Mere Fidelity
Mere Fidelity
The World Is The Wrong Shape For Women with Leah Sargeant
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Derek, Brad, and Alastair talk with Leah Sargeant about her book The Dignity of Dependence. They discuss why the world is built for male bodies, how pregnancy exposes universal human dependence, whether artificial wombs would help anyone, what's wrong with workplace dynamics, and why autonomy is a dangerous cultural idol.
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SPEAKER_03Hello and welcome to another episode of Mir Fidelity, a podcast by Mere Orthodoxy, where we think about the Word of God and the world we live in. My name is Derek Rushmaui, and I'll be your host for today. I am joined by two regular cast and crew members, Brad East and Alistair Roberts. Welcome back to the show, guys.
SPEAKER_05Happy to be here. Good to be here.
SPEAKER_03And we are joined today by a guest that we're all very excited about. We have Leah Sargent on, the author, the recent author of The Dignity of Dependence, as well as the um you run the Substack Other Feminisms, Substack, yes? Correct?
SPEAKER_00That's right, other feminisms with that plural, so you know that it's a rowdy crowd.
SPEAKER_03The many feminisms that are are other than the ones that we know. You run that Substack and author of many uh several other books so far. Um we're really glad to have you on the show today. Thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_03And we did want to talk to you about your your recent book that I'm just gonna write out say has was excellent. Uh The Dignity of Dependence, a feminist manifesto. Uh, one of the things that we're gonna have to ask you uh is just to unpack why it's a feminist manifesto, because one of the funny things that I noticed was almost every blurb under after it said, this is a humanist manifesto. So for some reason your blurbers were arguing with you that you mistitled your book. So um please explain to us what is the dignity of dependence and why it why is it a feminist manifesto uh in particular.
SPEAKER_00It's funny. I definitely got some positive reviews where people are like, this is a great book. You know, and Leah shouldn't call herself a feminist. The book is good. In many ways, each title, each word of the title is calibrated to give offense to somebody. Uh when I was pitching the book around, my agent said, you know, dignity, you might want to drop that. And he said it with my good mind. He's like, publishers know that's a Catholic word now. And I said I don't think it has to be. It's like they know. So he thought, you know, there are readers who might bounce off of it there versus talking about rights or something else. Um, dependence. I definitely got a lot of pushback of people going, shouldn't it say interdependence? You know, that way it's clear we're all giving and receiving from each other, that no one's just taking from other people. Like, that's why it says dependence. So it's clear that people who are just receiving, you know, who are disabled or who are elderly and won't be giving again from that point forward, that the book is about them. Um, and then of course, feminist and manifesto. Manifesto makes it clear it's a fighty book, even though it's not a pink cover. But feminism is part of the tradition I come out of. And I think there's a lot in it that's true. And what I'd say the kind of feminist I am is one who thinks that being just to women means not treating us as interchangeable with men or assuming our equality is premised on being interchangeable with men. And I think you go wrong when either you assume that that women have to be interchangeable with men to be able to make a claim of equality, or that because we aren't, as indeed we are not, it implies that one or the other is superior in a way that degrades the other. So that theme that women's equality is not premised on being interchangeable is one of the two core theses of the book.
SPEAKER_03I appreciate that. So your your work, along with um a couple of other recent ones, um feminism against progress, Mary Harrington, and then um against uh what was uh Louise Perry, uh her challenge against the sexual evolution. They're they're all maybe I I don't know if you chafe at being put in that box, but they're there are arguments that are feminist in in pedigree and in tenor, and yet are minority reports, as it were. They're all other feminisms. Would you own that in in that way?
