"You Have Heads, Use Them!"--Jesus of Nazareth, according to Dom Crossan

Take this discussion on luck (and personal responsibility, though I don't think he ever mentions that):

To become a better person is, at least to some degree, to consciously decide what kind of person one wants to be, what kind of life one wants to lead, and to enforce that meta-decision through day-to-day smaller decisions. They say you are what you do repeatedly; our choices become habit and habit becomes character. So forming a good character, becoming a good person, means repeatedly choosing to do the right thing until it becomes habit.

To make this more concrete, an example: For whatever reason, I hate waiting on people. I can barely stand to walk behind people on the sidewalk. Driving behind people leaves me in constant, low-level seething rage. Watching the people ahead of me in line at the store bumble through their slow transactions makes me want to claw my eyes out.

When I use system-two thinking, I understand that this instinctual reaction of mine is both irrational and uncharitable — irrational because we’re all always waiting for one another and there’s no way to avoid it; uncharitable because I expect alacrity from others than I don’t always display myself. I make others wait just as much or more than anyone, but I absolutely can’t wait for others.

To put it more bluntly, I tend to be kind of an asshole in that particular way. And I don’t want to be! It makes other people tense. It makes me miserable. It serves absolutely no purpose.

The only way to change it is to use system-two thinking to override system one — to intervene in my own anger — again and again, until a different, better reaction becomes habitual and I become, in a literal sense, a different, better person. (That project is, uh, ongoing.)

The same is true for being a good parent, saving money, making more friends, or any other long-term life goal; it often involves overriding our own instincts — many of which are grossly maladaptive.

Do people deserve moral credit for what they do with their system-two thinking? Perhaps that’s the mechanism through which meritocracy works, through which people really do get what they deserve?

And lay it alongside this discussion of "discernment" as understood by the Jesuits and Pope Francis:

What should Catholics do now? I assume you don’t think they should leave the church, and I assume you think the way the church is dealing with the crisis is unacceptable.

[Long pause] I know what I am doing, which is a word that is part of the Jesuit tradition that I came to know as a student at Fordham in the 1980s and is really at the center of Pope Francis’ approach, and it is the word discernment. In this instance, we have to call evil what it is, and call a crisis what it is, but also approach it from the point of view of discernment, and not from the point of view of the culture wars, let’s say. What does it mean for me? What does it mean for the victims? What does it mean for us as a Catholic people? What does it mean for our society if Catholic Christianity were sort of amputated from the body politic? We have to think about all those things and then try to look backward and forward at the same time.

Maybe it’s because I am nonbeliever, but you are being too cryptic for me. I don’t know exactly what you mean.

I mean: The secular lingo for this is a teachable moment. I think that’s a shallow cliché. A serious believer asks himself or herself with some regularity, “What do I believe? Why do I believe it? Do I believe that it’s the path of virtue? Is it one that I would recommend to other people? Is it one that I carry out into public life or just practice at home? Does it bind me to the past—to Saint Augustine, and St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Ignatius of Loyola? And if it does, does it bind me to those predatory priests also?” Catholicism—Judaism too—claims an essential continuity between the past and the present, and so if you claim that continuity, it makes it very hard to say, “Oh, things were done differently then. The past was the past,” which is what a lot of people are trying to do right now. If you are serious about Catholicism, I don’t think that’s an easy move to make. It’s a cop-out.

Granted, neither is an outstanding example of exposition of their topics, but I use them to tease out both topics and lay them alongside each other, where the topic that relates them is the idea of secular v. religious thought, and why we think one is superior to the other (when, in fact, they are simply different, perhaps even describing different worlds, although Wittgenstein would never allow that.  I will, though.)

What Paul Elie is getting at in that second selection, and what Isaac Chotiner is missing (partly because Elie is not explicit about it) is the issue of responsibility.  I learned, in seminary, that responsibility is the heaviest burden of all.  If we take it seriously, it can crush us to the ground.  "Am I my brother's keeper?" is, first and foremost, an attempt to shift that burden, to get the burden of responsibility off our shoulders.  Because if you take seriously your place in the community of humanity, you are your brother's keeper; and then again, you aren't.  It's not a simple either/or, and that's what makes the burden so heavy, and so difficult to shift.  When Elie challenges the notion of a "teachable moment," he's pushing aside the deflection (who is taught, and who is learning?  Usually not you, ultimately.) and going straight to the core:  "What is my responsibility here?"  Keep that question in mind and re-read his questions, the ones a "serious believer" asks.  The very concept of discernment is to discern your place, and your responsibility, in the situation; because our first attempt is always to determine how we are not responsible, or at best can escape responsibility.  And if we are not responsible, then luck is indeed akin to a religious awakening, because we are awake to our lack of responsibility (the opposite of what Roberts is criticizing in his essay, but then he takes the idea of luck as one that dissolves the benefits most successful people think accrue to their personal efforts.).  Roberts makes the argument this way:

It’s not difficult to see why many people take offense when reminded of their luck, especially those who have received the most. Allowing for luck can dent our self-conception. It can diminish our sense of control. It opens up all kinds of uncomfortable questions about obligations to other, less fortunate people.

