A decision tree for dealing with digital tech

Start with this question:

Do you believe that our, and especially young people’s, relationship to digital technology (=smartphones, screens, the internet, streaming, social media) is healthy, functional, and therefore good as is? Or unhealthy, dysfunctional, and therefore in need of immediate and drastic help?

If your answer is “healthy, functional, and good as is,” then worry yourself no more; the status quo is A-OK. If you answered otherwise, read on.

Now ask yourself this question:

Do the practices, policies, norms, and official statements of my institution—whether a family, a business, a university, or a church—(a) contribute to the technological problem, (b) maintain the digital status quo, or (c) interrupt, subvert, and cut against the dysfunctional relationship of the members of my institution to their devices and screens?

If your answer is (a) or (b) and yet you answered earlier that you believe our relationship to digital technology is in serious need of help, then you’ve got a problem on your hands. If your answer is (c), then well done.

Finally, ask yourself this:

How does my own life—the whole suite of my daily habits when no one’s looking, or rather, when everyone is looking (my spouse, my roommate, my children, my coworkers, my neighbors, my pastors, and so on)—reflect, model, and/or communicate my most basic beliefs about the digital status quo? Does the way I live show others that (a) I am aware of the problem (b) chiefly within myself and (c) am tirelessly laboring to respond to it, to amend my ways and solve the problem? Or does it evince the very opposite? So that my life and my words are unaligned and even contradictory?

At both the institutional and the personal level, it seems to me that answering these questions honestly and following them to their logical conclusions—not just in our minds or with our words but in concrete actions—would clarify much about the nature of our duties, demands, and decisions in this area of life.

Four loves follow-up

Consider the following portrait, all of whose modifiers are meant descriptively rather than critically or even pejoratively:

A man in his 20s or 30s who is godless, friendless, fatherless, childless, sexless, unmarried, and unpartnered, and who has no active relationship with a sibling, cousin, aunt, uncle, or grandparent. We will assume he is not motherless—everyone has (had) a mother—but we might also add that he lacks a healthy relationship with her or that he lives far away from her.

This, in extreme form, is the picture of loveless life I described in the last post, using the fourfold love popularized by C. S. Lewis: kinship, eros, friendship, and agape.

Here’s my question. In human history, apart from extreme crises brought about by natural disaster or famine or war or plague, has there even been a generation as full of such men (or women) as the present generation? The phenomenon is far from limited to “the West.” It includes Russia, Japan, and China, among others. Young people without meaningful relationships of any kind, anywhere on the grid of the four loves. They lack entirely the love of a god, the love of a spouse, the love of a child, the love of a friend, even the love of a parent.

On one hand, it seems I can’t go a day without reading a new story about this phenomenon; it’s on my mind this week because I just finished Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. Yet, on the other hand, the crisis we are facing seems so massive, so epochal, so devastating, so unprecedented, so complex, that in truth we can’t talk about it enough. We need to be shouting the problem aloud from the rooftops like a crazy end-times street preacher.

But what is to be done? That’s the question that haunts me. Whatever the answers, we should be laboring with all that we have to find them. The stakes are as high as they get.

Four loves loss

More than sixty year ago C. S. Lewis wrote a book called The Four Loves. Ever since, his framework has proven a reliable and popular paradigm for thinking about different aspects or modes of love. The terms he uses are storge, eros, philia, and agape; we might loosely translate these as kinship, romance, friendship, and self-giving to and for the other. They denote the love that obtains between members of a family, between spouses in a marriage, between close friends, and between humans and God. (This last category is my own gloss; agape is, for Lewis and for the Christian tradition, the love God displays in Christ and thus the exemplary cause of both our love for him and our love for others.)

A thought occurred to me about these four loves, and I wonder if anyone else has written about it.