SPEAKER_00Oh, absolutely. And I think what's fun is we all came to a cluster of beliefs that doesn't perfectly overlap, but definitely a similar cluster from very different starting points, which is something I also find reassuring epistemologically, that you know, you start different places trying to find the truth, and when you converge as folks who were definitely not allies at the your journey, there's something encouraging about that.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell One of the things I I I've noticed is with all three, is it's the prior there's an epistemic priority to addressing the body, the lived experience of men and women in their distinct bodies, in their distinct ways of inhabiting the world, not as abstractions, but but um you know, discussing things like how tall cabinets are and and the needs of pregnancy and and all those sorts of things that are just inescapably biological and physical, and and um you you can't you can't fully abstract. It's it's it's experientially grounded.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell That's right. And I think there's been a tendency to think that we're getting closer and closer to moving past the body. You know, the contraceptive pill is one of the biggest examples of this, that we've tamed one of the tremendous forces of being embodied, and we're close to beating the rest of it, hypothetically. And still at the same time, you can get caught out by lots of the ways the world still cares that you're embodied and you can't move past that. They just announced last week that they're close to, in 2028, perhaps, debuting a crash test dummy that is calibrated to a woman's pelvis so that women will hopefully stop getting as many broken pelvises and broken ribs and car crashes because the design of seat restraints is tailored to men's bodies and doesn't include women's. But we're still waiting until 2028 to start testing cars with the idea that two distinct sexes ride in them.
SPEAKER_03Wow. That's that that that that kind of concrete example is exactly what was uh so one of the things that was so stimulating about the shape of the argument is just considering all of these various um uh just concrete things that we take for granted. Uh Brad, I think you had a question you want to jump in on.
SPEAKER_05Aaron Powell Yeah. So um Derek was alluding to this uh raft of of writings from um different women claiming the F-word but wanting to pluralize it or particularize it in different ways. I'm thinking of Erika Bakiyoki's uh phrase sex realist feminism as one possible uh heading for this. So I my my question for you, Leah, is um what is Christian about your brand of your style of feminism, and then what's Catholic about it?
SPEAKER_00I think the most obvious Christian one is that I think the body is good. You could start with some of my premises that there are real meaningful differences between men and women, that they change how we respond injustice to men versus women that we can't just do the same to both and call that justice. But if you don't think the body is fundamentally ordered to our good, then you may mostly be thinking about it as treating women like defective men, especially with regard to fertility, that there are these differences and we've got to be sensitive to them. We've got to figure out how to get past them. You could even think that ultimately, and I think this is the least Christian point of view, that it's an accident of history and evolution that men and women are different in any meaningful way. And our goal is to converge them. What I think is the more Catholic part, and where I part ways with some of my Protestant friends, is thinking that fertility is one of those asymmetries that's incredibly important to the account of what God is doing for and with us. So that attempt to fully sidestep fertility, to tame it, to make it more trivial through contraception, through abortion, et cetera, is off the table. And then it makes you curious, okay, well, did God do all this as the result of the fall? Is this part of the cross he's asking us to bear? And a little bit, it's touched by the fall, but to think that men and women's asymmetry and our sexuality and our fertility is all part of from the beginning his very good plan for us, but that we live in a culture that treats fertility as optional and kind of an encumbrance, and we want to figure out how to push back against that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And to be clear, you're on a you're on a Protestant podcast where the older, the older, more magisterial Protestant views on that is fairly well representative. So we're we're a little we're we're a lot closer in that regard. Um although Brad, you had you don't follow that one up.
SPEAKER_00I'm on a podcast with three Protestants at the outset of the podcast, but I'll wait till the end just in case. Wow. Okay. High goals. That's a 60-minute convergence. Well, I'm here with the Holy Spirit, so anything is possible.
SPEAKER_05Okay, four plus one.
SPEAKER_00That's that's the four gathered together. So he is here.
SPEAKER_05It's amazing. She's invade, she's invading.
SPEAKER_03Never, never had that claim, never had that attempt on the podcast.
SPEAKER_05You know, this is why Leah specifically asked for me to be on here. She just wants to nudge me. So is it two?
SPEAKER_03Is it really a two-person show? Okay, go for it.
