Episode 364 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast.
In The Brothers Karamazov, the character Grushenka tells a story about an old peasant woman who never did a good deed in her entire life and went to Hell when she died. The woman's guardian angel petitioned God to let him search her life for a single good deed and if he found one, God would let her into Heaven. God agreed. It turns out she had once given a beggar an onion! Her single good deed! So God told the guardian angel to lower the onion into Hell to lift her out of the Lake of Fire...
What happens next depends upon the teller of the tale...
Today we venture into theology and the surprisingly radical nature of Christianity. Dorothy Day once quoted in The Long Loneliness, "no one gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy." I do my best to untangle what is genuinely striking in reading the Gospels with fresh eyes, and contrast that against much of the market-oriented and security competition games that dominate our world.
So much of where that leads us sounds silly in the cold light of day. It's downright maladaptive to worldly success. But as Léon Bloy once said, "the only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint." So, what the hell are we supposed to make of a world that is so at odds with the gentleness commanded by so many of the world's spiritual traditions?
I'll share with you what I've learned about myself in trying to become simpler, and do so with as open a heart as I can muster.
"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
— Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself,", Leaves of Grass
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
― Voltaire
This episode's sponsors
Philip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliers
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Listen to the RCC episode with Lisett Luik from Arbonics
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Resources
Realism (international relations)
Liberalism (international relations)
338: Carbon Security & the Geopolitics of Carbon Removal—w/ Sarah Godek
Sermon on the Mount on Wikipedia
The Sermon on the Mount starting with Matthew 5, King James Version (for the idioms alone)
The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day
The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy
"The Epistle to the Galatians" on Wikipedia
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X & Alex Haley
A Hidden Life (go watch this film right away!)
345: Why Too Many TV Antiheroes May Be Bad for the Climate
It isn't thematically exactly right since I argue against many of its verses, but the chorus to Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages" is apt: "Oh, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now!" I prefer the version by The Byrds.
Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green
The "no one should die from a preventable illness" meme
D&D Character Alignment (TvTropes)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still goofing around.
The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, thanks for listening to Reversing Climate Change. I’m your host, Ross Kenyon. Before we get going, I’d love to tell you a little bit about our sponsors. They make the show possible. I would love it if you could listen for just a minute while I tell you about Philip Lee LLP and Arbonics. If you work in carbon removal, you very well may have come across Philip Lee LLP’s work. I originally saw Philip Lee give a presentation about some of the common provisions within offtake agreements, and I was impressed by the quality of their scholarship and their work.
And I’m happy that we’re able to stay in touch and finally do this together. I think the law is an underrepresented part of what happens within carbon removal. We assume it’s the background. We assume it’s the mechanics. It actually takes a very smart and creative person to be a good lawyer. I think if you’ve Thank you. We’re awarded Environmental Finance’s VCM Law Firm of the Year for each of the last two previous years. They have offices in the U.S., Europe, and the U.
K. If you have business law needs around nature-based carbon projects or engineered ones, if you’re working with sustainable aviation fuels and the integration with Corsia, anything to do with the VCM generally, Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. The CRCF that’s coming out of the EU now. Get in touch with Philip Lee. If you’re working in this space, you really do need a good eye to the law. These projects need legal care. There’s a lot of structuring that takes place. It’s really not turnkey at this point still.
And there’s a lot more innovation and creativity that’s going to be needed to make sure that the legal infrastructure that supports carbon removal is there. So... Link is in the show notes. Go check out Philip Lee. Our other sponsors are Bonics. Bonics is great. They’ve been on the podcast before. I did a show with Lizette Luik, which I’ll link to in the show notes too if you want to go listen to that show I did with Lizette. Our Bonics is working on forestry in the Baltic states of Europe.
Europe used to be much more heavily forested. The great majority of forestry projects take place in the global south, which is generally a good thing. But we also do need forestry to take place in the EU and in Europe as well. Arbonics has put out some great research recently about the state of afforestation projects, about the bottlenecks in the industry, why the high quality credits are selling out far ahead of issuance, what that means for people who want to be buying carbon removal credits for forestry but cannot.
