Drew Wendt (from DoYouLikeApples) and I talk Revolution, Resistance, Instagram, One Battle After Another, Eddington and other movies - and, also, talk about living.

Trey Herweck and I talk about ‘The Algorithm’ - and how we should respond to it.

This episode of On Culture is based on the most recent dispatch from The Embassy -

Thanks for listening!

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This episode discusses the latest dispatch from The Embassy - Funerals and Other Expressions of Reality. Here is an excerpt -

I officiated a funeral service for the mother and grandmother of friends of ours recently. I had never met the woman whose life we were remembering and whose absence friends and family were grieving. She was someone who lived within the big gospel story, who had, by all accounts, embodied the reality of this story for those who knew her. I spoke on the passage in John 11 describing the death of Lazarus, the grief of the family, the grief of Jesus as He wept with them - and the promise of the resurrection.

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

John 11:25-26

We Christians believe that Jesus is the resurrection and the life, and that belief in Him is life, even through death - and that those who live this life will, spiritually, never die - not in the old, final, tragic sense. Even though we grieve those we lose, it is our loss we grieve, not theirs. Theirs is the resurrection and, finally, the life that is life eternal.

It is a familiar passage of scripture for Christians who are familiar with the gospel accounts of Jesus in the New Testament. The events of this account weigh heavier, no matter how familiar, with the casket holding a loved one a few feet away. That is the thing about funerals, or memorial services, if you prefer. They are the realest of ceremonies. The realest of things has happened. A thing that is somehow shocking while being the most ordinary of things, literally and actually awaiting all of us. The intruder we are apt to pretend isn’t visiting us. But it does visit. And so real things must be said, priorities reexamined, commitments renewed.

Real things must be said, but what must be said is not always said and what must be done is not always done. The real things are sometimes not said, and nobody is wiser, or better, or even really comforted in their absence. Some years ago, I attended a funeral for a young man that many people I was close to knew very well. The young man, while remaining a story of redemption and renewal, and while bringing joy into the lives of many, tragically and, for those who knew him well, mysteriously, took his own life. Probably around 500 people attended, and almost all of them, many of them very young, knew that he had taken his own life. But this reality was never mentioned during the service. What hundreds of young people needed was some sort of connection for their young friend who had given into his darkest impulse, to this story of redemption. This was bypassed in favor of a message that, very likely for the sake of some in his immediate family, missed the chance to provide this comfort within the harshest of realities.

Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed: we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.

From ‘At the Burial of the Dead’, Book of Common Prayer ~ 1549

Reality, as the saying goes, bats last - not just in death, but in life. And it is the reality that we live in a story that contains death but does not end in death (“Do you believe this?”). We avoid this reality to our own detriment and diminishing.

Read the whole article here

Trey Herweck and I share our thoughts about thoughts and prayers.

This episode of On Culture - Thoughts and Prayers - is based on the article of the same name from The Embassy:

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Chad Myers and I discuss this piece from The Embassy - Watching From The Sidelines.

Take

I may post this again, but I wanted, in light of even more violence that appears to be part of our political divide or cultural wars to repost this piece: Interesting Times

I pray there won’t be many more repostings in the near future.

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This episode interacts with the latest dispatch from The Embassy - here is an excerpt:

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Sharon Melzer, 24, has long believed in manifestation, or the idea that she can bring her hopes and dreams to life by visualizing them.

Coming Soon: Your Beautiful, Successful, Confident Life - Ayson Krueger - NYT - 7/26/25

Manifestation is one of the watchwords of our time. The idea is to take an idea, a preferred future, and manifest it, or put it into the universe in order to make it a reality. It is believing in a future that isn’t here yet - and the belief that belief itself is a big part of turning a desired idea into reality. There is a part of this I accept, but the part I believe probably doesn’t qualify as what people call manifesting an idea into reality. More on that in a bit, but first, let’s look at the latest turn in manifestation, involving, of course, artificial intelligence. Sharon Melzer’s AI generated videos are an example.

Now, thanks to improved artificial intelligence technology, she can be — by putting herself, or an avatar that closely resembles her, in videos depicting her ideal future.