SPEAKER_05So uh my my follow-up question, Leah, is um, you know, uh Derek alluded to um sort of like the maybe the dominant or or at least a dominant um mode of feminism in in the wider culture. My suspicion is that what the four of us understand to be sort of second or even third third third or third wave sort of plus feminism in its academic brand is not actually held by a majority of women or men for that matter. And in fact, when I read something like your book, Leah, I find a point of view that would be broadly that broad is broadly representative of many women that I know, left of center, center center, and right of center, religious but also non-religious. And I so I'm curious as to your experience of the reception so far of the book, but also just of your work over the last decade of uh not just Catholic Christians, but other Christians, but also um non-religious or agnostic folks who would who are cat are feminism curious or maybe would uh identify as a feminist, and but but the any surprising overlap or convergence with what you would take to be specifically religious or Christian elements of it?
SPEAKER_00You know, one thing I like is I've been running other feminisms for five years now. So I have people who disagree with me strongly, for example, on abortion, who have stuck with me for all five years, which I'm profoundly grateful for because I don't pull any punches. I both talk about the things where we agree, and then I write really strongly worded pieces where we disagree, and folks have judged it worth sticking around and trying to collaborate or trying to persuade each other. And I think some of the biggest places of convergence just come out of that concern for weakness. So we talked about one of the core theses of the book is about that women's equality is not premised on interchangeability with men. And the other core thesis is that what it means to be human is to be dependent, that autonomy is not the full expression of what it means to be human. It's not the aspirational mode. It's not something we are almost all the time, but for weird exceptions when we're young or when we're old or when we're sick, that what we are is people who need each other. And I got a lot of folks who come out of a non-religious background, but a leftist background, I would say, who are deeply interested in this question of who is at risk here, who's unusually vulnerable, and how do we respond to that vulnerability. And I find it easy to build bridges across there, uh, work together. And then my goal is trying to say, and let's look at this one other set of people who are vulnerable, the child in the womb. Let's talk about what we might owe them or what might make it feel safe for you to consider that we could protect them.
SPEAKER_04You talk a lot about the danger of presuming a sort of interchangeability between men and women. And yet so much of the modern technological and um political world presumes a sort of interchangeability a base. There is a sort of um homogenization of society in terms of shared principles. In certain cases it seems difficult to avoid. We all have to use the same technologies, we all have to use many of the same systems and institutions. And in the past there would have been a lot more segregation of the sexes, and so hospitality for the differences between men and women were very much provided by uh different realms, different different tools in many cases. But how can we navigate a society where so much seems to require interchangeability and a universal rule, a shared norm for both men and women, in a situation where men and women clearly are not interchangeable?
SPEAKER_00I think this dynamic, you're right, it's not just about men and women, the sense of how do we standardize ourselves to better fit the machines we've built, whether those machines are literal physical machines or kind of social machines, the shapes of jobs, etc., uh, pressures people to kind of take a procrastinary approach, cut off whatever's excess, stretch themselves to fit. And this is where I found a lot of common cause with people in the disability community who are often pushing to say, accommodate us as we are. Don't just find ways of helping me fit the exact mold that you are used to as an able-bodied person. I love the writing of Sarah Hendron who wrote What Can a Body Do? And she has this example of a woman who has a limb difference and who's given a very expensive prosthetic hand so she can have as hand-like an appendage as possible, so she can work all the drawers in her house in exactly the way someone else would. But it's uncomfortable, it has to be charged, it doesn't actually serve her well. And what she does is she puts um zip ties on lots of drawers, et cetera, that she can grasp with the limb she has. And what she wants is better tools for navigating her house with her actual hand. And that requires more customization. But it also requires respecting that there's a good to her body as it is. And the goal isn't, well, your hand is different. Let's give you the best approximation of a normal hand we possibly can. I think that's our task in a lot of things in the workplace, in social realms, in the built environment to say, what's the range of people who will use this tool, navigate this space, be part of this conversation? How do we accommodate, how are we hospitable to that full range of human persons rather than saying, this is what we're set up to accommodate? How do we help people better fit that mold?