It’s a really important set of questions that Arbonics addresses with grace. I would recommend you checking out their work and also just checking out Arbonics in general. If you want to support forestry, give Arbonics a look. Link is in the show notes there. Thanks for listening. And now I will go into the show itself. Thanks for your time. Here it is. Hey, thanks for listening. This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of Reversing Climate Change. If I could ask you for a small favor, if you love this show, will you please open your podcast app right now and give the show a great rating and review in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whichever app that you’re using that allows for rating and reviews.
It helps maybe more than you expect, and it would be greatly appreciated by me. Secondarily, if you would like to become a paid subscriber of this show, it’s $5 a month, gets you ad-free listening, helps you support the show, and there’s also bonus content on Spotify. The link is in the show notes if you’d like to support the show. But in any case, I’m going to begin talking now. I’m going to begin this show now. This is a monologue show. And I’ve been working on it for so long.
It’s one of those shows that feels like it takes 20 years to be an overnight success. I’ve been processing this seemingly my entire life. One of the ways that I think through problems is that I like to think in terms of schools of thought. As you may have heard me say, I think that schools of thought, ways of thinking, have a kaleidoscopic quality to them. They can illuminate some things while they obscure other things. It’s a spotlight. And if you look inside your own soul or intellect or both, I suspect there are schools of thought that are mutually contradictory, that somehow coexist.
And whenever I’ve been made aware of this in the past, I often come back to Walt Whitman’s immortal lines from Song of Myself, from Leaves of Grass, where he says, Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes. And that’s how I feel today. I also contain multitudes. Two of these broad schools of thought that I’ve been influenced by or still think about on a regular basis are about as far apart as one could conceivably be. The two schools of thought are strategic realism and Christian pacifism.
Both of these ways of seeing the world and their subsequent ethical dictates have impacts for climate change and for carbon removal. The more that I read, the more that I think, the more shows that I make, Somehow it just comes back to what kind of being do I want to be in the world? When I co-founded Nori, I think I was much closer to a form of strategic realism. Realism assumes defection. And the prisoner’s dilemma. Realism assumes that people are mostly self-interested. They are not altruistically inclined.
They’re not going to cooperate unless they have to. They’re looking out for number one. And we should design systems that assume for defection. So in co-founding Nori, some of the early writing and podcasts and things that I was thinking about was what do we do? Given that we want ecological outcomes in a world where most people are self-interested, profit-motivated, making rational choices under constraints, not really thinking about large spiritual transcendence. The idea of building a business around people having a spiritual awakening, around the Gaia hypothesis, Or some sort of thoroughgoing Christian or really any spiritual tradition seemed very unlikely.
And it seems safer just to bet on continued microcosmic self-interest. Geopolitical strategic realism is that same set. I’m sure people listening could take issue with this if you’re a scholar of either of these things. But strategic realism within a geopolitical context carries on some of those microeconomic insights to the state level of saying that countries are self-interested. They might dress up what they’re doing with a bunch of rhetoric. They might drape on themselves Marxism. Or the liberal democratic order, but mostly they’re trying to increase their own security, to increase their own economic standing, their own status, and to make sure that the decisions that they make have implications for those who may not agree with them, but are forced to go along with them.
If there’s a war, countries want to win it. In the absence of war, they’re aiming to win the peace. Cooperation is useful so long as it furthers national interest. And you can see this coming out much more lately. On another show I did on Antiheroes, I was talking about how presidential rhetoric recently has felt much more realist in inclination. You can argue whether or not the U.S. was ever actually a strategically liberal country, which is often contrasted with realism, or whether its liberal tendencies were more a tactical decision that was superficial, layered on top of an underlying realist orientation.
And rhetoric you’re hearing lately from the Trump administration of being that and immortal words of Eddie Murphy. What have you done for me lately? It’s not about the US’s responsibility to maintain a Pax Americana, to maintain global trade, to protect the weak, to chastise the strong. That’s not the job of the US rhetorically. To what extent it ever was that is an open question. And people argue about it and will continue to argue about it for a very, very long time. It has a logic that is very attractive.
When I think about The relationship between strategic realism and liberalism, I’m looking at it from the lens of being an American. And so long as there is conflict between the U.S. and regional powers or the U.S. and other great powers, I want to make sure that my country is successful. If there’s a war, I certainly don’t want my country to lose it. That’s probably true of most people listening, that in general, we would prefer that the country of which you are a citizen does not lose a war.
