Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Book-Review

Dallas Willard on the Beatitudes

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Dallas Willard‘s understanding of the Beatitudes:

It will help us know what to do—and what not to do—with the Beatitudes if we can discover what Jesus himself was doing with them. That should be the key to understanding them, for after all they are his Beatitudes, not ours to make of them what we will. And since great teachers and leaders always have a coherent message that they develop in an orderly way, we should assume that his teaching in the Beatitudes is a clarification or development of his primary theme in this talk and in his life: the availability of the kingdom of the heavens. How, then, do they develop that theme?

In chapter 4 of Matthew we see Jesus proclaiming his basic message (v. 17) and demonstrating it by acting with God’s rule from the heavens, meeting the desperate needs of the people around him. As a result, “Sick folk were soon coming to be healed from as far away as Syria. And whatever their illness or pain, or if they were possessed by demons, or were insane, or paralyzed—he healed them all. Enormous crowds followed him wherever he went” (4:23–25 LB).

Having ministered to the needs of the people crowding around him, he desired to teach them and moved to a higher position in the landscape—“up on the hill” (Matt. 5:1 BV)—where they could see and hear him well. But he does not, as is so often suggested, withdraw from the crowd to give an esoteric discourse of sublime irrelevance to the crying need of those pressing upon him. Rather, in the midst of this mass of raw humanity, and with them hanging on every word—note that it is they who respond at the end of the discourse—Jesus teaches his students or apprentices, along with all who hear, about the meaning of the availability of the heavens.

I believe he used the method of “show and tell” to make clear the extent to which the kingdom is “on hand” to us. There were directly before him those who had just received from the heavens through him. The context makes this clear. He could point out in the crowd now this individual, who was “blessed” because The Kingdom Among Us had just reached out and touched them with Jesus’ heart and voice and hands. Perhaps this is why in the Gospels we only find him giving Beatitudes from the midst of a crowd of people he had touched.

And so he said, “Blessed are the spiritual zeros—the spiritually bankrupt, deprived and deficient, the spiritual beggars, those without a wisp of ‘religion’—when the kingdom of the heavens comes upon them.”

Or, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.” This, of course, is the more traditional and literally correct translation of Matt. 5:3. The poor in spirit are blessed as a result of the kingdom of God being available to them in their spiritual poverty. But today the words “poor in spirit” no longer convey the sense of spiritual destitution that they were originally meant to bear. Amazingly, they have come to refer to a praiseworthy condition. So, as a corrective, I have paraphrased the verse as above. No doubt Jesus had many exhibits from this category in the crowd around him. Most, if not all, of the Twelve Apostles were of this type, as are many now reading these words.

(Willard 99-101)

This is a fairly persuasive interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount. It is certainly a Biblical teaching, in the sense that in 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, Paul makes it clear that the gospel is for lowest of the low. But is it what Jesus/Matthew means to say? I’m not as sure as I used to be. Since the Sermon on the Mount is a presented as Jesus’ moral system, it makes sense that it would start with Jesus’ description of happiness. If I were Lutheran, I would take the “blessings” of the beatitudes as promises for believers. But the problem is that that genre of saying and the Greek word it begins with is almost always used to speak of virtues that naturally lead to specific consequences. The major counter-example is Luke’s version of the SoM in Luke 6, where the traits of the blessed are negative traits.

Works Cited:

Willard, Dallas The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering our Hidden Life in God(Harper Collins, 1997)

Hedonism, Love, and Goodness

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The things that shape who we are and how we think are pluriform and sometimes mysterious. This is especially so in the age of the internet stuff that may disappear forever after you read it. Every once in a while, the Internet sends it back to you.

Around 2008-2009, I was quite depressed. And while I was still known for being a social butterfly at work and school, and many people even called me for advice (I remember distinctly two women with doctorates in psychology contacting me for relationship advice), I was languishing. There are probably three main reasons for this:

  1. Many of my friends had moved away, gotten married, or achieved opportunities I had never managed.
  2. I worked between 3-5 part time jobs to pay for grad school at any moment and so I got very little exercise or sun light. My academic nature and lack of sleep made it easy to substitute books for exercise. I also couldn’t afford a gym membership anywhere except a giant mega-gym that operated like a night club and prohibited squats, chalk, and grunting.
  3. I was lovelorn. During this time period, I fell in love, really hard, with two women. And because of that I felt like I had lost every ounce of the charm that had helped me make friends and ask girls on dates effortlessly before that. It was like I developed a speech impediment or a sudden physical handicap when I communicated with either of these women.

