maybe I am an intellectual. But I’m pretty profoundly disappointed with what passes for academic discourse—in the secular world and also within the religious community—and so I have to confess to a predisposition to agree with Elder Packer. After all, I think the ambiguous relationship between intelligence and learning is rather baked into our scripture, with “the glory of God is intelligence” on the one hand, but also the pointedly conditional, “to be learned is good if [you] hearken unto the counsels of God.” These days, it seems like most of the counsel from PhD-holding Mormons tends to flow the wrong way. We’ve got an embarrassment of riches when it comes to councilors willing to tell Christ’s Church how to amends its policies and teachings.

And—last of all—a quick quote from a different talk. In Build Your Shield of Faith, Elder L. Tom Perry said, speaking of his siblings as they were growing up with faithful parents, “While our shield was being made strong, theirs was always available, for they were available and we knew it.” I love the image of parents extending their own shields of faith over their children to give their kids time to grow their own shields before going out to face a hostile and treacherous—but also beautiful and promising—world.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Victimhood Culture Metastasizes

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dts-lonely-commute

One of the most important papers for understanding the political climate we live in is “Microaggression and Moral Cultures” by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning.[ref]The article made a splash–it was covered in The Atlantic, among other places–and we covered Jonathan Haidt’s reaction to it here at Difficult Run back in September of last year. You can download the full paper for free, however, and you should do that.[/ref]

In the article, Campbell and Manning explore three stages in the evolution of moral culture:

  • Honor culture
  • Dignity culture
  • Victimhood culture

The essence of honor culture is reputation. That is because–in a society without a strong, centralized authority–the best defense against predation is a reputation for drastic overreaction. If people believe you will overreact to any provocation, they are less likely to provoke you. Unfortunately, when everybody is trying to build a reputation for toughness and overreaction at the same time, “people are verbally aggressive and quick to insult other.” This causes damage to reputation, and so we have “a high frequency of violent conflict as participants in the culture aggressively compete for respect.”

When strong, formal authorities begin to emerge, the logic of the honor culture dissipates. If someone insults you and you react by physically assaulting them, then–in the presence of a strong authority–you’re going to end up getting punished more harshly than they are. When there is a legitimate criminal justice system to handle major offenses, the best response to a minor offense is to simply ignore it. As a result, reputation is not as important in dignity cultures. In an honor culture, appealing to an outside authority is a sign of weakness. In a dignity culture, failing to appeal to an outside authority is taking the law into your own hands.

The transition from an honor culture to a dignity culture is vitally important, because a dignity culture has a much greater capacity for pluralism. Free speech is more than a legal framework or a constitutional right, it’s also a tradition. In a dignity culture, where having a thick skin is encouraged, that tradition can flourish because minor conflicts and disagreements don’t carry the risk of exploding into open hostility and violence.

Victimhood culture is an outgrowth of dignity culture that combines the worst of honor and dignity cultures. It is “characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight combined with a heavy reliance on third parties.” The “sensitivity to slight” comes straight from honor culture, and the “heavy reliance on third parties” comes straight from dignity culture. The basic idea of victimhood culture is to manipulate third parties[ref]These third parties can be formal authorities (like university administrators) or sympathetic crowds (like a a Twitter mob).[/ref] to intervene in a dispute on your side by appearing to be the victim.

The bigger the apparent injustice, the greater the chance of persuading a third party to take your side and the more drastic the action you can convince them to take on your behalf. Victimhood culture, then, is fundamentally about manufacturing and maintaining the highest degree of apparent victimhood. As Campbell and Manning point out, one simple way to achieve this is through the use of outright hoaxes and “hate crime hoaxes are common on college campuses.”[ref]Other tactics include hunger strikes and protest suicides which increase the apparent injustice by increasing the actual damage suffered.[/ref]

The gold standard in victim culture, however, is the microagrresion. Microaggressions are essentially a form of bundling. First, you bundle individual instances of minor offenses into larger patterns. Second, you bundle individual people (victims and perpetrators alike) into larger cohorts. By using this approach, an isolated and incidental comment from one individual to another becomes a symptom of systematic oppression of one entire category of people by another category. These forms of bundling are important, as we will see at the end, because they forge a link between victimhood culture and identity politics.

