Walker joined Difficult Run as an editor in August 2013.
He graduated from the University of North Texas with an MBA in Strategic Management and a BBA in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management. He's currently a grad student in Government at Johns Hopkins University. He has been published in SquareTwo, BYU Studies Quarterly, Dialogue, Graziadio Business Review, and Economic Affairs. He also contributed to Julie Smith's (ed.) 'As Iron Sharpens Iron: Listening to the Various Voices of Scripture'. His other online writing can be found at Worlds Without End and Times & Seasons. He lives in Denton, Texas, with his wife.
In You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, philosopher James K.A. Smith argues against the modern idea that we are simply “brains on a stick” and that Christian life is achieved by downloading the right spiritual data into our heads. We are not so much thinking creatures as we are lovers, i.e. creatures of desire and habit. He points out the gap between what we think and what we actually want. More disturbingly, he notes that we may not actually love what we think. Our wants are often shaped by what he calls “secular liturgies”: repetitive practices and rituals that orient our desires and shape our habits. Take for example (as Smith does) the mall: the mall doesn’t tell you what to think. It doesn’t hand out a tract with a list of propositions that the mall believes. Instead, it shapes your consumerist desires as it assaults your senses with sights, smells, comforts, etc. This is why Christian liturgy is important and necessary. Christianity is not just a rival worldview, but a rival set of desires. And those desires are shaped through repetition.
You can see Smith lecturing on this idea at Biola University below:
In the Spring 2016 issue of National Affairs, economist Arnold Kling has an engaging article on the concept of cultural intelligence:
Thanks to work in a number of related fields, collected in some exceptionally important books published in just the past few years, it is becoming increasingly apparent that progress tends to arise from the evolution of decentralized trial-and-error processes more than from grand schemes launched by planners and revolutionaries.
Economists and scholars of public policy are not the only ones conducting this research; students of human behavior are also finding support for Burke and Hayek’s theses — that the knowledge embedded in social norms and practices is vast compared to the knowledge of even the brightest, most educated individuals. As individuals, we cannot figure out very much by ourselves, but we learn a remarkable amount from others. In short, some social scientists in recent years have been building (or rebuilding) a powerful case for cultural intelligence.
One implication of their findings and arguments is that two sets of institutions in particular — markets and traditional social and familial practices — are the most important products of the process of social evolution building on cultural intelligence because they are the foremost means by which that process operates in free societies. It should hardly surprise us, therefore, that these two sets of institutions are also the foremost targets and objects of scorn of today’s progressive planners.
Drawing on the work of cultural psychologists and anthropologists like Joseph Henrich, Kling argues against the the heavily centralized, top-down worldview of the “engineers” and instead embraces the bottom-up adaptability of the “ecologists.” One school of thought centralizes power and decision-making into the hands (minds?) of a few intelligent elites, while the other recognizes that the collective brain matters more than individual ones in terms of knowledge. “Henrich,” Kling writes,
even goes so far as to argue that, as isolated individuals, humans are not particularly intelligent in comparison with chimpanzees. It is not the hardware of our brains that makes us superior. It is instead the software that is loaded into our brains by cultural learning. In fact, Henrich’s central thesis, in terms of this metaphor, is that the hardware of human brains evolved to be able to run the software of cultural learning, and that we are the only species that evolved in this manner. To use a different computer metaphor, we are not born with much in the way of individual intelligence and knowledge. Instead, we download cultural information from the “cloud”: our family and friends, teachers and mentors, books, electronic media, markets, and other cultural institutions.
…This…is highly reminiscent of Friedrich Hayek’s views about how markets work. Markets coordinate across many people the tacit knowledge that resides with individuals. In contrast, the would-be economic planner, who makes decisions by “applying causal models, rational thinking, or cost-benefit analyses,” works with an information set that is woefully inadequate to the task.
The book eloquently discusses the culture of innovation, which can refer to both an entrepreneurial mind-set and the cultural achievements during an age of change. He sees modern capitalism as profoundly humanist, imbued with “a spirit that views the prospect of unanticipated consequences that may come with voyaging into the unknown as a valued part of experience and not a drawback.” The dismal science becomes a little brighter when Mr. Phelps draws the connections between the economic ferment of the industrial age and the art of Beethoven, Verdi and Rodin.