That is one’s preference. And once you accept some of those premises or intuitions, or maybe you’ve never even considered that thought, maybe now’s the first time. It becomes pretty obvious that’s the default, which, by the way, is a fascinating thing because that was not always the case. In fact, it’s often pointed out that the birth of the modern nation state, you know, it’s not just from Westphalia, but it’s also more considered to be after the French Revolution, the people that are considered to be a nation. Have a state, their nation state, the people identify with that state.
And therefore, when the state goes to war, people give themselves over in a much more thoroughgoing capacity than they did in the past. If the people control the state or even are the state, if you’re feeling especially poetic about it, total war becomes possible. Total mobilization of the populace and the economy becomes possible in a way that was really not possible when the king was seen as the state and almost as a separate entity from the hoi polloi that are just farming and trying to stay alive and trying to minimize their interactions with the levers of power, essentially.
Wars looked different. They were smaller back then. They were something that kings got themselves into. But once we had a sort of quasi-liberal democratic order and we’re going that way after the French Revolution, that starts to change in a really big way. Once you accept that there’s going to be conflict and you’d like your country to win it, then the ethical decisions that you have to make are pretty far downstream. Okay, well, does a hyper aggressive posture in this particular case further national interest or not?
Does it make us safer or not? There’s a logic to that. It leads to some dark places, though. Obviously, if you look at the legacy of someone like Henry Kissinger, who’s very famously a geopolitical realist, Robert Kaplan is an interesting conservative who thinks that the US has pretended for a long time not to be an empire, but actually owning up to the imperial ambitions that the country has. Supposes it does not have, but in effect does have, would actually make us safer, more honest. We’d be able to understand who the U.
S. is in the world in a much more clear kind of way. And in fact, this could be on net a positive thing that decreases instability, that increases predictability and trade. It makes it clear that there is a world leader that is willing to fight to maintain the existing order. Obviously, if you’re listening, you can think of cases where maintaining the existing order is not just. You can’t just take a snapshot of how things are at any one moment and say, perfect justice exists and we’re done, and that’s it.
But if you accept those sort of core ideas, the rest broadly falls out, in my opinion. On the other hand, it’s a big hand, too. Several years ago, I read the Bible cover to cover for the first time. I reread the New Testament. I read loads and loads of secondary sources which are necessary to make sense of any book sufficiently old and dense just requires it. But perhaps the first thing I did that really knocked my socks off was is reading the gospels. You don’t have to be religiously inclined to do this, obviously, but I think it’s one of those things that everyone should do.
I mean, the Bible is without a doubt, the most, I mean, it’s the book, the Bible, without a doubt, the most impactful book that’s ever existed on the planet. It’s the most cited, the most well-known for world historical reasons, for literary reasons, one should know. And reading the Gospels, especially Matthew chapters 5 and 6 of the Sermon on the Mount, just blew me away. Just really, really wowed me. And one of the senses of wonder that I had in reading these books was that the difference between the Christianity of the Gospels, what Jesus is teaching in there, versus what you see in the world is so remarkably disappointing.
To the extent that I think if you saw much of what passes for Christianity in the world and you were an alien and you had just read the Bible, you would be flabbergasted. You’d be like, what is the connection between this book and what I see in the world? Mostly because what I experience in reading the gospel in particular is how wildly impractical it is. It is not a practical philosophy, seemingly at all. It is extremely rigorous. It is very much not of this world, in my opinion.
It’s also one of the reasons why some of the earliest works that I read after I read the Bible was Leo Tolstoy’s Religious Writings. Books like My Religion or The Kingdom of God is Within You really strange. Struck me because it points to this in such a loud and clear way. In fact, if you do read the New Testament, one of the things that will likely strike you is that the gospel is extremely clear. Granted, it’s cryptic. Jesus often works in parables. Some of the ethical lessons are extremely counterintuitive, in particular things like Parable of the Talents.
The Prodigal Son is probably the story that often causes the most consternation among people that I know. Its sense of justice is very much out of step with what we would expect to happen in the world. But Tolstoy, as you probably know, is a very well-known pacifist. And just looked at Jesus' extremely plain words, how many times should we forgive someone who sins against us? Not seven times, but 70 times seven times, which as far as I know, is a Bronze Age way of saying infinite times.