These digital vision boards are a little like movie trailers showing coming attractions. In one, Ms. Melzer is flying on a private plane, giving a keynote address to a packed room and getting a notification on her computer that she reached 100,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Coming Soon: Your Beautiful, Successful, Confident Life - Ayson Krueger - NYT - 7/26/25

She says that she watches these videos, and there are about 20 of them now, when she wakes up in the morning and before she goes to bed - instead of, in her description, scrolling through Tik Tok or Instagram. She watches herself achieving her dreams instead of other people (supposedly) achieving theirs. Not a bad thing, certainly, if that is the alternative. This idea of making the right moves so you can live your best life now and into the future is not foreign to the Christian space. It is Joel Osteen’s philosophy - living your best life now is thought a birthright, something the universe, or God, depending, gives us if we make the right moves or picture the right future or have the right kind of faith. It is a bit of the main character syndrome I talked about in my last dispatch - an invented life with an outcome within my control.

Using A.I. for manifestation has taken off in the past year, said Catherine Goetze, the C.E.O. of CatGPT, an A.I. educational platform. … To Ms. Goetze …, the videos look real enough that she is compelled to remind users they are not “crystal balls,” she said. “The computer has been trained to reflect back at you what you tell it, so if it shows you as a billionaire, it doesn’t mean you are going to be a billionaire. It just means you told it you want to be a billionaire.”

Coming Soon: Your Beautiful, Successful, Confident Life - Ayson Krueger - NYT - 7/26/25

Well, yes … right. Otherwise, there would be a lot of billionaires. I guess. I’m not a billionaire, maybe I just didn’t manifest hard enough. Or have enough of the right kind of faith. Or have the right software. But I don't think so. I don’t want to say a positive outlook on the future coupled with positive action toward that future isn’t important, even vital. But it seems like we are talking about something else here. For one thing, using Ms. Krueger as our example, she has 20 or so videos, depicting her in various aspects of a preferred future, but some of these may not go together. If there are 20 pictures, different pictures, of your future, it is quite likely that the over/under on how many of these happen is about one half. It is quite likely, in fact, that accomplishing one of these things precludes accomplishing others.

If one of these things happens, it will very likely require hard work, disappointment, redirection … it will be a journey. That journey may include a positive outlook, maybe even manifestation, and it may end with the desired outcome, but it will likely be hard earned. And here is the first thing that strikes me as I ponder this trend of manifestation. The destination of the journey is important, it isn’t just any journey that will do - but, with these caveats in mind, it is the journey that is the point. Life is the journey, the outcome doesn’t produce life, whatever outcome there may be is the fruit of a life. Or, I should say it is one fruit of a life. It isn’t even the most important fruit. It is, as I spoke of Living a Discovered Life, part of life that is “under the sun”. It is fine, great even, but it can’t be the point.

I have spoken with many people who have had a difficult journey, or who are in a difficult stretch in their journey. I’m sure you have too. That might describe you right now. One of the things that I have said to others and have reminded myself of during these times is God does not promise us relief from these difficult parts of the journey. In fact, it is through these difficult parts that most of the real fruit is produced. This is the fruit we are not manifesting, partly because we don’t have this fruit in mind, but mostly because we aren’t sure what it looks like - at least not from here. AI can’t help me make a video depicting a wiser future me. Or a more peaceful me, or more contented, kinder, more faithful, more humble, more joyful, or a more hopeful me. Or a more loving me. What would that even look like, exactly? As soon as I am the point of the manifestation, these things fade out of focus - they come indirectly, by God’s grace, on an outward focused journey. If God is gracious, and if I act in the faith He gives me, and if I imperfectly persevere through the difficult parts of the journey - a measure of these fruits find their way to me, even though that wasn’t the outcome I had in mind. Faithfulness in the journey is the point of a life that is more than good outcomes “under the sun”. …

Read the whole thing here.

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As always, we use the latest dispatch from The Embassy for our discussion - here is an excerpt:

The debate concerning the origin or foundation of mathematics has been around for a very long time. Particularly, this question: Is mathematics invented or is it discovered? Because mathematics describes to an unreasonable level of accuracy how the physical world operates, is it something like a part of or an addendum to our universe? Or, is it something humans are inventing, which may be what it seems like in the moment of thinking up new mathematical ideas. For those who are interested in the question, here are a few (very non-technical) minutes from Roger Penrose, one of the most prominent physicists of the past number of decades, on the question. One of the arguments against mathematics being discovered is the unresolved, and probably scientifically and mathematically insolvable question: how did it get there? God doesn’t often come up in these discussions, but that might be the beginning of an answer. I suspect this is one of the motivations of those who favor view that mathematics is invented.