The book also provides an epic takedown of the enemies of economic dynamism: socialism and corporatism. Even though this is well-traveled ground, it is nice to have a Nobel laureate addressing these ideologies head-on in an academic publication given their growing popularity among young people. For those who may wonder about the connection between “the good life” (flourishing) and economics, this book is for you.
You can see Edmund Phelps present at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) below:
Can the ancient Greeks teach our present-day, anti-trade politicians anything? According to Cornell historian Barry Strauss, they sure can. In a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, Strauss explains that, at first, “Athens’s free-trade zone fostered prosperity, democracy and the soaring confidence that built the Parthenon and fired the Golden Age of Greece. Athens also had a magnetic appeal to immigrants. They came from far and wide and represented rich and poor. Immigrants competed with natives for jobs but not for political power since they were rarely allowed to become citizens.” But the backlash produced three disheartening developments:
Nativism: “Athens’s old landed elite disliked democracy and despised the immigrants. So, when extreme conservatives seized power in a coup d’état after Athens lost the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.), they evicted immigrants from the city limits and targeted the wealthiest for murder and property confiscation.”
Demagoguery: “In Athens, for the first time in history, demagogues emerged. They were popular leaders of unrestrained vulgarity and crassness. They shouted, used abusive language, and instead of keeping their hands modestly tucked inside their cloaks, they raised their garments and introduced hand gestures into oratory. Although wealthy and well educated, they spoke in populist accents and criticized the establishment.”
Endless conflict: “Athenian foreign policy should have built an international order that shared prosperity and encouraged allies to stay loyal. Instead, it chose Athens First.”
In short, “Athens had given people an impossible choice: prosperity or freedom. In the end, all they got was the more than quarter-century-long Peloponnesian War, the ancient Greek equivalent of our world wars. The long struggle weakened all of Greece but especially Athens, which by 404 B.C. lost its alliances, its ships and its prosperity.”
See if you can get through this very short blog post without getting distracted. Devote all your energy and attention to it. Why? Because, as The New York Times reports,
multitasking, that bulwark of anemic résumés everywhere, has come under fire in recent years. A 2014 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that interruptions as brief as two to three seconds — which is to say, less than the amount of time it would take you to toggle from this article to your email and back again — were enough to double the number of errors participants made in an assigned task.
Earlier research out of Stanford revealed that self-identified “high media multitaskers” are actually more easily distracted than those who limit their time toggling.
So, in layman’s terms, by doing more you’re getting less done.
This is because “humans have finite neural resources that are depleted every time we switch between tasks, which, especially for those who work online, [Manoush] Zomorodi said, can happen upward of 400 times a day, according to a 2016 University of California, Irvine study. “That’s why you feel tired at the end of the day,” she said. “You’ve used them all up.” The term “brain dead” suddenly takes on a whole new meaning.”
Over at Harvard Business Review, there is a post reminding us that the supposedly new idea of collaborative spaces is in fact quite old:
Much has been made of these shared workspaces as a brand-new idea, one that barely existed 10 years ago. But the way they function reminds me of a very old idea: the Renaissance “bottega” (workshop) of 15th-century Florence, in which master artists were committed to teaching new artists, talents were nurtured, new techniques were at work, and new artistic forms came to light with artists competing among themselves but also working together.
The Renaissance put knowledge at the heart of value creation, which took place in the workshops of these artisans, craftsmen, and artists. There they met and worked with painters, sculptors, and other artists; architects, mathematicians, engineers, anatomists, and other scientists; and rich merchants who were patrons. All of them gave form and life to Renaissance communities, generating aesthetic and expressive as well as social and economic values. The result was entrepreneurship that conceived revolutionary ways of working, of designing and delivering products and services, and even of seeing the world.
These Renaissance bottegas had three major elements going for them:
Turning ideas into actions.
Fostering dialogue.
Faciliating the convergence of art and science.
Modern-day work spaces could learn a lot from their 15th-century forebearers.
The Bible can be very problematic for believers, especially those that adopt an early 20th-century fundamentalist reading that transforms it into a history and science textbook. As biblical scholarship has continued to progress, many of the assumptions held by believers have been challenged. Is there a way to read the Bible that includes both scholarship and faith?
In the Oxford-published The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically and Religiously, biblical scholars Marc Zvi Brettler, Daniel J. Harrington, and Peter Enns explore ways in which historical criticism can be incorporated into various faith traditions, including Jewish (Brettler), Catholic (Harrington), and Protestant (Enns). The book serves not only as good introduction to historical criticism, but a model of how to approach one’s religion “by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118).