Essentially, because of certain failures of courage, mindset management, and personal care, I found myself ignored by women right during the stage of my life in which I had subconsciously decided to get married.*

Now, during this time, I had gotten really into reading Hans Balthasar, and I read his book Love Alone is Credible.

I searched online for any commentary on the book and found a quote on a blog [utterly devoid of theological interest in the academic sense], lost to the sands of time, “Never compromise on love. It’s the only thing that isn’t bullshit.” I’ve since found the blog through a retweet of the quote with a link to the 2008 post. It’s a great quote (the other material from the post varies in quality), and while the author clearly means erotic love, the point still stands. But, as any depressed person would do, I read other another post from the blog. The other post I read was about the author’s personal philosophy. That was relevant, since I was a seminary student working at a corporate coffee shop and therefore talking to atheistic armchair philosophers all the time. The author advocated a godless hedonism:

Imagine you had incontrovertible proof that there was no afterlife. No supernatural entities. No heaven or hell. No otherworld. No reincarnation. No forevermore.

No second chances.

Imagine there was no moral accounting after death of your actions on earth. No supreme being to judge your soul’s worth on the scale of divine justice. No reward or punishment. No appeal to omniscient authority in matters of good and evil.

There was only the endless black void at the moment death. The infinite silence. A complete surrender of your consciousness as the last pinprick of light extinguishes. All your thoughts, your feelings, your sensation, your memories… you… wiped away clean to merge with the great nothing.

How would you live? Given this proof of the finality of death, and of the expectation of nothing once dead, what is your personal philosophy?  

-@heartiste

His answer to the thought experiment is this:

My answer to the philosophical question I posed above is hedonism. It is the only rational conclusion one can draw faced with the premises I presented. When there is no second life or higher power to appease; when our lives are machines — complex misunderstood machines cunningly designed to conceal the gears and pulleys behind a facade of self-delusional sublimation, but machines nonetheless — grinding and belching the choking gritty smoke of status-whoring displays in service to our microscopic puppetmasters… well, there can be only one reasonable response to it all. It makes no sense to behave any other way unless you never questioned the lies.

-heartiste

My own answer to the thought experiment is that if I try to imagine the world without meaning he described (advocated?), I come up blank. Why? If love isn’t bullshit, then there is meaning beyond the chemical soup and system of mechanical pulleys and levers he imagines us to be.

Indeed, if love bears the marks of a single aspect of life that isn’t bullshit, isn’t a lie, and is worth pursuing, then the matter of meaningless matter must be questioned. Is life actually meaningless or is this feeling of melancholy a salve for my own conscience? Perhaps the lie is that we’re just machines of no consequence in a heartless universe. If love isn’t bullshit, it’s implied that love is true and if truth is real, then perhaps beauty and goodness are real, too. This is an important implication, for if truth, goodness, and beauty are real, then it is perhaps the case that pleasures beyond the reach of mere physical pleasure exist. Pleasure is a good, but what happens when the intellect attains to beholding goods beyond the mere stimulation of dopamine and serotonin? And what of beauty? Love entails beauty. If there is transcendent beauty, enjoying it may require that we move beyond the mere act of feeling momentary pleasure.

Ultimately, if it’s true that love really isn’t bullshit, then the meaningless universe is opened to the possibility that there is meaning in the universe rather than artificially imposed upon it by our illusory consciousness (if you’re conscious of your consciousness being illusory, what is what of what?).

Love truly is not bullshit. And neither is the cosmos.

*Note: After I went through a fairly rigorous period of trying to improve myself, I did end up getting married and love, indeed, is not bullshit.