SPEAKER_04There's certainly a need to be accommodating for that sort of range. And yet at the same time, there are there do seem to be trade-offs. The more that our building codes, for instance, are designed around accessibility, many of the beautiful sorts of buildings we would have enjoyed in the past are no longer fit for code. And so the question is, what sort of trade-offs should we be prepared to make? And to what extent should uh concern for hospitality to those who are less abled or differently abled, however we want to speak about it, to what extent should that be traded off against hospitality for those who have certain strengths or certain um desires to enjoy beauty that might not be enjoyable otherwise?
SPEAKER_00This is something where I'm I have a lot of confidence in architects' ability to think more about ramps and so on, about how to incorporate them harmoniously into a space. Um I'm I'm pretty bullish on ADA accommodations, et cetera, even when it changes what we can build in the future, in part because those ramps that it you know need for a zero-step environment is one of the most likely accommodations all of us will need at some point in our life. You know, it really changed for me looking to buy a house with my family. We were thinking a lot about stairs, both in terms of we live in a hilly area, so half the houses are up high enough above street level that you've got maybe 10 or 12 stairs to get down to the sidewalk. And we were picturing just what does it look like to do that holding a car seat all the time? What does it look like doing that with a stroller and how little we wanted that? But by the time we were actually moving, my dad was getting older and we were really looking at each house, saying, Will my dad ever be able to visit us here? Or will even one step in the near term plausibly be too much for him? You know, we've kind of taken for granted the grandeur of stairs, which I like, but the more time you spend around the elderly, a group to whom we all hope to belong, the more you kind of see that starting the design of the world with the assumption that stairs are normal excludes and annoy you unless you're hit by a bus.
SPEAKER_03Thinking about that, I I hear that and I wonder, um, just as a seal banner, I I was I was moved by a lot of the the the concrete examples and the overall point of of um preparing. I I do I do wonder I do wonder if there's an argument for when when we prepare in that way, I guess it's it's kind of deepening the argument of of of I'm trying to think out loud here, but but if there are things that we should accept that in our future dependence and in our other dependence we we will just always need help for. Uh and so the opportunity cost, as it were, of building every environment uh for every person in every way, in every possible condition. Um I don't know if it's taking it too far, but it's but it's almost uh um uh a roundabout way of not wanting to deal with some of us are just gonna need um helps uh our whole life uh across uh uh a wide variety of of uh experiences. So that does that kind of make sense as a as a as a pushback?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Let me state it back and see if I've got it. You're saying the the building with accommodations in mind kind of pretends that we'll be able to uh navigate all these environments by ourselves for longer. Is that what you're saying?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, something like that. I would uh in my in my in in less of a think out loud kind of way. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You know, I'm I'm less concerned about that partly because there are a number of things we go through where it's obvious we can't. Um, but you know, the built environment does make it harder to make those transitions, including to have make that transition where a caregiver helps us. You know, watching my husband and two and his brother and his dad all struggle to get his yaya over one single step that was keeping her from going on vacation with them, you know, radicalized me, right? You know, it's that question of how much does it take for someone to bring you with them.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah, that's really helpful. Brad, did you want to follow up?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, give us, just give us, and and and for listeners who haven't read the book, give us maybe a flavor with a few examples of some of the ways in your phrase the world is the wrong shape for women and the world to expand the point is the wrong shape for relations of dependence, whether that is um the gestating child or child rearing, or as you alluded to, um uh the life of the elderly, family formation, all of it. Just just a few concrete examples of the of the range of what sort of what you the vista that you're trying to portray in the book, uh so we can have a sense of the problem.