According to Campbell and Manning, one of the results of the rise of victimhood culture is a “clash between competing moral systems” as dignity culture and victimhood culture come into conflict. This is certainly true. Progressive social justice theories like Critical Race Theory “[reject] the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy,”[ref]What is Critical Race Theory?[/ref] which are the heritage of dignity culture. There is no doubt that victimhood culture–championed by progressive social justice ideology–is incompatible with dignity culture.

This is why so much of the push-back against second-wave political correctness has been bipartisan.[ref]For a sample, see the second section of my article: When Social Justice Isn’t About Justice.[/ref] There are plenty on the left of American politics who still cling to old-fashioned notions of liberalism like freedom of expression, the marketplace of ideas, and the dignity of individuals. Aligned with conservatives who share these concerns, they form a bipartisan coalition that is engaged in the conflict Campbell and Manning predicted: dignity culture attempting to hold off the insurgent victimhood culture.

But there is another conflict going on as well. The most vociferous push-back against progressive social justice ideology (and ostensibly the victimhood culture it embraces) comes from the alt-right. What is notable about this push-back, however, is that instead of genuinely objecting to victimhood culture, the alt-right has embraced a re-branded version of it. The best example of this is the most obvious: Donald Trump’s promise to “make America great again” and his obvious appeal to white grievance.

Just as with the progressive social justice movement, Trump’s appeal works because it has enough truth in it to give it the feel of veracity. One of the best explanation of this comes (believe it or not) from a Cracked article: How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind. The article (which includes lots of non-censored swearing) does a fantastic job of outlining the legitimate grievance of white, rural America.

Which leads me to an essential side-note: it is possible for the world to simultaneously get worse for both the minorities that liberals care about (black, Hispanic, women, and LBTQ Americans) and the group that Trump and the alt-right appeal to (rural, white Americans). I recently had simultaneous stories in my Facebook feed about white highschoolers putting a noose around a black student’s neck and another about how Berkeley students barricade bridge, force whites to cross creek. These two stories neither cancel out nor justify each other.

One of the things that contemporary theories of racism as systematized prejudice and discrimination fail to appreciate is that in the United States there is more than one system. The legacies of systemic oppression of racial minorities are absolutely still in place. My review of The New Jim Crow should leave no doubt about where I stand on that. But the existence of systematized anti-black discrimination in the criminal justice system does not obviate, cancel out, or justify the creation of anti-white (usually: anti-poor-rural-conservative-white) discrimination in other systems, like academia in general or social psychology in particular.

So this is where we stand: in the battle of victimhood culture against dignity culture, Trump and the alt-right are not fighting against the so-called social justice warriors. They are–with their grievance-based, identity-centric campaigns–quite literally part of the problem. They are fighting fire-with-fire while the whole world burns down.

Along these lines, David Marcus’s recent Federalist piece (How Anti-White Rhetoric is Fueling White Nationalism) is a must-read. In it, Marcus attacks another prong of the progressive social justice approach to race, writing that a shift to emphasizing privilege amounts to “ask[ing] white people to be more tribal” and is even “abetting white supremacy.” Marcus points out that the number of active Ku Klux Klan chapters more than doubled (from 72 to 190) just between 2014 and 2015, and argues that “one of the key components of this racism is the almost-daily parade of silly micro-aggressions and triggers.” He adds:

Young white men, reacting to social and educational constructs that paint them as the embodiment of historical evil, are fertile ground for white supremacists. They are very aware of the dichotomy between non-white culture, which must be valued at all times (even in the midst of terror attacks), and white culture, which must be criticized and devalued. They don’t like it.