I have always been on the discovered end of the question, not that anyone cares. As Penrose points out, there are many examples, Einstein’s theories being some of the most prominent, where the known mathematics was extended far beyond our knowledge of the physical universe, only to find, through experimentation, that this apparently invented mathematics predicts the outcome of these experiments to an incredible degree of precision. The mathematics, along with those aspects of the universe that the mathematics describes, was waiting, from the very beginning of the universe, for us to discover it. Some on the invented side of the question seem to believe that everything is invented, that nothing exists on its own, rather we make it up and live according to these invented rules. It is all in our heads because everything is. Okay, okay, enough about mathematics, or at least let us move from mathematics to life. This is our question: is our life invented or discovered? And what difference does that make?

This is our question: is our life invented or discovered? And what difference does that make?

I don’t assume you have ever thought about the question, at least not in those terms. But our answer, or our assumed answer, whether we have reflected on it or not, impacts how we approach, think about, and live our lives. As Carl Trueman writes in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self …

… most of us do not self-consciously reflect on life and the world as we live in it but instead think and act intuitively in accordance with the way we instinctively imagine the world to be.

Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p.73

As we reflect, with aid from Trueman and his book, we can draw on the work of philosophers Philip Rieff and Charles Taylor. Neither are religious, to my understanding, but both have wrestled with how we have thought about what life is over the course of Western Civilization. Rieff describes society’s moral values as finding their foundation in a sacred order (at least until our current age). He describes three successive worlds, with the first two worlds justifying these moral values by appealing to something transcendent, to the sacred. The first world is pagan and is controlled by fate, based on the whims of capricious gods or spirits. The second world in the West is Judeo-Christian and is characterized by faith, and at it’s moral foundation is a loving God who made us and everything else. We can move past fate because, in this second world, our lives have a purpose beyond ourselves, we are part of a larger story. The third world, by contrast, moves past belief in anything transcendent. It is only us, no larger purpose, nothing else to justify us, we have to justify ourselves. We have to invent our lives instead of discovering them in a larger story. Rieff writes,

Culture and sacred order are inseparable, the former the registration of the latter as a systematic expression of the practical relation between humans and the shadow aspect of reality as it is lived. No culture has ever preserved itself where it is not a registration of a sacred order.

Philip Rieff, Sacred Order / Social Order, Volume 1, p.13 - referenced by Trueman, p. 76

What Rieff calls the third world, Charles Taylor in his work A Secular Age, calls the immanent frame. Previously, as Rieff describes as the first and second world, we operated in a transcendent frame. In this shift from the transcendent frame to the immanent frame, Taylor describes a shift in how we understand our lives. In the transcendent frame, we view our life as deeper than what is on the surface, the world we see is representative of a larger reality. In the immanent frame, there is no larger reality, there is no order or meaning to discover. We are the creators of the meaning of our lives, instead of the discoverers of the meaning our lives already have. I think it is important to note that Taylor is not arguing for the transcendent frame, I don’t want to misrepresent him. He is simply noticing this shift and some of the impacts it has.

I have summarized and oversimplified very large ideas - but it is clear we have moved from the idea that our lives are given to us, along with the meaning and purpose that is a part of this gift, to the idea that our lives are completely our own, that we enter in Act 1, Scene 1 of our stories and it is all about the play that we write. Which is pretty much what we are left with if we reject the transcendent frame.

Many of us, perhaps most of us, ourselves, our friends, family, and neighbors experience life as chaotic, bewildering, maybe even apparently meaningless. That is true as well for Christians who have signed up for the transcendent frame, and a life of meaning - but who expect to understand the meaning at every step. At various times, I suspect, this describes all Christians, though we may not want to admit it to ourselves. We are impacted by the immanent frame all around us even as we believe in a transcendent frame. We seek to form our beliefs in this transcendent frame, but we feel the pull of a world that has largely rejected it

Read the whole thing here.