Sanctification, Repentance, and the Habit Loop

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Introduction to Concept:

In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explains something advertisers have known for quite some time: human beings can be trained to respond to cues with routines as long as there is a reward. He calls this the habit loop. It looks like this:

The idea is that when we have a cue, we usually will follow a certain routine that leads to a reward and if this cue occurs enough times it becomes a habit and is very difficult to break. Many habits have no particular reward but are still hard to break. Think about things Americans do not eat (cartilage, fat, and animal skin) that are good for you and if you do not eat these things, think about how gross it feels to try eating them.

Duhigg’s model of habit formation is especially interesting Christians who wish to use spiritual disciplines, obtain some virtue, or overcome some particular sin.

Keep in mind this paragraph from Jesus’ brother:

Jas 1:13-15 ESV  Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. (14) But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. (15) Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

James’ answers the question, “Who is the go-to guy for blame when we sin?” Who is it? The person who sins. Or, to put it more personally, we are responsible for the temptations to sin that come our way. Desire is the cue, this or that sinful action or constellation of thoughts and actions is the routine, and desire fulfillment is the reward.

Personal Case Study

I have a tendency to struggle with acedia. It’s essentially a feeling of weird existential boredom that leads to sloth. The best cure for it, in the moment it attacks, is to pray, do something physically productive, and move on with life. The thing about acedia is that it never really happens at work, but it can happen after a really productive event or series of events at work. Now, coupled with acedia, I love information. My grandfather used to think it was weird how I always had “factoids” that seemed to have no practical use. He’s right. I remember, though I can’t place the story, when Holmes told Watson, “I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.” This love for knowledge coupled with a periodic lack of motivation to exert effort causes what the medieval scholars called “curiosity.” Not the good kind that leads to scientific discovery, but the waste of time kind wherein you simply search for novelty. I suppose that if I were less conscientious it would be the sort of feeling that makes one easily addicted to drugs (and I am susceptible to binge playing video games when I cannot sleep).

  1. Cue: Feelings of lack of motivation coupled with a constant desire to know things.
  2. Routine: The internet now exists: follow links, listen to music, and read pointless articles.
  3. Reward: Dozens of silly facts rather in the same time it would take me to read one sustained argument concerning an important truth, perform one satisfying repair to part of my home, or write one chapter of a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount I am trying to finish by the end of the year.

Duhigg prescribes two paths to change the habit loop:

  1. Keep the cue and reward the same, but change the routine. To change the routine, Duhigg notes that we must come to understand precisely what craving is set off by the cue. For instance, a shopping addict might have the desire to accomplish something, but the routine (buying something on credit) is so easy that it is the only option that comes to mind until the loop is further examined by the obsessive clothing buyer.
  2. Remove the cue. Removing the cue only goes so far, but it is better than nothing. For instance, one would no longer be able to binge-watch The Office and eat sweets if they canceled their internet service and only bought meat, eggs, and veggies at the store.

Two Necessary Things to Keep in Mind

There remain two other elements to changing the habit loop:

  1. The role of belief
  2. The education of desire

As to the first idea, Duhigg observes that belief plays a crucial role in long term habit transformation (82-86). In the case of athletes, they have to believe that the new habits will help them succeed. Similarly, AA members who commit to the steps and the whole program are more successful when they actually believe in the higher power (84). In the case of Christianity there is a cluster of beliefs that are important for manipulating the moral habit loop:

  1. Sin really is disgusting and bad for you
  2. The way of Christ is meant to give you joy (often now, but infinitely so in eternity)
  3. You are dead to sin (in other words, it is not your master and you always have a way out)
  4. God will help you

The second element, the education of desire, is implied by Duhigg but made explicit in Scripture and ancient philosophy.[1] This should not be news to us. Many people grow to love the routine of exercise no matter how grueling, people start to enjoy the taste of healthy food on a new diet. For instance, I can only drink one or two types of soda now since I went about four years without a sip of the stuff. Soda, even a sip, burns my mouth and is so sweet that it makes my teeth hurt. If Christianity is true, it stands to reason that the process of habit formation applies to the moral life we see in Scripture as well. And we do see this.