It may seem like a stretch to draw parallels between ill-advised anti-racism efforts and the alt-right (let alone the KKK), but here’s a headline that might give you pause: Cal State LA offers segregated housing for black students. According to the article, the decision came after the Black Student Union cited “microaggressions” as part of their call for “housing space delegated for Black students.”

Journalism student Aeman Ansari recently made a similar case in the Huffington Post, justifying the expulsion of student journalists from an event because those journalists were white and arguing that safe spaces are different because “segregation was imposed on people of colour by people of privilege, not the other way around.” That’s a legitimate difference, but it doesn’t erase this fact that the two groups of people in America who think whites and blacks should not mix are the KKK and progressive social justice activists. The different terminology–safe space vs. segregated space–and the differing power dynamics can’t efface the fact that both of them have the goal of racial separation.

It is a genuine tragedy that–after such great (albeit incomplete) progress towards racial equality in this country–we are now seeing a resurgence of the kind of hardcore, strident racism that has not been prevalent for decades. But this is where we are today.

Victimhood culture, as Campbell and Manning note, originated with the political left because “the narrative of oppression and victimization is especially congenial to a leftist worldview.” However, there is nothing about the tactics of victimhood culture that dictate it must remain exclusively an artifact of the left, and it has not. “Naturally,” Campbell and Manning observe, “whenever victimhood…. confers status, all sorts of people will want to claim it.” White identity politics is a natural and inevitable response to minority identity politics, and it follows basically the same playbook.

So, while victimhood culture was initially created by left-wing activists in college campuses, it has metastasized and spread throughout American society. Because it is such an effective political weapon, it is has proved irresistable to many of the folks who originally set out to destroy it.[ref]In this reading, the alt-right is Boromir, and they have the Ring.[/ref] Based on grievances both real and imaginary, the alt-right has embraced the logic and tactics of victimhood culture. Because victimhood culture is fueled by identity politics and tribalism, the rise in the co-option of victimhood culture by the alt-right necessarily entails a reawakening of old-school racism the likes of which we have not seen openly promulgated for decades, if not more.

I agree with the solution that Marcus proposes, and it’s a solution that applies not only to the resurgence of racism in the US but to the broader problems plaguing our society. He writes that “our anti-racism efforts must be refocused away from guilt and confession and towards equality and eradicating irrational judgments based on race…we must return to the goal of treating people as individuals, not as representatives of their race.”

I would only add that this vision could be expanded even farther: we must treat people as individuals, not as representative of their race, gender, political party, or any other kind of identity-tribe.

 

We Too Are Fathers

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Father bonding with newborn daughter by Kiefer.Wolfowitz under CC BY-SA 3.0. Click for original file.
Father bonding with newborn daughter by Kiefer.Wolfowitz under CC BY-SA 3.0. Click for original file.

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

One of the talks from the priesthood session of the April 1974 General Conference stood out to me, and that was Elder Marion D. Hanks’ talk Boys Need Men. I took the title of this post from one of the lines of his talk: “Only God knows the worth of a boy, but we too are fathers, and we have an inkling.”

Some of that sentiment is universal. He could have as easily said, speaking to a more general audience, “Only Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother know the worth of a child, but we too are parents, and we have an inkling,” and that would have been just as true. I love that sentiment, and the idea that—as parents—our highest calling is to emulate our Heavenly Parents and provide our children with the love, support, and challenges to foster their growth and happiness.

Along those universal lines, Elder Hanks went on:

Every individual is a kind of an omnibus carrying with him all the past that has gone into his making, all the potential in him for influencing the present, and he has, in addition, the sobering reality to face that he carries within himself the seeds of the future.

But there is also something unmistakably specific about fathers and boys as opposed to mothers and daughters, and that was also part of Elder Hanks’ message:

Boys need men to learn from, men to be with who understand their need for activities that are challenging and socially and spiritually constructive and that stretch them and give them a chance to learn manly skills, men to love and who love them, men who are models of what a man ought to be. The father should be the first line of strength, and a boy blessed with such a father is fortunate indeed.