Can people multiply that in those days? I don’t know. Probably not. And of turning the other cheek and resist not evil. And ethical dictates like this that are very clearly meant to discourage the use of force to solve problems. This is an inappropriate way for people who aim to live a spiritual life to be solving problems. It’s okay. You read that. There’s not a lot of caveating, you know, there’s no footnotes that you read and say, oh, wow, there’s all these exceptions for war, or if someone does something really mean, it’s just stated this is the way that it is.
Then you wonder, like, why is it just the Amish and Mennonites and Quakers or the Catholic Worker Movement or like a couple of Christian organizations that have made pacifism such an important part of their religious feeling and their beliefs? It’s really not that common. And then if you keep going though, and you get through the epistles, and especially the apostle Paul, So much of the epistles is Christianity going from this weird, as far as I can tell, anti-organizational, very flat, potentially anarchistic, pacifistic set of believers into something that needs administration.
And so as Paul has these churches throughout Asia Minor and Greece, There’s all these letters of him trying to just like solve disputes and trying to organize people to live together. And the thing is, they’re not living like the desert fathers who are living as monks in the desert. This comes later. Or groups like the Shakers in upstate New York, where, you know, they’re not really supposed to have families. These are people who are trying to live normal-ish lives, as far as I can tell, but also adopt Christian principles.
And so he’s weighing in on all sorts of matters. Potentially the most famous or one of the most famous epistles is Galatians, where Paul is talking to the Galatians, as a matter of fact. About how Christianity is not merely for ethnic Jews. You don’t actually have to be Jewish to become a Christian. You don’t need to keep some of the Old Testament rules like circumcision. Galatians is famous for, you can be circumcised of the heart, but not of the body. Christianity can be seen as a way of universalizing Judaism beyond its ethnic bounds.
That’s one way to potentially conceive of this world historical movement. The point of this though, is that Paul’s work is really difficult, and he has to make rulings about whether or not women can speak in church in Timothy. How should divorce work? And can you remarry? And like, what if someone remarries multiple times, but their spouses keep dying? When they get to heaven, who’s actually their spouse? Questions that are... I don’t know. There’s like a sense I have in me that if you are a Christian or you’re even willing to like give Jesus the benefit of the doubt here, if it was important, Jesus probably should have covered it.
If he is the son of God and it was not covered, you don’t need to spend a huge amount of time worrying about it. The important stuff he got out, if you believe in that. But Paul just has all of this hassle trying to institutionalize what I think is an anti-institutional religion. One of my favorite stories, I don’t even know where I got this, but I’ve been obsessed with it. I’ve told it on a couple of shows. So forgive me if you’ve heard it before, but many of the monastic orders are considered cenobitic, which is a crazy word that I’m happy to know and throw into casual conversation on a regular basis.
But cenobitic means that they live together. So monastic orders oftentimes live in a community of other monks who have taken their holy orders. And in some cases, Monasteries were extremely prosperous. They had businesses. They did brewing. They would function, in some cases, kind of like normal society. It depends. There’s many different orders, and at different times in history, different orders were more or less strict, and that’s beyond the scope of this. But one of my favorite stories is that The people who become saints are not always very good at behaving synonymically.
Saints are oftentimes those who are extremely hard to keep inside of institutional bounds. And the story that I love is that a future saint, and I wish if you know who I’m talking about and where I got this from, please let me know. But someone who later achieved sainthood or was at least on the road to sainthood for the purposes of this story, He was a monk, but kept going out into the world and giving away his cloak and would just end up naked because he would give his cloak to someone who was colder than he was.
And the abbot who governed the monastery kept having to come back to this future saint and be like, hey, I can’t keep... Yeah. And the owl would be like, no, not like that. Like, no, you’re supposed to, it’s better for Jesus if you just stay within the monastery, you know, do your gardening. Maybe you can brew some chartreuse and we can sell it, whatever. But you’re not supposed to just keep giving your stuff away. And the saint is just like, Jesus just says, you’re supposed to give all your stuff away.
That’s what I’m trying to do here. And just driving the abbot up a tree, And that’s a lot of how I see the relationship between the Gospels and the Epistles, that Paul is trying to institutionalize this force. But a lot of what I see is the goodness of Christianity. And this is true whether or not you are a Christian or you’re just trying to understand what is the importance of this philosophy for the world. Is an anti-institutional, irrational, exuberant force of love and forgiveness. You’re supposed to love without bounds.