Paul speaks of being transformed by the renewing of the mind. This implies that one can change for the better over time. Similarly, Peter speaks of growing in grace and knowledge. It is also the case that John and James speak of love and faith being perfected in us, respectively. The author of Hebrews says that we should strengthen our weakened joints in our quest for holiness and so-on (Hebrews 12:12). In other words, God shapes our desires through the habits we develop.

References

[1] In order to fully change our character, eventually our choices and then habits, must result in an incremental change of desire toward the good. Jesus talks about this difference of orientation in several places. For instance, he observes that the Pharisees do their religious rituals in order to hide their sin from others rather than as acts of faith, hope, and love toward God (which obeying the Law was always meant to be, see Psalm 19:7). So, when one begins to put to death sinful habits and to put holy habits into practice in their place out of sincere trust and hope in God, ones desires start to change.

Tales of the Mountain Men

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My book club recently read Tales of the Mountain Men, a collection of excerpts about mountain men, edited by Lamar Underwood. While it has interesting stories, each segment ended right when it got interesting. It felt like I paid Underwood 12 dollars to advertise other authors’ books. So as a book, it gets like 5/10 or even less. But the experience of reading the excerpts was pretty good. It would be a great book to get from a library. Two of the paragraphs were so good, that I’ll reproduce them here with some comments.

Excerpt from Across the Wide Missouri by Bernard Devoto quoted in Tales of the Mountain Men:

Skill develops from controlled, corrected repetitions of an act for which one has some knack. Skill is a product of experience and criticism and intelligence. Analysis cannot much transcend those truisms. Between the amateur and the professional, between the duffer and the expert, between the novice and the veteran there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different integration, a different nervous and muscular and psychological organization. He has specialized responses of great intricacy. His associative faculties have patterns of screening, acceptance and rejection, analysis and sifting, evaluation and selective adjustment much too complex for conscious direction. Yet as the pat. terns of appraisal and adjustment exert their automatic and perhaps metabolic energy, they are accompanied by a conscious process fully as complex. A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom…It is hardly too much to say that a mountain man’s life was skill. He not only worked in the wilderness, he also lived there and he did so from sun to sun by the exercise of total skill. It was probably as intricate a skill as any ever developed by any way of working or living anywhere.

This is one of the best paragraphs and a half I’ve read on habit acquisition. A neurosurgeon friend of mind said that it would be worth reading daily for anybody in a profession requiring highly developed habits, he know this because he knows the brain and because he said, “It perfectly describes neurosurgery.”  

Excerpt from The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie quoted in Tales of the Mountain Men:

When they were going again his thoughts went back. As a man got older he felt different about things in other ways. He liked rendezvous still and to see the hills and travel the streams and all, but half the pleasure was in the remembering mind. A place didn’t stand alone after a man had been there once. It stood along with the times he had had, with the thoughts he had thought, with the men he had played and fought and drunk with, so when he got there again he was always asking whatever became of so-and-so, asking if the others minded a certain time. It stood with the young him and the former feelings. A river wasn’t the same once a man had camped by it. The tree he saw again wasn’t the same tree if he had only so much as pissed against it. There was the first time and the place alone, and afterwards there was the place and the time and the man he used to be, all mixed up, one with the other.

It’s funny how going to a place brings you back to the best memories you had there and the sorrow connected to the fact that those times have passed you by. From a Platonic point of view, it’s a good bit of evidence for the hereafter. If our consciousness is shaped by the form of consciousness, then the best we long for in each place, which shapes our consciousness of everywhere we revisit, is actually a picture of how that place ought to be or will be in some unspecified future. It was a thought-provoking paragraph for sure.

Book Review: Jordanetics by Vox Day

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Jordanetics by Vox Day

Vox is a guy who probably needs no introduction. If there is some kind of controversy involving the internet and its intersection with political ideology, Vox has something to say about it. His main writing efforts have been aimed at fiction, but he also writes political philosophy, general philosophy, and economics books. His writing is prolific, to say the least, and he’s fairly bright. When I discovered he wanted to take on Jordan Peterson, I figured it would be a fun read. Regarding Peterson, I started out a big fan because he talked about the value of free-speech, tried to speak about the mythopoetic value of the Biblical stories (which is valuable for Christians and non-Christians alike), used observations from evolutionary psychology, and tried to help young people obtain some degree of future orientation (though there has been a study of the future authoring program showing smaller or no effect size).