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Trey Herweck, pastor at Refuge Church in St. Charles, MO, joins me to talk about living in Interesting Times. We are using the most recent article from The Embassy as our jumping off point. Here is an excerpt:

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Although it is often mislabeled as a Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times” is of English origin. It appears in British diplomatic circles during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While there is no equivalent Chinese saying, they (at least according to Wikipedia) do have this: “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos”, which is a bit more, well, interesting. At any rate, we live in interesting times, and we understand the impulse to call that a curse. Our times are in turns unpredictable (except when they are all too predictable), anxiety provoking, polarizing, angry, fearful, dark, and at times, violent. It is the last one that is catching us, or most of us, by surprise. This violence seems increasingly to be cast as a moral response to this broken state of affairs.

The murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, on December 4th of last year is perhaps the most prominent recent example of an act of violence which was justified by some as a moral act. After his arrest for the murder, Luigi Mangione’s manifesto was discovered which

indicated that he saw the killing as a direct challenge to the health care industry’s “corruption” and “power games.”

“Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming,” the document read.

NYT - December 20, 2024

Based on the reaction to his arrest, many people, many of these being younger people, agreed - this was, to them, a moral act, an attempt to change the world for the better, ending the corruption of the health care industry.

Ending the corruption in government was the stated motivation for the man who beat the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a hammer after breaking into their San Francisco home in 2022. He intended to hold the Speaker hostage to extract government changes. A similar motivation was behind the group that plotted to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. Authorities claimed they hoped to start a civil war to bring down a corrupt government. While no motive has been identified after shots were fired into the Democratic National Committee office in Arizona last fall, a fire set in the New Mexico Republican Party headquarters in March of this year was in response to immigration enforcement.

Shortly after a dinner with dozens of friends celebrating the beginning of Passover, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and family narrowly escaped the fire destroying their home. The man who has admitted setting the fire cited the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza.

A similar motivation was at the heart of the killings of two members of the Israeli Embassy staff in Washington D.C in May and of the man who used fire to injure and kill at a Boulder, Colorado march in support of the Israeli hostages in Gaza.

On a different note, Ziz LaSota believes that the threat of artificial intelligence is sufficient to justify violence.

She wrote favorably of violence, said she was willing to sacrifice everything to achieve her goals and considered A.I.’s threat to humanity “the most important problem in the world,” she once wrote. Now six people are dead, landing her and several friends and allies, known as the “Zizians,” in jail, awaiting trial.

New York Times - July 6, 2025

And, of course, two different people on two separate occasions, citing the danger to democracy, attempted to assassinate President Trump.

Certainly, there is corruption in health care and government. Many of us are troubled by the at turns absent, then uneven, capricious, and perhaps lawless enforcement of immigration laws. The plight of the Palestinians in Gaza is grievous. It may be true that artificial intelligence poses a threat to humanity. Much of our world is broken. Does this justify violence, specifically lawless violence, in response? And what positive impact does any of this violence have? Far from being a moral statement, lawless violence lacks moral standing, and therefore undermines the cause in the eyes of almost everyone who is not already a true believer. I can’t think of any case where violence caused positive change in any democratic society in my lifetime. It tends to alienate those not already onboard, and shows itself to be part of a statement about the person committing violence more than it is about the injustice of the world. I have mentioned before there were more than 2500 anti-war, anti-government bombings in our country during an 18-month period spanning 1971 and 1972. That is about five per day. Those who are old enough to remember it were not surprised that Richard Nixon was re-elected as President in 1972, winning over 60% of the popular vote and 49 states. This violence for a purpose just does not get you to the purpose. It also identifies the brokenness of the world we live in as something unique to our age instead of something common to all ages. This common brokenness is something we are called to engage and redeem, and that won’t happen by way of violence. We live in a society of political freedom and, therefore, political responsibility. Far from fulfilling this responsibility, these acts of violence are an abdication from it.

Bad times, hard times - this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: such as we are, such are the times.

Augustine of Hippo, ~ 400 A.D.

Read the whole article here.

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This week’s On Culture is a conversation between Trey Herweck and me about privacy and our public selves and how they relate. It uses the latest piece from The Embassy as the jumping off point. Here is an excerpt …

Even though it is something I feel called to, it is a strange thing, not ever being a professional writer, to send these things off to people I don’t know. And, perhaps because of that, I want these private thoughts to make an imprint out there, with you - and, in so doing, are they no longer private? And, what impact does all of that have on me? (A not very private question to raise, but I hope you might consider the question, as it may be appropriate for you.)