SPEAKER_00I'll start with one example I think we all agree is less morally charged, which I think illustrates the tensions well, and then get to the more intense ones. So in basketball, there's been an on and off controversy at the collegiate level about where you should put the three-point line for women's basketball. And the question they're essentially asking is women are on average shorter than men. So should the three-point line be at a space back from the hoop that is equivalently hard for the men's three-point line, given that the players are shorter, or should it be at the exact same spot so that there's no difference? Men and women are being treated equally as in the same. And a lot of folks, including a bunch of women, prefer the matched single line, even though it means women are less likely to sink three-point shots. And the reason they prefer it is the sense that if people go out on the court of the same court that's shared by the men and women's team and see two lines painted there, even if they're different by just a couple inches, that will immediately convey that the women players are inferior, that they're playing with an easier line. And what's funny is they're having this whole dispute while at the same time, the women play with a smaller basketball. They play with a basketball that's better proportioned to their hands, but you don't line up all the basketballs next to each other at the beginning of the game and say, and look, these are the small women's hand basketballs. So there's a sense of it can be safe to accommodate the differences between men and women. Women, when people can't see that there's a difference, when they're either not lined up, they're private, or they're hard to spot. But when you put it out where people can see, you'd rather not make the trade-off because exposing the difference is dangerous. And then you see that turn up again and again, like I said, in the cars, where they're not well tuned for women's safety, in surgical equipment, where women who score as more dexterous than men on kind of trials of finger dexterity, then wind up equally dexterous once they're actually using their surgical tools because they're sized for men's hands and they have to hold them differently to use them at all. So you just kind of encounter a built environment that before you get to the really controversial example of fertility, just presumes a male default and pushing for a female default feels dangerous because it's acknowledging you can't use the standard equipment in the same way. So do you belong here at all if you need a special accommodation? And then when you get to fertility, the sense of, well, you know, I can't use the standard equipment of not being pregnant the same way as a man can. What does it mean to acknowledge that in a visible way that draws everyone's attention to it, just like those two lines on the court? Can I do that in a way that's safe, that doesn't make people think I don't belong here at all?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, Leah, I've seen a tendentious criticism of your book in more than a few critical reviews. Uh and so I'm gonna give you the opportunity to set the record straight. Let's go for it. Uh the the the um there are two options, two interpretive options for reading your book. One is that women are more dependent ontologically than men. And another is that all human beings are dependent. Um, but there is something about women's bodily experience in the world that raises the uh that raises the issue of dependence acutely in visible and undeniable ways. And that for you is an in on human dependence. Give me your give me the answer there. Or maybe there's a third one, but those are the those are the options as I see them.
SPEAKER_00I'd say there's one huge asymmetry, and it's fertility, right? That women are at risk of being exposed to someone else's need in a more intimate way than men are, and that that exposure we know makes women weaker. Yes, it makes us stronger in that we can do this thing, but in the meantime, you're throwing up, you're exhausted, you're depleting the calcium from your bones. So I really don't want to underplay what pregnancy asks of people. Being hospitable to another person's weakness in the way it makes you weaker. So you give to the dependent person but become more dependent in turn. And that's just a stark binary difference. And then at the same time, there are lots of ways that women are, by virtue of being smaller, less strong on average, more exposed to risk in certain ways than men are, more exposed to weakness. And then, you know, you get to weird medical stuff like autoimmune. So you get all those like small things. But I'd say the grounding one is pregnancy. And that's partly because, as I said, the foundational thing it means to be human is to be dependent. Men and women are both dependent in the most profound way. We are created beings. If you never, ever, ever have a baby, if you are in perfect health until you die after taking your first bite of your 100 birthday cake, you know, having been in perfect health the whole time and then an instant heart attack, very straightforward, you have still lived a life of utter and total dependence, dependent on God for creation, for redemption, regeneration, right? Part of the big asymmetry for men and women is when do you have to notice that you are at your core dependent, especially if you're not theologically in tune with this? When do you get caught? You've seemed autonomous for a bit, everyone else thinks of you autonomous, but you have realized it's not going to work. It's a lie. When do you notice? Women notice earlier on average because of that sense of risk of pregnancy.
SPEAKER_03I I was thinking about this just uh that Pauline text in 1 Corinthians 11 about um the the priority of men in some ways, but that the fact that both are from each other uh in different ways. Uh that that gap of of noticing is there because people people forget their childhood. People my my my little boy is one day gonna forget um perhaps uh being nestled and carried and dependent on all those sorts of things in all the ways that um that he was and has been and still is, he's only four, uh upon everyone else before him. But when little boys forget they were children, uh when when they're men, um women are attached to that experience or ha run the risk of that experience, so to speak, uh much more quickly. And th my own my wife's own my wife's own pregnancy, uh nothing drove home the difference, the distinctness between us uh than that experience of of of of seeing and caring for my wife while she was caring and gestating and feeding and housing our our children. Uh and so I I absolutely think that that line is is the big bright red one that we we want to mute, as it were.