The Good

Vox cites a great deal of Peterson’s own material to make his case that Peterson is insane, narcissistic, and ignorant. The most damning citations were from Maps of Meaning, the Peterson book I read some of first (but started in interesting sounding chapters). What I hadn’t done was read it entirely. You can find a PDF of it here. I recommend you open the pdf and search for this phrase, “compacted into something resembling a large artist’s paint-brush”. That this paragraph, recounting one of Peterson’s disturbing dreams, made it into the book past editing is crazy. That Peterson had this dream is even crazier. And that he put it into the book on purpose is just damned weird. That Vox took the time to read the whole thing is nuts. I’ve read lots of big books, but after I read 12 Rules for Life and listened to Peterson’s Bible lectures, and his podcasts with Rogan and a few others, I realized that there was more to Peterson than I had initially thought, and not in a good way. Vox provides more than enough evidence to indicate that Peterson often speaks on topics he has not sufficiently studied (the prime example is when Vox pointed out that Peterson was wrong about Jewish IQ and representation in American media and politics, even Jewish folks on Twitter said that such representation was the result of more than IQ), is mentally ill by his own admission, and tends to universalize even highly eccentric personal experiences to provide advice to the masses.

An important element of the book is Milo’s foreword which exposes a major lie of Peterson’s. It’s that kind of lie (two of them really) that makes me much more suspicious than I was. That and the Joe Rogan podcast where Peterson claimed to have been 25 days with no, literally, NO sleep, made me think that he plays fast and loose with the truth more frequently than I’m comfortable with. And I’m from south Texas. I understand tall tales, where accuracy is sacrificed to make a story faster, bigger, or more exciting. But people don’t double down and insist on the truth of their exaggerations. Peterson, when I heard him on Rogan, claimed he couldn’t debate Sam Harris (a jobber of an intellectual) effectively because of his 25-day bout of sleep deprivation. As an aside, chapter 17 has some partly positive, partly critical comments on the carnivore diet:

The good news is that Mikhaela not only survives her long battle with mental and physical illness, she goes on to marry, have a child, and even to launch a career as a dietary con woman overselling the merits of an Atkins-style meat-only diet to cure a long litany of mental and physical ills, including, but not limited to: inflammation, gum disease, rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune disease, excess weight, brain fog, anxiety, diabetes, ankylosing spondylitis, other types of arthritis, high blood pressure, depression and fatigue.

Considering what the young woman has been through, even a hardened skeptic like myself cannot find the necessary wherewithal to criticize or condemn her. And given the current percentage of the American and Canadian publics that are dangerously obese, it can be convincingly argued that whatever the shortcomings of the Mikhaela Diet might be, the benefits it has to offer a dangerously overweight society stuffing itself on far too many carbohydrates and sugars significantly outweigh them.

There is some evidence in favor of the carnivorous diet. I have a post I’ll eventually finish attempting to answer this question, “Can a human survive and thrive on a carnivorous diet?” But in the meantime, Meat Heals, Just Meat, and /R/ZeroCarb have some good resources on the diet. It’s not for everybody, but the health benefits are real.

While I’m not entirely persuaded by Vox’s final chapter claiming that Peterson’s teaching is all tares and no wheat, I am persuaded that there are better avenues for helping young men grow up without asking them to forsake all group-identity (which is insane).  For instance, one could read Proverbs, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and many other great books for men.

The Bad

The book has a lot of grammar errors. But Castalia crowd-sourcing to edit ebooks before hard-copies are released. It’s annoying, but not damning. On a rhetorical end, Vox probably spends too much time connecting Peterson’s ideas to Gnosticism and the occult (not that the connections aren’t real) for the book to connect. Vox also, rightly, argues against Neo-Babelism (or globalist hegemony), but those concerns, I suspect, will seem esoteric to a larger potential audience who needs to know that Peterson isn’t as useful a resource as supposed.