He even specifically stated that “we have no lack of appreciation for the wonderful influence of mothers and other noble women in guiding boys. . .but it takes men to make men.” And I believe that’s true. We’ve even written about that at Difficult Run before, for example here and here.

In fact, that’s one of the most important things that Mormonism—as a religion and also as an institution and a culture—does for its members. It provides a template for pro-social, principled masculinity (and femininity). And I think that’s essential for our growth as human beings. We are social beings, and to live vibrant lives we should understand ourselves as unique individuals, as part of non-universal group (and the groups: male and female are the most fundamental such groups), and as part of a universal collective. Those are the three fundamental levels of human experience: alone, part of an exclusive us, and part of an inclusive us.

Coming back to the talk, here are two more quotes that I really liked:

How foolish we are if we reserve to ourselves, or for others than our own children, the knowledge and testimony of the gospel we have gained. They, no less than others, need and deserve this from us.

And then:

It is no small thing to reestablish confidence and faith in a man at a critical point in his life when he has failed and is full of self-doubt.

And then a final thought that gives me both direction and hope in my life:

God bless you boys to appreciate your dads, to be patient and gracious and forgiving.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

The Opposite of Uncertainty

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Modern man must replace uncertainties and doubt with a desire to know more of Jesus.

This statement, from Elder Haight’s talk What Does Jesus Mean to Modern Man?, has been stuck in my brain for days now. It confounds expectations. Certainty is the opposite of uncertainty, right? But we can’t manufacture certainty.

Or rather, we can, but it’s a terrible idea. Manufacturing certainty preempts faith and precludes growth. Pretending to know—when really you don’t know—is worse than blind belief, it’s like gouging out your spiritual eyes. Real conviction is not something we claim. It’s something we’re given. And—like any blessing—it’s not the kind of thing that we are necessarily given right away, the moment we ask for it.

And so if you are struggling with doubt and uncertainty, you can’t just replace them with knowledge and certainty because you want to. So, from a practical standpoint, what can you do?

I can think of no better approach than what Elder Haight suggests.

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The Paths We Walk

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

One of the most memorable of the talks I’ve read so far was Lost Battalions, which I read near the start of the General Conference Odyssey. The talk was by (then) Elder Thomas Monson. He has been serving as an apostle since 1963, when he was just 36 years old. That’s longer than I’ve been alive by almost two full decades. And yet because (to be perfectly honest) I haven’t paid such close attention to GC talks in the past, I’m only now beginning to get a real feel for his voice. And there’s more to it than just “tells stories.”

His talk for this week was called The Paths Jesus Walked, and it was filled with a lot of the same pathos as his earlier talk about the Lost Battalion. He described how Jesus walked the paths of disappointment, temptation, and pain. Not exactly cheery stuff, but definitely uplifting and encouraging when we feel our own paths are not all sunshine and roses:

Yes, each of us will walk the path of disappointment, perhaps due to an opportunity lost, a power misused, or a loved one not taught. The path of temptation, too, will be the path of each. . . Likewise shall we walk the path of pain. We cannot go to heaven in a feather bed. The Savior of the world entered after great pain and suffering. We, as servants, can expect no more than the Master. Before Easter there must be a cross.

I think I have heard somewhere—and I wish I could remember it—that because the Savior suffered, he made suffering sacred. Sometimes things just happen. Sometimes we or others make choices that inflict needless pain. And so not all the pain that we experience in life is necessary. But all of it can be made meaningful.

President Monson also laid out the paths we can walk, as disciples, to find that meaning. We can walk the paths of obedience, of service, and of prayer. Obedience and service make sense; they cover a lot of ground. Walking the path of prayer seems more interesting, but I like that it is included. “It is by walking the path of prayer that we commune with the Father.”

I was struck by two more things from the talk. First:

Jesus changed men. He changed their habits, their opinions, their ambitions. He changed their tempers, their dispositions, their natures. He changed men’s hearts.