Our society is awash in loneliness, apathy, despair, and even sexlessness. The youngest generations (“Gen Z” and Millennials) are marrying later or not at all, and (thus) having fewer children or none at all. Divorce is rampant. Kin networks are declining in both quantity and quality, and what remains is fraying at the seams. Regular attendance of church (or synagogue, or mosque) reached historically low numbers before Covid; the pandemic has supercharged these trends beyond recognition. Even friendship, the last dependable and universal form of love, has seen drastic reductions, especially for men. I heard one sociologist, a middle-aged woman, remark recently that our young men are beset by “the three P’s: pot, porn, and PlayStation.” You can’t open an internet browser without stumbling upon the latest news report, study finding, or op-ed column on opioids, deaths of despair, hollowed-out factory towns, fatherless children, lethargic boys, screen-addled kids, housebound teens, risk-averse young adults, social awkwardness, and all the other symptoms of a sad, isolated, and unloved generation. They are like a car alarm ringing through the night. Eventually you get used to it and go back to sleep.

I don’t have anything especially insightful to say about any of this. But I found that, as Lewis’s book came to mind in conjunction with these trends, his framework suggested itself as a useful analytical grid. Perhaps one way to judge whether an individual is flourishing today is whether she can point confidently to the presence of all four loves in her life. A dense and supportive familial network of parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles; a spouse and children of her own; concentric circles of friends who know her well, whom she sees regularly in a variety of settings, and on whom she can rely; a church to she belongs and where she consistently worships and enjoys the presence of the God who created her and continues to sustain her, day by day.

In a sense it’s all too obvious: this description simply transposes into the vernacular the native grammar of the sociologist. We’ve been “bowling alone”—not to mention working alone, dating alone, praying alone—for some decades now; this is nothing new.

Granted! At least for me, though, using the four loves is a helpful way to identify the different ways in which certain loves are present or absent in one’s own life or in the lives of others. I can think off hand of any number of folks who can only count one or two or three of the four loves in their lives. Most of the twentysomethings I know who aren’t uber-churchgoers (as some of my students are—glory be) lack agape, storge, and eros; all they have are friends, and even then, those friends are good for little more than happy hour drinks after work or a concert or club on the weekend. In other words, they barely amount to friends at all.

The Lewis framework also helps us to see the feedback loop of love. Kinship, marriage, friendship, and church (again, feel free to substitute some other religious tradition; I admit readily that I am identifying the institution of religious piety with love for God, for it is in institutions that we embody our loves) each and all reinforce the others. And where one love is absent by unchosen fact—as for those who wish they were married, or whose parents are abusive, or who wish they had more or better friends—the other three loves (a) offer support for what is lacking or lost and (b) provide durable structures in which to persevere and, hopefully, to rectify or supplement the absent love in question.

Peter Maurin once remarked that we ought to labor to forge a society “where it is easier to be good.” That is, the laws and norms, institutions and habits of our common life ought to conduce to virtue—honesty, courage, prudence, kindness, justice, piety—rather than vice. We are social creatures, after all. Likewise we ought to make it our collective aim to build a culture where it is easier to discover, to receive, and to share in the four loves. A world in which the four loves “came easier” would be a world worth living in and working for. Unfortunately, we seem to have done the opposite.

Church people

What does the phrase above mean to you?

I can imagine many answers, but here’s a stab at a common enough picture that comes to mind when the phrase is used.

Church people are the people who have their you-know-what together. They have happy marriages, healthy households, thriving children, good jobs, and dense networks of friendship. They’re not rich, but they’re well off enough. They’re not self-righteous, but they’re not unaware of their uprightness. They are the sort who show up, not least to church, because their lives are full of faith, piety, love, and a spirit of service. They aren’t perfect, but they possess what many wish they had: that wonderful mix of temporal and spiritual happiness that few attain but all strive to acquire. Above all, they love God and out of that surfeit of love they do their level-headed best to love others in his name.

I don’t want to deny that people like this exist. It takes all kinds to make a world. Occasionally people really do seem to have it all together; life has worked out for them, and they’re not worse for it, but better, in terms of their character and the way they treat others.

But to the extent that this description has popular purchase, it’s an image, in my experience, that fosters resentment, anxiety, envy, frustration, and disappointment. And here’s the thing. By and large the image is wrong.