How much is the technologically enabled drive to go public with our lives - a public that is now global - reshaping how we understand ourselves? Reshaping the moral landscape of our interior lives, our psychological incentives, the very definition and experience of being a person? … Have we ceased believing that something of value might lie outside what other people can know and articulate about us, beyond what we can even know about ourselves?

Anne Snyder, Seen and Unseen, Comment Magazine, Spring 2025

Have you ever seen one of those social media videos that are posted because they are really embarrassing to someone - they make the subject look stupid, weak, scared, awkward? And have you ever noticed that many of these videos appear to be posted to the account of the person who is the subject of these videos?

I also take it for granted that the greatest threat to privacy is not prying eyes, so much as our own desire to be pried into.

Anton Barba-Kay, Keep it Private, Comment Magazine, Spring 2025

Now, of course, these videos may be fake. But I think that makes the point even more clearly. We seem to live in an age where exposure, being noticed by others, is its own currency. And while I don’t think that any of you would do such a thing, such things impact us. While we value our privacy, many of us, culturally, seem to assess our value (at least partly) via exposure - whether by likes and clicks and hearts or by other ways we present ourselves to the world or to ourselves. I rarely post on social media - in fact, almost all my posts are links to this newsletter to let people know it is out there … which, back to the contradiction. I am part of the attention economy even as I analyze it. That, as I have written many times before, is how culture works - we can analyze it, but we should remember we are a part of it, even the parts we don’t want to think we are a part of. It leads me to consider (after having to admit it to myself) why I check to see if anyone has liked or shared or subscribed. It isn’t for the money - I make enough to cover the costs of my website and to help me do some consulting and coaching for churches and leaders who can’t really pay market rates for these services. (Why am I telling you this?) Anyway, it isn’t about the money. I want it because at least part of me wants the affirmation. Does that change anything about what I write? I don’t think so (see above). But it is a question I should ask myself.

There are two basic wishes at play in all our privacies: the desire for solitude and the desire for society. We wish to be left alone, but it is hell to be alone. We wish to break the spell of solitude, but hell is other people. Digital technology promises to resolve this problem by affording us both … But instead of both, we get neither.

Anton Barba-Kay, Keep it Private, Comment Magazine, Spring 2025

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room, alone.

Blaise Pascal, 1654

I am using this newsletter and social media more broadly as examples, but I am also thinking about the larger cultural impulse to present a curated picture of ourselves to the world, even to those we know and love, without thinking about it. We seek to present this to ourselves also, for our own approval. The perfect vacation, the perfect wedding, family, anniversary. The gleaming career, the wonderful house, the latest fashion. Many people, not all, but many, bought a certain electric car because it communicated what they considered to be the right things about the kind of person they wanted to be seen as. Some people, not all, cheered when those cars were torched when the message those cars delivered to the world changed. Some of that second group of people are also in the first group of people. The car is more than a car - it is a statement in a different package. Even statements about privacy are statements to send out publicly (I guess like this one? or from a writer I like below). I think most of this happens under the surface, beyond our personal reflection.

Read the whole piece here.

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Chad Myers and I talk about the latest piece from The Embassy - The Good People and The Bad People.

Here is an excerpt:

About four or five years ago, a friend gave me a copy of Richard Beck’s book Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality. In this book, Beck explores how we view concepts like purity and contamination in our culture (and other cultures) and how that transfers to our view of people. Often, the people we tend to reject are those who move us to disgust. Our rejection of them is partly a reflection of that disgust. Beck asks us to imagine a glass of juice into which he drops a cockroach and stirs it around. After removing the bug, do we want the juice? Almost everyone would say no. But Beck, citing the work of Psychologists Paul Rozin and April Fallon, shares that after the juice is filtered in a way that ensures all traces of the cockroach have been removed - even if the juice is boiled after filtering - most people refuse to drink the juice. It has been contaminated for us, it has failed the purity test in a way that is permanent. It is an example of a kind of fear of contamination that comes from a reaction of disgust. Disgust and fear can be related - we fear coming into contact with what disgusts us. It is also an example of what is called negativity dominance. A small amount of the negative dominates and contaminates the larger amount. It doesn’t matter if it is a 12 ounce glass of juice or a gallon, or if it is a small or a large bug, the result is the same. The clean juice doesn’t counteract the bug, instead, it is contaminated in its entirety.