You’re supposed to be extremely forgiving to the point where it’s enabling a bad behavior in some cases. It’s actually really hard to forgive 70 times, seven times. If you’ve ever had any interaction with someone who is an addict or someone who has problems, this amount of forgiveness can cause serious problems. People will occasionally take advantage of the goodness of this bountiful availability of forgiveness. It requires meekness in cases where to stand up for someone is potentially the ethical choice to make. I actually just reread, I hadn’t read it in probably a decade.
Books sometimes just find you at exactly the right time, and I was really happy for this. But I just reread the Autobiography of Malcolm X, which is a fascinating book for a bunch of reasons, and you should totally read it if you haven’t read it before. Malcolm X’s and the Nation of Islam’s criticisms of Christianity are pretty much all on this front, that Christianity was weaponized against the enslaved peoples of Africa who were brought to America. And they were taught that, you know, you get your pie in the sky after you die and your job is to be meek on earth and to obey the slave master and resist not evil.
And that means do whatever people tell you to and your reward for meekness is coming later. It’s hard to listen to someone like Malcolm X talk about this and how it was used against them and to not understand the anger at Christianity and the desire for a less forgiving, a more defensive spiritual posture. Yeah. One of my favorite movies and potentially the best Christian film, it’s a tough, tough call, but it’s up there. If you haven’t seen Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, not only is it just beautiful, the man loves grass.
He’s always got wind blowing through grass. It’s a great story about an Austrian Catholic farmer. During World War Two, who refuses to take a loyalty oath to Hitler and basically everyone in his life, including his wife and everyone in the community and his lawyer. Sorry, there’s spoilers here, but also it’s like written into the synopsis of the film. He’s on the road to sainthood. You know, if you’re on the road to sainthood, something not so nice probably happened. But basically everyone is trying to convince him that, okay, if you just swear the oath, they’re going to give you hospital duty.
You won’t actually have to pick up arms and fight for the Third Reich. If you just go along and swear the oath, it’ll be okay for you. But if you don’t swear it, they’re literally going to put you to death. Like you will die for this. And it is sort of just known if you’re watching the film that this person And for whatever reason, I suspect it’s also from the Sermon on the Mount of let your yea mean yea and your nay mean nay. Do not swear oaths.
I’m pretty sure that’s what started it. But it’s also broader than that. He just does not think the Nazi order is worthy of his Christian support and so refuses to swear the oath and is put to death for it. And there’s a sense that you can watch A Hidden Life and think this person is a lunatic. You abandon your wife and your children to make some point that did not stop the war. All you did was inconvenience and cause grief to those you care most about.
There’s also a sense in which what he did was amazingly courageous that sets an example for all of us that this is what is required of those who allege themselves to be Christian is to be this kind of stick in the mud, to believe in what you’re doing and to not make compromises with what one believes is actively evil in this way. And to be willing to go like a lamb to the slaughter for it. It’s a beautiful film. It’s one of those films that I’ve seen a couple of times and I come back to, I’m just like, how do I feel about this?
Because I’m a family man too. What does that mean for someone like me? What does faith require? I spent so much of my life as a type of Jaded idealist, essentially. I talked about this on the Antiheroes podcast I did not long ago. And if you haven’t heard that, I’ll put a link in the Spotify section and in the show notes so you can go check it out. On TV Tropes, it’s called Default to Good. There’s a lot of protagonists who... Find themselves that when they were younger, they believed in something really beautiful.
And then they got stuck into reality, quote unquote maturity. And in this maturity, there’s trade offs and hard decisions and knock on effects, second order effects, third order effects that need to be considered. And I think a lot of smart people end up in this space where made a meme recently. Actually, I think I’m going to make it as the landscape image for the show. So if you look at it on Spotify, you’ll see it. But there’s an IQ bell curve where the low IQ and the high IQ.
The book is pretty simple, which is just no one should die of a preventable illness. And I think that’s the low and the high end of that meme I was just talking about. There’s no one should die of a preventable illness. And then the people in the middle of the IQ distribution are saying, no, we have to make sure that pharmaceutical companies maintain their profit margins that they continue to develop new drugs and blah, blah, blah. And I think for a long time, I ended up in the strategic realist position, which is very much located in the middle of that distribution.
Where I am thinking about like, okay, but no, big pharmaceutical companies aren’t making a lot of money, then they’re not gonna invest in new drugs and that will be on net bad and maybe more people will die and so on. And I feel that to be very much akin to the realist position on the global balance of power and how I wanna make sure that we’re on the winning side, that the US remains the world hegemon and things of that nature. Which is to say that there is some serious truth to that position.