You can listen to an interview with Marc Brettler on BYU’s Maxwell Institute Podcast below:
Two centuries ago, the average world income per human (in present-day prices) was about $3 a day. It had been so since we lived in caves. Now it is $33 a day—which is Brazil’s current level and the level of the U.S. in 1940. Over the past 200 years, the average real income per person—including even such present-day tragedies as Chad and North Korea—has grown by a factor of 10. It is stunning. In countries that adopted trade and economic betterment wholeheartedly, like Japan, Sweden and the U.S., it is more like a factor of 30—even more stunning.
And these figures don’t take into account the radical improvement since 1800 in commonly available goods and services. Today’s concerns over the stagnation of real wages in the U.S. and other developed economies are overblown if put in historical perspective. As the economists Donald Boudreaux and Mark Perry have argued in these pages, the official figures don’t take account of the real benefits of our astonishing material progress.
…Nothing like the Great Enrichment of the past two centuries had ever happened before. Doublings of income—mere 100% betterments in the human condition—had happened often, during the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome, in Song China and Mughal India. But people soon fell back to the miserable routine of Afghanistan’s income nowadays, $3 or worse. A revolutionary betterment of 10,000%, taking into account everything from canned goods to antidepressants, was out of the question. Until it happened.
So argues economic historian Deirdre McCloskey in the past Saturday Essay of The Wall Street Journal. How did this Great Enrichment happen?:
The answer, in a word, is “liberty.” Liberated people, it turns out, are ingenious. Slaves, serfs, subordinated women, people frozen in a hierarchy of lords or bureaucrats are not. By certain accidents of European politics, having nothing to do with deep European virtue, more and more Europeans were liberated. From Luther’s reformation through the Dutch revolt against Spain after 1568 and England’s turmoil in the Civil War of the 1640s, down to the American and French revolutions, Europeans came to believe that common people should be liberated to have a go. You might call it: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
There tends to be a large gap between how I think about Mormonism and how I experience it. I find Mormon theology to be innovative, imaginative, and exciting. I find Mormonism in practice…rather dull. Take the “primary answer” for every question: go to church, read your scriptures, pray. Three hours of church isn’t exactly my definition of excitement. I love studying the scriptures, but only when it includes commentaries and such. Merely reading them in their archaic King James English doesn’t exactly get the blood flowing. Prayer makes me feel silly and unproductive. But we can extend this to other activities as well. The temple is a snooze fest. I hated Family Home Evening growing up and hoped that my parents would forget or be too busy. Home teaching strikes me as largely a waste of everyone’s time.
Having confessed all that, my appreciation for these monotonous and seemingly pointless activities have slowly grown over the last couple years. It’s been especially heightened over the last week as I’ve been reading through James K.A. Smith’s You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Smith argues against the modern idea that we are simply “brains on a stick” and that Christian life is achieved by downloading the right spiritual data into our heads. We are not so much thinking creatures as we are lovers, i.e. creatures of desire and habit. He points out the gap between what we think and what we actually want. More disturbingly, he notes that we may not actually love what we think. Our wants are often shaped by what he calls “secular liturgies”: repetitive practices and rituals that orient our desires and shape our habits. Take for example (as Smith does) the mall: the mall doesn’t tell you what to think. It doesn’t hand out a tract with a list of propositions that the mall believes. Instead, it shapes your consumerist desires as it assaults your senses with sights, smells, comforts, etc. This is why Christian liturgy is important and necessary. Christianity is not just a rival worldview, but a rival set of desires. And those desires are shaped through repetition.