His audience is so big, I suspect because he’s actually as much a media creation as Sam Harris is. Regarding Harris:

When Sam Harris first began to promote his first book (before anyone knew he would become popular) a writer for The Simpsons introduced Harris to a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and a longtime contributor to The Atlantic and The New Yorker. They became friends.

Regarding Peterson (from the forward to 12 Rules for Life:

The first time I met Jordan Peterson was on September 12, 2004, at the home of two mutual friends, TV producer Wodek Szemberg and medical internist Estera Bekier. It was Wodek’s birthday party. Wodek and Estera are Polish émigrés who grew up within the Soviet empire, where it was understood that many topics were off limits, and that casually questioning certain social arrangements and philosophical ideas (not to mention the regime itself) could mean big trouble…

Wodek is a silver-haired, lion-maned hunter, always on the lookout for potential public intellectuals, who knows how to spot people who can really talk in front of a TV camera and who look authentic because they are (the camera picks up on that). He often invites such people to these salons. That day Wodek brought a psychology professor, from my own University of Toronto, who fit the bill: intellect and emotion in tandem. Wodek was the first to put Jordan Peterson in front of a camera, and thought of him as a teacher in search of students—because he was always ready to explain. And it helped that he liked the camera and that the camera liked him back.

In other words, while Peterson needs to be intellectually humbled, it’s important to recognize that his audience is disproportionately large due to media efforts in his favor (this is kind of paradoxical because Peterson receives huge quantities of unfair press, especially for a guy who is basically liberal). Because of this, certain elements of his audience who needed an alternate point of view with a proposal for alternate voices won’t find it in the Vox book. On the other hand, just like pastors might benefit from reading the Peterson book, they might also benefit from reading Vox’s book to help them steer their charges in a more positive direction.

Conclusion

Overall, it was a good read. Vox is a nationalist, which is a reasonable political position, but it is much vilified. That comes up in the book, it may make it unpalatable for you, but sometimes medicine taste bad.

 

Appendix: Vox’s Translation of the 12 Rules

  1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
    The First Principle of Jordanetics: Be mediocre.
  2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. (Why won’t you just take your damn pills?)
    The Second Principle of Jordanetics: God is the balance between Good and Evil.
  3. Make friends with people who want the best for you.
    The Third Principle of Jordanetics: Leave the wounded behind to die.
  4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
    The Fourth Principle of Jordanetics: Your head is the only truly safe space.
  5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
    The Fifth Principle of Jordanetics: Do not excel, because excellence endangers the balance.
  6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
    The Sixth Principle of Jordanetics: Inaction is always preferable to action.
  7. Pursue what is meaningful (Not what is expedient)
    The Seventh Principle of Jordanetics: To reach Heaven above, you must descend into Hell below.
  8. Tell the truth–or, at least, don’t lie.
    The Eighth Principle of Jordanetics: You can speak a new world into existence through your lies.
  9. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.
    The Ninth Principle of Jordanetics: Dominate the conversation and control the narrative by keeping your mouth shut.
  10. Be precise in your speech.
    The Tenth Principle of Jordanetics: Transcend the material world and very carefully choose the words that will alter this reality.
  11. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.
    The Eleventh Principle of Jordanetics: Heal the world by assimilating its evil.
  12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.
    The Twelfth Principle of Jordanetics: To lift the world out of Hell, you must be willing to accept its pain and suffering into yourself.

I’m not certain all of these are adequate translations of Peterson’s ideas. Principle 10 is accurate if you take Peterson’s definitions of truth elsewhere stated into account. That’s fairly damning. I think that principle 2 is more rescuable than Vox tries to claim, even if Peterson bungles the delivery. The Bible frequently uses the metaphor of “watching over” which is a leadership term, to speak of overseeing/watching over your own life, soul, heart, and so-on. And Vox is right about rule 3. Peterson gives no helpful advice about how to distinguish between genuine friends in a hard spot and people who just destroy you by increments. Vox supplies no solution to this, but he never claimed to. I think that the Bible, with some help from Aristotle and Aurelius end up showing us how to navigate such perilous waters. For instance, Aristotle speaks of “perfect friendship” which is friendship for the sake of growing in virtue. The Bible speaks of the kingdom of God in these terms (of Israel in the OT and the church in the NT). Jesus also says that it is appropriate to criticize others after you criticize yourself (Matthew 7:1-5), and that rebuke and potential excommunication are necessary components of church-life (Matthew 18). Paul says that corrupting influences aren’t worth the risk to your own character (1 Corinthians 15:33). Psalm 1 reminds us that it’s better to be influenced by the law than by sinners, scoffers, and such. The book of Proverbs tells us over and over that men with bad tempers make bad friends. And Marcus Aurelius reminds himself that “people are your proper occupation.” All of this is to say, one can think of Christian ways to love somebody (in the sense of wishing them well and doing them some good) without letting them influence you, waste your time, or ruin your family.