Church people aren’t the ones with their you-know-what together. That couple or family at church that looks like all is well? Like they could star in a 1950s sitcom? One of their siblings is homeless. Or one of their parents is an addict. Or one of their children has a congenital condition you don’t know about. Or one of them works a job that is sucking the soul right out from him. Or, failing all that, they’re wondering what they’re doing here in the first place. They grew up Christian and now they’re not even sure what they believe. Attending worship is muscle memory more than anything.

Every week they show up, and every week they feel observed, feel watched, feel pre-judged for having it all together. Yet they’re lonely and stressed and confused just like everyone else.

“Everyone else,” after all, is also “church people.” Everyone at church is church people. Church is filled with nothing but people; people at church are church people; but people at church are just people. People always and everywhere and without exception includes people in pain, people with problems, people who don’t have it all together. Hungry, broken, needy sinners, in other words. Us. All of us. That’s it. That’s church people.

When I was a young and foolish and excitable student, an uber-Christian who knew all the answers and had big ideas about how the church should become more “radical” (Lord help me) in its commitment to following Jesus, I remember sneering at how “family friendly” churches try to be. It was all so suburban, so bourgeois. Get a grip, y’all! Let’s drop the Starbucks act and stop catering to the middle-class crowd.

It was—no shock here—having children that woke me up to why churches “cater” to families. Not because of their status or their money or their demographic or whatever else. Because it is really, really hard to have young children and belong to a church. Every family with multiple pre-school children that makes it to church on Sunday morning should get a prize. Single moms who do it should get a $1,000 check and the keys to the city. It’s no small thing. Imagine, from the time you wake up to the time you arrive at church, having a small rubber mallet knocked against your skull at random intervals, on average three times per minute. That’s what it’s like corralling, feeding, clothing, and driving multiple young children to church early on a Sunday morning. Except that diapers are involved. Also toys, snacks, tights, and bows. It’s a struggle, every time.

God be praised, I’m nearly out of that phase myself. It’s been just shy of ten years at this point. Now I know. Now, when I see twentysomethings with a baby or a toddler plus a newborn walk into church, I want to throw a parade for them. I want to crown every mother as she enters the sanctuary, lift her up in a seat of honor and carry her hither and thither in triumph. She certainly deserves it. They all do.

But more than anything, I want to remind myself that we are all of us barely scraping by. Making it to church is a victory in itself. The car payment that might not be met this month, the niece who has to live with you for a while, the old friends who filed for divorce out of nowhere, the parent in hospice without insurance—all of it weighs down the soul to the point of exhaustion and despair.

These are the people who straggle into church on Sunday mornings. Have mercy on them. Give them a hug. And if they don’t reach out to you first, don’t assume it’s because they’ve got all they need: friends, faith, money, health. The church people you eye, wondering why they don’t give more out of their abundance, may lack the very abundance you project onto them. They’re wondering why you (along with everyone else) don’t reach out to them. We’re all wondering it about each other. None of us is a position of strength. We’re all operating out of weakness, out of need, out of yearning for contact, connection, presence, friendship—something.

If that’s how you’re feeling, take it as given that that’s how they’re feeling, too. Realizing that will make a difference. Church people is you.

Teaching a 4/4: tradeoffs

In the last post I laid out what a typical work week looks like in terms of one’s allotment of hours while teaching a 4/4 load at a university. In this post I want to compare that to institutional contexts on the other end of the spectrum. Such a comparison shows rather straightforwardly what sort of tradeoffs are involved, from an institutional perspective, when professors are asked to teach more or fewer courses; in this case, tradeoffs concerning quantity and quality of publication.

Before I do that, though, I want to talk about a different set of tradeoffs. These tradeoffs aren’t about what a university asks of you. They’re about what you ask of yourself, or rather, what you want for your life.