Like it is not that it is not true. There is a logic to it that is extremely tight. But I also want to default to good. The characters that I admire in films that have done this are people like, I think Rick from Casablanca is probably the most well-known one I could cite here. Where, you know, when Rick was young, he was involved in the French resistance and believed in fighting fascism in Europe. And then he gave up on it. He had his heart broken.
He starts some gin bar in Casablanca. And by the end of the film, rejoins the resistance and believes in something again. And I think this valley of despair, this middle ground where you’re focused on tactical trade-off type decisions, loses sight of the fact that no one should die from a preventable illness. That fascism is not an appropriate political opinion. That children should not be dying for want of food. I took a graduate seminar in the Israeli-Arab conflict is what the course was called. And I learned a lot.
It was a great course on history and politics. And I ended up coming out of there almost like more confused or having less moral clarity than I went into it. Granted, this was I don’t even know, 15 years ago at this point, maybe longer. But at this point, I think the bigger political concerns, like I don’t necessarily need to have all of the tactical decisions worked out of the mechanics of how peace should work or how things should happen. My position is basically that if children are dying in particular, that it needs to stop.
We’ve made some kind of wrong turn into tactical decisions that take away from the fact that children are dying. And I find that to be the same about the tuberculosis case that I mentioned or in any sort of conflict where what we can all agree on are innocents are being harmed. And whoever at the time is doing that is the person that I’m going to be asking to stop. And recovering this kind of moral clarity is something that I’ve been recovering over time. And it’s one of the reasons why that radical vision of Christianity is so appealing to me because there are also cases where this type of forgiveness, this type of pacifism will not lead necessarily to the most expedient outcome.
It might not even lead to the most immediately just outcome, but I believe in that sort of romantic vision. That is extremely demanding, extremely peace-oriented. And I want to believe that. I don’t want to get sucked back into this realist orientation. I only have one life to live here. I want to make sure that I spend my time believing in things that may even run the risk of being naive. And I am more okay with running the risk of being naive at this point.
I don’t think there’s any other great way to live life at this point. Now is the time. For big visions of what has gone wrong. A lot of the ways of thinking incrementally and realistically about the world have led us essentially to where we are now. That’s one of the reasons why, if you’ve listened to the shows recently, you will hear Les Miserables brought up over and over again, because I love the capital R romantic vision of society and the individual. Someone like Jean Valjean, I think is A wonderful character, even in the absence of great complexity, because he has so much to say for the kind of world that we actually do want to create and spend time creating.
We should be practicing forgiveness and we should be trying to make amends for who we were before we got to this moment. But what the world especially needs is not more realism. What I believe it needs more of is more mercy, more love, more forgiveness. And I think a lot of that power can come from the sort of non-Pauline version of Christianity, which is just read the gospel. If you have it within you to bring some of that radical forgiveness and love into the world, that’s something that you can hold your head up high about.
There are cases where it will be irrational, but I have more respect for being irrational and erring on the side of love than not. And if you’re large and contain multitudes here, that’s okay. I do too. I love military history. I read a lot of foreign affairs, military affairs, diplomatic history, the history of wars, and geopolitical jockeying. I love that sort of thing. I think I’m probably among the people who have reread and rewatched shows like the Pacific and Band of Brothers, probably as much as close.
I’m like within the top percentile, almost without a doubt, definitely for the Pacific and books like Ian W. Toll’s Pacific War Trilogy, which he’s been on the podcast. And I think it’s just an amazing, amazing story. And I’m endlessly fascinated by, especially the war in the Pacific, but yeah. In military matters in general. And that exists alongside my desire to be a member of the chaotic good orientation that I think is Christianity’s natural tendency. We’ve attempted to put Guardrails around it in a way that I don’t think serves it at all.
I think domesticated Christianity is really confusing because it does demand us to give no thought for the morrow and sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof and You know, give away your stuff. And there’s all these stories about, I don’t know, I’m just going to quote a bunch of things about you, but, you know, let the dead bury the dead. People who want to follow Jesus, but they have to go to a funeral first. Or they keep all of the commandments and all of the teachings of Jesus, except they have a lot of money.