As I said, I read Beck’s book about four or five years ago but pulled it off my shelf to take another look after receiving a text from another friend. He sent me a link to an interview of comedian Tim Dillon by CNN’s Elle Reeve. In his text, he described as the hour and ten minute long interview as “one of the more painful interviews I’ve ever witnessed.” Of course I watched the whole thing. Painful is not a bad description, I thought it had a bit of a train-wreck quality. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I found it fascinating.

Dillon is a successful and popular comedian with a successful and popular podcast. He is a bit hard to pin down. I think that is a good thing, more of us should be a bit hard to pin down. I’ll come back to that. Dillon is gay, irreverent, irreligious (I believe), a liberal of sorts politically, but heterodox, eclectic in his thinking. As such, he has been critical of positions taken by the right and the left, politically and culturally. He has been critical of positions I hold. I forgive him this indiscretion because he is very funny.

I know nothing about Reeve aside from this interview. On the other hand, the interview was an hour and ten minutes long and I watched all of it. In my reading, Reeve represented a stance that is all too familiar in our culture - and I don’t just mean it is reflected in the media, though it is prominent there. It seems to be an assumption underlying many of our interactions, social media or conversations or whatever, regarding any number of topics related to the culture and politics.

Reeve’s assumption, underlying far more than half of her questions, is that there are good people and bad people. She repeatedly asked Dillon about trends in comedy, in the podcast universe, in politics that had a very similar theme. There are good people and bad people, Reeve clearly assumed herself to be one of the good people, and assumed it is the job of the good people - be they comedians, podcasters, journalists, or politicians, to expose the bad people as bad. She never attempted to make the case for this assumption, she never argued for it, it was, to her, unquestioned. This assumption manifested itself in many ways, but most prominently, Reeve considered some of Dillon’s podcast guests to be bad and wanted Dillon to do more to expose their badness. She also seemed to bemoan the reality of podcasters in general talking to politicians without asking them “are you bad?”

I don’t have an opinion about the podcasts that she asked about - I haven’t heard any of them. But I think this good people / bad people assumption is behind much of our cultural division and, quite frankly, makes us dumber. As Dillon was pushing back on her assumption, Reeve said, “these are not my ‘are you bad?’ questions”, to which Dillon replied, “we are all bad.” Reeve then attempted to make a soft case that Dillon was bad, in a ‘if I was going to make the case, it would look like this’ sort of way. I think she thought, and wanted it to be clear to us, that she thought Dillon was one of the bad people (and she was doing her good people duty by pointing it out).

Dillon’s response that we are all bad, though probably he is not aware of it, has a grounding in Christian theology. We are all flawed, we are all broken, we all need redemption. We should not sit in judgment, certainly not in condemnation, of others.

The good people / bad people assumption (again, it is not argued for, it is simply assumed) generally means that I assume the good people position. I am joined by the people who are “like me”, the other “good people.” I or we are in a position to judge, to condemn, the badness of others. But I don’t need to be too self-critical. I am one of the good people.

I’m not naive, I am aware that some people seem to do a higher percentage of bad things than others. However, the proposition that my own percentage is 0 or so low that it has no real effect in the world is worse than naive. Moreover, even people who allegedly fit into the bad category may be right in this or that particular case, they may say something true that I should hear. Which I won’t if I make it the hallmark of the good person never to listen to the bad people. Which I also won’t if I think any contact with the bad people contaminates me permanently. I must stay away, I must not platform, I must condemn - in order to maintain my purity as one of the good people. After all, the smallest exposure to the impurity of the bad people threatens to contaminate me entirely.

One of the results of this assumption, painfully obvious in the interview, is a lack of genuine curiosity about other people - especially if we have already classified them as good or bad. Reeve lacked curiosity about what Dillon would say in response to her and, therefore, seemed to miss much of what he was saying. Or she didn’t interact with it, choosing instead to pursue the good/bad dichotomy. As I said, Dillon is a bit hard to pin down, a bit of a contradiction or mystery that I find interesting, but that is lost on Reeve, or on anyone else who is only interested in the moral classification. When we put ourselves in this position, we stop listening, we stop being challenged, we stop refining our own thinking. We are far poorer for it and so is our culture. Just to be clear, I find myself agreeing with Dillon sometimes and disagreeing with him maybe a bit more of the time. But if I allow myself to listen, I get to know something about someone else, I learn something about what they think, and, with Dillon, I often laugh.

Check out the whole piece.