I got married midway through my senior year in college, and beginning in my PhD program my wife and I had four children in six years’ time: from the beginning of my second year in doctoral work to the beginning of my second year teaching as a professor. Being a husband and a father in one’s 20s and 30s while earning a doctorate then teaching at the university level is, shall we say, a different experience than doing those things while being a single person without children. The key word there is “different,” which isn’t (yet) a term of judgment. I know single people in doctoral programs who eventually dropped out due to listlessness and lethargy, and I know folks in a position similar to mine (spouse, young kids) who powered through for the simple reason that they were always on the clock and thus were forced to use their time wisely. So in and of itself the difference between the two stations in life doesn’t tell us which is “harder” or “easier” for the academic life.

Having said that, the fact is undeniable that a person who is neither a parent nor partnered has, in general, far fewer limits on her available time than a person who is both. I knew and still know people, both grad students and tenure-track (or tenured) profs, who work 12 hours a day in the office, most weekday evenings, and full days on the weekend. That’s 70-90 hours per week, if you’re counting. The work never stops. There’s always another book to read, another article to review, another draft to revise, another lecture to attend. Such persons are quite literally secular monks. But instead of ora et labora, it’s sola labora (or, I suppose, solus labor): work, work, work, all day, every day, world without end, amen.

Thus the “pure” academic life. No wonder the old Oxford dons were so often bachelors. No wonder the founders of the university were priests and monks!

The upshot is obvious. A scholar who has 70-90 hours available per week to devote to her scholarship, and who does thus devote it, is in an entirely different position than a scholar who does not, owing to the latter’s duties to her family (not to mention to her church, her neighbors, and so on). Whether or not it is wise or live-giving to work 12-15 hours per day every day of the week for months on end, it’s what many do, and are able to do, given their circumstances. And academics like myself who lack that monastic allotment of time can either accept the profound gap between us or kick against the goads. Phrased more sharply, we can pretend that we are equally disposed to produce equally superb scholarship, or we can decide not to deceive ourselves. I suggest we opt against self-deception.

I’m going to write in the fourth post in this series about the flip side of this acceptance: that there are opportunities, gifts, and blessings precisely for scholarly work that come from being a person with a family or from teaching a 4/4 (or both). But the prior condition of realizing those possibilities is the unqualified recognition that the lay life, as it were, pales in comparison to the monastic in terms of sheer hours in the day available for scholarship. Them’s the facts. And that’s before we get to differences between institutions.

But before exploring those differences, there’s an important point buried in these comparisons. That point we may phrase as a question: What do you want? Better put, what should you want? Rare is the happy workaholic academic. I can’t count the number of secular monastic super-scholars I know who are immiserated, depressed, joyless souls from top to toe. That’s not because they’ve resisted the call of the bourgeois life. It often is because they know nothing but The Work, and The Work doesn’t satisfy the heart.

Life is about tradeoffs, in other words, and being the most successful possible academic one can be will almost certainly demand that you give up something not only that you want, but that you should want, if you would be happy. I would like to be happy. That means I’m content with the choices that led me to where I am today. I’m glad I’m a married father of four teaching a 4/4 in a university setting that doesn’t suck my soul right out of my body. But I also refuse to lie to myself. I would likely be a “better” scholar, measured by output and erudition, if I lacked the many limits and duties my family places on my life. Would I trade the latter to gain the former? Never.

Besides, limits and duties are (not paradoxically, but given a certain set of assumptions, unexpectedly) the source and ground of true happiness. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you stop looking to cut them out of your life in order to serve the shapeshifting, exacting, and altogether death-dealing idols of Work.

*

Okay. One set of academic tradeoffs concerns the family, or life beyond work more generally. Another is institutional context. Time to compare like with unlike.

Consider a standard course load for a professor at an Ivy League university. Such a person (pre- and post-tenure) teaches a 2/2, often to small cohorts of graduate students in seminar-style classes that meet once weekly; she further takes a mandatory year-long sabbatical every three or four years, precisely in order to produce the sort of scholarship expected of her, given her status as a tenure-track (or tenured) professor at Harvard or Yale or Princeton. She also regularly receives grants and scholarships from either within or without the university that fund course releases and external sabbaticals and visiting professorships: these in turn alleviate teaching and administrative responsibilities.