Harvard business professor and fellow Mormon Clayton Christensen has touched on how one practices Christianity within the Mormon Church:
What I appreciate about the Mormon Church as an infrastructure for Christian living is that it puts me in touch with people I can help. I told a friend once, “If you truly want to live your life as Christ taught, then start coming to the Mormon Church. You don’t even have to believe what we believe. But if you want to practice Christianity, this is where the state-of-the-art is practiced.” This is why I choose to belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In the October 1972 Conference, Franklin D. Richards quotes from Joseph Smith’s infamous letter to Nancy Rigdon: “Happiness is the object and design of our existence; and will be the end thereof, if we pursue the path that leads to it; and this path is virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God.” Despite the controversial context, the line rings true: this is a path of repetition as we continually reorient our hearts toward God. “There is tremendous power in focusing upon an ideal,” says Richards. “People are inclined to become like those whom they admire. As we increase our knowledge and love of the Savior and indicate our willingness to do his will, we necessarily become more perfect and like him.” As we take what Smith calls a “liturgical audit,” we’ll begin to “realize that temptation isn’t just about bad ideas or wrong decisions; it’s often a factor of de-formation and wrongly ordered habits. In other words, our sins aren’t just discrete, wrong actions and bad decisions; they reflect vices. And overcoming them requires more than just knowledge; it requires rehabituation, a re-formation of our loves.”[ref]Smith, You Are What You Love, 54.[/ref] According to Richards, as we continuously seek to have a “Thy will be done” mentality “we will know God’s will and have the desire and courage to conform. This doctrine or philosophy requires one to deeply love the Lord and have great faith in his judgment.”
Sterling W. Sill seems to support the need for repeated action in shaping our character and achieving happiness/the good life (what he calls “the most abundant lives”):
The religion of Christ is not just an idea; it is an activity. It is not just something for us to think about; it is something for us to do. These words also constitute the world’s most powerful success formula. The best way to be a good doctor or a good lawyer or a good teacher is to be a good man. These three words [“keep the commandments”] serve as the shortest, the most pleasant, the most direct, and the only road to the celestial kingdom.
I’ve written multipletimes about the common Conference theme of the gospel and “the good life.” It’s a nice reminder that the sacred is not often found in earth-shattering theophanies (though there is obviously a place for those), but in the mundane. It’s found in worship (altar), home life (tent), and work (well). It’s not found necessarily in intricate theologies or philosophies (though there is obvious a place and need for those as well), but in the daily, repetitious, habit-shaping liturgies we participate in.
As I’ve shared before, a few years ago my manager came up to me and asked, “Walker, you’re Mormon, right?” Living in Texas, this always sets off an alarm inside my head. I had never told him I was Mormon, so he had obviously heard it elsewhere. “Yes…,” I replied. Then, the sledgehammer: “Do Mormons have a problem with black people?” It’s important to note that my manager is African-American. He explained that we had gotten along so well and that he was surprised to hear some of the things said about Mormons and blacks and to learn that I was a Mormon. He couldn’t square the supposed racist ideology of Mormonism with his personal interactions with me. This led to a 15-20 minute discussion about the history of the priesthood ban. I ended with my personal view: “The priesthood ban was a mistake, the result of racist folklore, which was allowed to continue for an excruciatingly long time. Thankfully, that policy no longer exists today.” My manager enjoyed the conversation and seemed to understand the complexities surrounding the issue.
The history of Mormonism and race is both sad and fascinating. W. Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness is the book for understanding the history of the priesthood ban. Yet, it is much more than that. It is also an illuminating tale of race relations and the very concept of race in 19th-century America. Despite being predominantly white Yankees or Northern Europeans, Mormons were seen as racially degenerate. Not only did they supposedly associate with blacks and reds (Native Americans), but they also practiced the degrading, foreign barbarism of polygamy. The Mormon response to reclaim this seemingly withheld status of “whiteness” was to eventually distance themselves from non-whites, finally leading to the barring of blacks from both the priesthood and the temple.
An important and needed book in Mormon history. You can see a presentation by Reeve at Benchmark Books below:
In You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, philosopher James K.A. Smith argues against the modern idea that we are simply “brains on a stick” and that Christian life is achieved by downloading the right spiritual data into our heads. We are not so much thinking creatures as we are lovers, i.e. creatures of desire and habit. He points out the gap between what we think and what we actually want. More disturbingly, he notes that we may not actually love what we think. Our wants are often shaped by what he calls “secular liturgies”: repetitive practices and rituals that orient our desires and shape our habits. Take for example (as Smith does) the mall: the mall doesn’t tell you what to think. It doesn’t hand out a tract with a list of propositions that the mall believes. Instead, it shapes your consumerist desires as it assaults your senses with sights, smells, comforts, etc. This is why Christian liturgy is important and necessary. Christianity is not just a rival worldview, but a rival set of desires. And those desires are shaped through repetition.
Having confessed all that, my appreciation for these monotonous and seemingly pointless activities have slowly grown over the last couple years. It’s been especially heightened over the last week as I’ve been reading through James K.A. Smith’s 
As I’ve