Book Review: Poor Richard’s Retirement

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Aaron Clarey, Poor Richard’s Retirement: Retirement for Everyday Americans

Aaron Clarey is a consultant and independent economist who writes books that are meant to help young men and women make wiser financial choices. His approach is no nonsense, gruff, and often cynical. But despite seeming like a complete jerk, his advice which is free on his blog or youtube channel clearly comes from a big heart (for sensitive users or those who may listen w/children around, he does curse a lot). This is evident when he, for instance, criticizes parents who don’t spend a great deal of time with their children (this is a common thread in his books and podcasts and I only listen to them a couple of times a year).

I disagree with a great deal of his material, but it’s because he’s not religious and I’m a Christian. But his grasp of markets, how they work, and what personal steps are necessary for success are second to none.

That being said, if you’re a millennial, especially one who graduated college between 2007-2010, you’ve probably wondered how in the heck you could ever retire. If so, Clarey’s book has everything you need. It contains a helpful explanation of steps one can take in order to get ready for retirement, but does something a great many similar books don’t do. He reframes what it means to live a life of meaning with a personal sense of significance. The book amounts to a sort of secular explanation of Jesus’ saying that we should “…take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”

I think the argument he makes, though it veers toward cynicism is worth reading in full because of its rhetorical effect. So I won’t explain it.

The practical tips he gives are excellent. His solution to the problem of retirement is ultimately satisfying (more on that below). And he does run some of the numbers comparing costs in previous generations of those of ye olde current year in a way that is helpful and potentially guilt inducing.

Worthwhile quotes:

  1. Understand this and understand this clearly. Most two-income families are: Outsourcing the upbringing of their own children To complete strangers Passing up on seeing their children grow up So BOTH parents can work jobs they don’t like While suffering commutes that keep them from their families AND stressing themselves out in the process. (47)
  2. We engage in the rat race, pursuing pointless educations, for taxing careers, life-wasting commutes, just to buy stuff, pointless material things, while abandoning anything and anybody that really matters in life.  It’s the cause of the majority of divorces in the country, the majority of unvisited parents in nursing homes, and is ultimately responsible for all the country’s financial problems.  And to throw the burden of saving for retirement on top of Americans’ inability to just keep it together, only makes an already-miserable situation impossible to bear. (48-49)
  3. It is a full – time job to go and seek out new and interesting people who are going to make your life worth living. (134)

Conclusion

Ultimately, Clarey’s essay on retirement is an admirable little book in that it accomplishes three things:

  1. Instructs you not to retire.
  2. Tells you how to retire.
  3. Subverts the present day value system.

With respect to number three, I’ll wax philosophical. One of the reasons that a capitalist style economy can work is if Adam Smith’s moral sentiments are assumed. Capitalism helps provide a wide degree of freedom to people who pursue a sort of Aristotelian/Christian/Stoic vision of the good life wherein virtue is paramount, social trust is assumed, and while the particulars of an individual’s pursuit of wealth and greatness may vary, they typically revolve around family, invention, adventure, and philanthropy. Such a system of values simply is not broadly assumed in Western Civilization, and so capital itself is perceived as the highest and total good for man.

Clarey, an irreligious capitalist, sees this problem as a source of poverty and unhappiness and attempts to solve it by reorienting the value system of his audience. For this the book is worth ten times the price. Buy it for graduating seniors, read it if you’re in college, use it to get out of debt. It’s a good book.