Now consider my own situation. I teach four courses a semester, some of which have 20-30 students, some of which have 50-60. (One semester I taught an overload, five courses, and I had about 220 students. We also had a newborn, our fourth child. That semester’s sort of hazy, now that I think of it . . .) These students are mostly gen-ed undergraduates, not tight cohorts of committed Master’s or doctoral students. Moreover, sabbaticals must be applied for and approved; they apply to one semester rather than a full academic year; and one becomes eligible to apply only after having received tenure, in one’s seventh or eighth year at the university.

One response to this comparison might be to suppose I’m comparing quality of situations. But I’m not. I’m deliriously happy in my job. And as I said above, I know a lot of miserable people in Ivy League institutions. Whether it’s the pressure to Be The Best, or the stifling atmosphere of competition and production, or the sword of Not Getting Tenure hanging over the necks of junior faculty, or the Byzantine institutional politics of the Ivies, or what have you, the amenities and affordances of teaching-light, research-heavy professorships are not there to make you happy (in fact, the effect may well be the opposite); they are there to get you to publish. Better: they’re there to make the institution that pays you look good. They’ve a prestigious reputation to uphold, after all.

So we’re not asking which institution is a better work environment. We’re comparing material conditions and incentives for producing high-quality research. And I trust you can see with your own eyes what’s staring us in the face: namely, that to ask professors with a 4/4 load to produce scholarship anywhere close to the level of professors at Ivy League institutions is downright absurd. Looking at the two institutional contexts side by side, we might be inclined to judge them two different jobs.

But the comparison need not be merely between a small Christian liberal arts school in west Texas and a comparatively ancient and ultra-rich Ivy League college in New England. Consider a friend of mine who works at a large R1 school a few hours down the road in Texas. Every fall he teaches one undergraduate course and one Master’s course. In the spring he teaches no classes at all. His primary job, though he is neither tenured nor a research professor nor does he hold an Endowed Chair in Something or Other, is to research and publish. And research and publish he does. All the dang day. You wouldn’t believe his output. Or maybe you would, since you know how little else he has to do with his time.

The point, at the risk of belaboring it, is not to compare apples and oranges as though they were the same fruit. It is to point out that the fruits we invariably compare in academia are apples and oranges. My friend plainly inhabits a different profession than I do. He is something like a patron-supported independent scholar, contingently connected to an institution that happens to be called a university, for which he occasionally teaches a class or two. I, on the other hand, am a workaday teacher of undergraduate college students who, when he can spare a minute, finds the time to read a book and even to scribble a little on the side.

My friend has a good life and a good job. I have a good life and a good job. But our equally good jobs are not the same job. They are both good, but they are different jobs. That’s the point.

And there’s no problem in that difference. The problem comes if and when, and only if and when, someone supposes that my friend’s job should be my job, too, while expecting me to continue doing my original job all the while. In a word, the problem comes if and when I’m expected to work two jobs instead of one—not least when, as I documented in the last post, that first job tends to spill over from the office into the evenings and weekends of life beyond work. After working 50-60 hours per week teaching a 4/4, where is such a person to find the time to add a second full-time job, which is to say, the job of producing first-rate academic scholarship?

I may sound as though I’m speaking in the first person here, but as I will share in the next post, I’m not describing my own situation. I’m fortunate to work in and for an institution that understands that no one teaching a 4/4 can be an Ivy League or research professor at the same time. Those to whom I report evaluate teaching, service, and collegiality first and scholarship second; everyone understands the pressures of teaching and grading and mentoring and sponsoring and the rest. The expectations, accordingly, are reasonable, which is why I’m grateful not only to work here but to be heading into the year of my T&P submission with little to no anxiety.