Nonetheless, this is a battle that cannot be bypassed. There can be no ceasefire. Individually, coming to terms with luck is the secular equivalent of religious awakening, the first step in building any coherent universalist moral perspective. Socially, acknowledging the role of luck lays a moral foundation for humane economic, housing, and carceral policy.

Building a more compassionate society means reminding ourselves of luck, and of the gratitude and obligations it entails, against inevitable resistance.

He makes a number of leaps there, trying to get us to a Rawlsian awareness of initial conditions that will make us see we are all in the same boat and the fact that some are more equal than others is not a product of our own efforts alone.  Luck can, indeed, diminish our sense of control; but it doesn't necessarily lead to "uncomfortable questions about obligations to other, less fortunate people."  It can just lead to thinking we aren't as powerful as we think we are, but at least we're still not that guy!

There but for the grace of God, right?

Coming to terms with luck is not really "the first step in building any coherent universalist moral perspective," either.  The moral perspective of Donald Trump and Stuart Varney ("On Fox Business, Stuart Varney sputtered at [Robert] Frank: 'Do you know how insulting that was, when I read that?' ” What Varney read was Frank's book arguing luck has more to do with success than personal effort.  Most of us, as Gov. Miz Anne used to say of George H.W., were born on third base and think we hit a triple.  We just don't like to admit it.) doesn't, by it's opposite, lead to actual concern for humanity.  That "luck plays a large role in every human success and failure, which ought to be a rather banal and uncontroversial point," doesn't mean luck is the universal engine of human society.  In Chaucer's day, for example (the General Prologue is a wonderful catalogue of 14th century English society), society was stacked like a pyramid (later imagined as a Great Chain of Being, just before the Industrial Revolution starting breaking up the links of that chain).  Those above were what Brits today would call members of the "Lucky Sperm Club" (hey, they recognize the place of luck in success!); those below stayed where they were born.  Kylie Jenner wasn't even a vague possibility (you'll have to read the essay to get that reference, but it's in the first paragraphs).  Building a more compassionate society means reminding ourselves that the first will be last, and the last first, and the race is to the bottom, where the last of all will be first and servant of all.

You knew I was gonna get there eventually, right?

So we're back to this idea of discernment.  Simply placing luck in the center and using that as the lodestone that guides you in the right direction really won't do much, if only because focussing on luck doesn't really force us to focus on who we are and how we are responsible not just for what we do, but for what we think.  If there is a "cost of discipleship," more and more I think it has nothing to do with fealty to a certain interpretation of scripture, or more severely that "when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."  That seems to me the very opposite of the Gospel message; Christ calls us to live.  Christ calls us to life.  But that call creates responsibility; the grave responsibility of humility.

There is a story of a desert father who listens to the other monks in the community discuss the moral failings of a member of the community.  The Father leaves the circle and returns with a heavy sack on his back, a tiny sack hanging in front of his eyes.  He walks around the circle with this apparatus until someone finally asks him what it means.  "These are my sins," he says of the sack on his back, and these are the sins of my brother, pointing to the tiny sack.  The circle quickly broke up, as the others were reminded of their responsibilities.  Lucky thing he thought of that, huh?

There is an essential continuity between us all, past and present, near and far.  To discern that is to discern your responsibility in that continuity, in that community.  You don't rise above it or fall below it; you simply live your part in it.  Do you live it well, for yourself and others?  Or do you live it poorly, thinking only of yourself and your "luck," or your "skill," "perseverance," "hard work," what you will?  Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort worked hard, persevered, used their skills to make money beyond the dreams of Midas; were they lucky?  Did their luck run out?  Were there skills misapplied?  Perhaps, but in their world being charged with crimes was unheard of, much less being convicted.  Were they unlucky because of the publicity brought to them by Donald Trump?  Or were they bad people, and the bill eventually came due?

What do we discern from this?  And how responsible are we, for letting, or for putting, a man like Donald Trump, who associates with such people, in the White House?  Or is it simply a matter of bad habits, and we can think our way into better habits?  And what would those be, besides not getting angry in traffic?