And so we have to ask the question: in what ways is our discipleship changing us? Are our habits, opinions, or ambitions changing? Our tempers, disposition, and natures? Can you look inside at your own life and point to the specific ways in which your heart has been changed? If not: why not? After all, “The passage of time has not altered the capacity of the Redeemer to change men’s lives. As he said to the dead Lazarus, so he says to you and me: ‘… come forth.’”

Second, speaking of Paul (then Saul) in the time just before his conversion, he said of the Old Testament that “For some reason, these writings did not reach Paul’s need.” This struck me as an unusually penetrating and frank insight to make. We almost always hear that the scriptures are powerful. And they are, nothing here contradicts that. But they are not always—by themselves—sufficient. It’s a reminder of the limitations of men and of the limitations of any one aspect of the Gospel. It implies that discipleship has to be full spectrum or there is no guarantee that it works. We have to strive to be well-rounded saints, or we won’t be saints at all.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Scattered Pearls

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Shell and Pearls. Photo by Mauro Cateb. CC SA.
Shell and Pearls. Photo by Mauro Cateb. CC SA.

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

I enjoyed taking a break to cover the October 2016 General Conference last week, but now we’re back on to our usually scheduled General Conference Odyssey posts, which means we’re writing about the Friday afternoon session of the April 1974 GC.

I didn’t really catch a theme in this session, and there wasn’t one talk that really grabbed me. Instead, I just want to go through a couple of lines that stuck me from several different talks.

In Three Important Questions, Elder ElRay L. Christiansen said:

True love is not earthbound. It is as eternal as our spirits, which never die.

There is no coincidence that two of Mormonism’s most unique beliefs are (1) marriage for time and all eternity and (2) the immortality of the human soul both forwards and backwards in time. There is a part of our soul that is ageless, because not only does it have no end but it also has beginning. For souls like these, nothing but eternal relationships could possibly do.

In Hanging On, Elder Loren C. Dunn told a story about a pampered tree that toppled in a storm and contrasted it with a neglected tree—that, because it was forced to drive down deep roots for water—outlasted the gale.

I see in many people this same kind of beauty. Adversity and trial have driven the roots of faith and testimony deep in order to tap the reservoir of spiritual strength that comes from such experiences. By nature they know how to stand and fight and hang on.

Elder H. Burke Peterson spoke with frankness and directness about the role of mothers in Mother, Catch the Vision of Your Call. His call for women to not work outside the home was unapologetic, but it was not unqualified. He not only indicated that single mothers had to work—and deserved our respect and help—but went farther, writing:

Fathers and mothers, before you decide you need a second income and that mother must go to work out of the home, may I plead with you: first go to the Lord in prayer and receive his divine approbation. Be sure he says yes.

This is one of those interesting verses that complicates simplistic stereotypes and reaffirm that the teachings of the Gospel are not as amenable to caricatures as some might think. What he’s saying here is a teaching that has been reiterated more plainly in more recent years: that the guidance of General Authorities in General Conference is just that: general. It is up to us to, in humility and a spirit of obedience, figure out how to apply those teachings to our individual lives. And, as a corollary, that means that we ought to get a little bit better at minding our own business when we see folks who are departing from the general course. Maybe they’re lazy, or disobedient, or apathetic. Or maybe they’re just as righteous, obedient, and passionate as we are but walking a slightly different path.

Then we have Elder William H. Bennett, in Inertia, describing some the primary reasons that people fail to live up to their potential:

some of the more important [reasons we do not reach our potential] are failure to do adequate realistic planning; lack of desire, commitment, and dedication; failure to use time effectively; and failure to correct one’s mistakes.

It’s a very practical list, and one that I think is entirely applicable to most or our lives. I also like how it fit with Elder Kazuhiko Yamashita’s call (in the most recent GC) to “be ambitious for Christ.” If you want to realize your ambitions, then you should pay attention to Elder Bennett’s cautions.

And last but not least, two more short quotes, this time from Elder Marvin J. Ashton in A Time of Urgency:

Midnight is so far and yet so close to those who have procrastinated.

and

God listens to humble prayer. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t ask us to pray.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!