But so far as I can tell, among 4/4 profs at large I’m one of the fortunate few. I’m the lucky one. Not everyone works in a healthy, mutually supportive, non-dysfunctional—and Christian!—institution. And even in such institutions, the built-in expectations, pressures, and incentives can work against one flourishing and finding promotion rather than buoying and supporting one in that journey. “Punishing” and “brutal” are two words one often hears in conversations about such environments. There’s a reason folks are fleeing academe. Why not just work a boring nine-to-five with benefits and regular hours, without having to bring it home with you?

Most, I take it, are just trying to endure. That’s why I’m writing two more posts in this series. The imagined audience for the first post was graduate students and administrators wondering what it’s like to teach a 4/4; for this second post, administrators and trustees as well as fellow 4/4 teachers. The third and fourth posts, though, are together targeted directly at those friends and colleagues teaching a 4/4 (whether now or in the future), either at the beginning or in the middle of their tenures(!) in such positions, who are wondering how to make the time for research. Having cast a somewhat bleak or at least stark vision of the 4/4 life, I want to make good on the promise that it need not be the academic purgatory—or inferno—it’s so often made out to be. It’s possible to read and to write, to produce quality scholarship. It really is. But just as institutions make tradeoffs in what they offer faculty, given what those institutions want from their faculty, so in your own work and career, you have to be willing to make similar tradeoffs. It all depends on what you want.

A very special episode of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood

In which Daniel, now the middle child with half a dozen siblings, experiences a tiny setback that flummoxes his otherwise unqualified expectation that everything in his young life ought to go his way.

He sits down and cries—but in the chaos of a bustling household and so many other children, his mother and father are unable to pause the family's life, halt the earth's spin, and sing a song to soothe his self-esteem while ostensibly increasing his emotional intelligence.

Soon enough Daniel stops crying.

Eventually he gets up, discovers a solution to the problem on his own, and moves on.

Remembering Nama (1921–2019)

My maternal grandmother passed away this afternoon, after nearly 98 years of life on this earth. She was born in Mississippi two and a half years after the end of World War I. She lived through the Great Depression, the second World War, and every other major event you can think of from the last 75 years. She gave birth to seven children and, after losing one in childhood, raised the other six—spread across 21 years—together with her husband, who worked as a mailman. She lived to see 15 grandchildren, 31 great-grandchildren, and four great-great-grandchildren. She was widowed in her early 70s, and never remarried. She suffered the loss of her oldest son in his 70s, but no one else; she outlived the rest.

She was an extraordinary woman in the most old-fashioned of ways. A dutiful wife and stoic mother, a quiet Catholic and yellow-dog Democrat, she believed in loving your family, working hard, and doing what you can, with what you have, while you're able. She took wry pleasure in informing young women who married into the family that "we don't have no crybaby girls in this family." One of her mottoes was "you can't do everything." She loved food, especially seafood, and most of all if she was cooking it for a house full of people.

But probably her favorite thing was simply to be there, in a chair, in the midst of an overcrowded house somewhere in Mississippi (or Austin, Texas, or Dothan, Alabama), just marinading in the hot loud hustle and bustle of a family gathering: kids running to and fro, cooks in the kitchen, grandpas asleep in recliners, a baby crying somewhere, all manner of shouting and laughing, a ballgame on in the background. If you were lucky enough to be there, and you glanced her way, Nama—that's what we called her, Nama—would be still, usually quiet (unless holding court: in which case, watch out), observing, taking it all in, with a small smile on her face.

And think of it: From this one woman's life, from the decades-long outpouring of love that she made her life to be, 57 human lives (and counting) have come forth into this world. Double it for their spouses. Now quintuple it and then some for the friends and in-laws and neighbors and others who've been touched in one way or another, directly or by proxy, by this single soul.

For her part, she was wise enough to sit back, to see it for what it was—a gift you can't force and can only ask for, but when it comes, you don't question it—to say a silent prayer of thanks, and to let it wash over her. She didn't need words for any of that. Her family, just by being there and being who they were, said all that needed to be said.

For such a one, we give thanks to God for a life well lived. May she, then, our beloved Nama, rest in peace; and may she, then, by the grace and love evident in her life across a century's time, rise in glory. Amen.