And Jesus says to, well, give away all that money, pick up your cross and follow me. And they go, ooh, not so sure about that. I’m not going to, that’s a little inconvenient for me. And I think quite a lot of the reason why Christianity feels so disappointing in the world at large is that we’ve tried to domesticate it. We’ve tried to make it so that you can live a normal family life and be a radically loving anti-material force. I just don’t think it makes that much sense.
I think it makes way more sense to take the words at face value that Christianity endorses a celibate Anti-material, Spiritual Orientation. Lay up not your riches here on earth. Mods are going to eat that stuff. Invest your time into the things that will keep forever of the soul. If I can only leave you with one thing here, just like go read the book of Matthew. You can skip over the first chapter. That’s all genealogy, but like especially the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7.
Just read the Sermon on the Mount and then think about it. How plainly spoken it is and how different that is from what you see in the world. One of my favorite stories on Mercy that I’ll interject here, it comes from the Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Grushenka tells a story about how she had heard from a peasant woman in her girlhood or something like that, that there was a woman who was sinful, real unlikable person that had never done a single good deed in her life.
As far as anyone could tell, it was just bad from start to finish. And so when this person dies, they go to hell. This woman who never did anything good is in hell. And so when this woman dies, her guardian angels intercede for her and go to God and say, there has to be some good deed here. There has to be something that I can offer that will redeem her from hell. And God says, okay, if you can find something, then let me know. So the guardian angel goes and audits this woman’s entire life and finds out that there’s one single thing and that’s that once she gave away an onion to a beggar and that was her single good deed.
So the angel tells God and God says, okay, lower the onion into the lake of fire and try to pull her up. The woman grabs hold of it and it looks like it’s working. The onion is being pulled up by the guardian angel and The woman is getting up. But as people start to see that she’s being pulled out of the lake of fire, they start holding onto her legs in the hopes that they might be able to be brought up too. And she starts kicking them away, kicks them in the face and says, get off of this.
This is my onion. I did this, not you. And then at that point, the onion breaks and she falls and everyone falls back into the lake of fire. And that’s a beautiful story, but it has that mean, ironic twist where this woman could have been redeemed, but even in this last moment, Stoll was so oriented to herself that she could not be redeemed. And it was her choice that isolated her from this forgiveness. I like a version of this story, though, that is that she accepts it with grace, or in fact, everyone there is able to be pulled up by her and be forgiven by proxy and just sort of all come along into forgiveness like this.
That’s the vision that I broadly have of Christian forgiveness. I want it to be That huge. I want it to be that big. I think there’s room in the world for more of it. Even if we want to cut back against me and say like at some point, some things are just unforgivable and we shouldn’t tolerate this at all. I dialed it up to 10 and you want to turn it down to eight. Okay. But right now we’re at like a two. I’d like to see a lot more forgiveness in the world.
And I find that onion story. I come back to it all the time. Whenever I’m struggling to forgive someone, whenever I’m stuck on, can I enact mercy at this micro level within my own life? I’m thinking about that onion. I’m like, can I find the onion for this person that I can lower down to them that will help me redeem them, at least in my own mind. I really love that about mercy. I think the world does need so much more mercy and it’s often so absent.
I hope you enjoyed this show. It’s Unusual. It’s not like many other podcasts within the show’s canon, I don’t think. I care about these ideas. I think about them a lot. They get referenced sometimes, but maybe not to the degree to which I might like them to be. I’d just like to pull all of you a little farther away from focusing so hard on the very seductive Strategic realist orientation. And if you’ve grown jaded over time, once again, I’m telling you, it’s okay to believe again.
You can come back. You don’t have to be so practical. You can believe in things again that are even foolish to say aloud. I’ll go first so I can be the fool who takes all of the arrows ahead of you. But I think it’s important to be simple in this way, be merciful in this way, and allow yourself to be maybe a little bit of a fool. A fool for something that is big. I think we need big ideas, big beliefs, big hearts. And I don’t want to be so guarded and so focused on what if everyone in the world is selfish and we need to adapt to their selfishness so that we can solve this problem.
I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be that. If you’ve made it this far, maybe you feel a little bit like me and also don’t want to be that or feel that. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed this show. Thanks for letting me be real with you. Not everyone’s going to love a show like this, but if you stuck it out with me, I appreciate you. You could be somewhere else. As I said earlier, you’re not. You hung in there with me.
Thanks for listening.