SPEAKER_00I think it's a big thing we lose in both a more age-segregated culture than we've lived in historically, and at a time when childbearing and marriage are being pushed further back in people's lives. Because if you think about how do I understand myself in relation to God, God often returns to the images of maternity and childhood to talk about how he loves us, you know, whether it's human maternity or you know, the hen with her chicks. But when he talks about how he loves us, he returns to the image of a child nestled against its mother. Now, as you say, we don't remember that very well in ourselves. It forms us, it's rooted deeply in us being loved that way, but we don't retain the sense memory of it. What we do have or used to have more often is watching other children, whether it's our younger brothers and sisters, other people at church, being held. And then when we hear those scripture passages, we go, that's me. That's how I was loved by my mother, that's how God loves me. And I've seen it, I'm looking at it right now in church. But the more you wind up in an age-segregated society, the further away you think your own children could be, the harder it is to identify strongly with those passages. And I think the less we know ourselves in relation to God.
SPEAKER_03Uh that that point about this the loss of siblings and uh magnitude of uncles and siblings, extension, all that sort of thing is fascinating, especially when you start to look at, I'm listening right now or reading right now um Christian Smith's work on the obsolescence of religion and the decline with age, with each age cohort. And um, I haven't gotten to the section where I'm not sure if he discusses it, but the fertility gap of each age cohort and the boomer bump and so on and so forth, the less people are around children and dependent folks, the less they are likely to run into the fact that, yeah, that is you. Um if we're gonna throw Schleiermacher into it, the God consciousness that the the out feeling of absolute dependence at all times, it's easier to push off um in our in our modern age when you don't have and especially you don't have any siblings, uh that sort of thing. Um Alistair, you have been silent.
SPEAKER_04You mentioned at the outset the title of the book and the um concerns that some people had about the term dependence and preferring the term interdependence instead. And it maybe highlights the fact that people aren't really spooked by dependence so much by its asymmetry and the way in which there is the question behind the issue of dependence, dependence upon whom? How do we tackle a situation where dependence seems to have as its corollary you must be dependent upon someone else apart from yourself and all the fears that come with that?
SPEAKER_00Part of the advice I give people or the challenge I set them when I give book talks is I ask everyone who's there, and I'll ask you guys on the podcast with me and everyone listening when it's eventually released to ask someone for help with something you could have done yourself within the next week. And it's very funny because when I say this, like you see a variety of kind of chuckles or like, uh, right? You know, someone like they can think very concretely of what it would be and they quail at it. And I think that's partly because when we don't have a habit of asking, then we do only ask in extremists, where it's critical we get a yes or scary to get a no, and that puts pressure on the person we're asking, etc. It's more common that we solve our problems either by ourselves, to the best of our ability, by ignoring it if we can't, or by paying a stranger to help us so that no one who knows us know we needed it. And I think breaking that habit is what gives you room for the big ask. So in my neighborhood, in my family, you know, it's very normal for my family, including when I am doing book talks, to just ask one of our friends, Leah's in Notre Dame this week. Would you be interested in inviting us over for dinner? Which is rude, right? It's it's rude in the common parlance. You can't ask people to invite you over for dinner. You can't say, oh, obviously we could get DoorDash, but we'd rather come to your house and eat with you. That's very off-putting, isn't it? We do it all the time. And it makes it more normal that then they ask us because we were rude first. We asked for something we wanted. And now they can say, Would you watch my kids? I'm taking this kid to a doctor's appointment. You know, oh, we're delayed. Would you pick them up from school? All these asks where we're not promising an exchange. It's not, well, you watch them this Friday, I'll watch them next Friday, we'll be even, it's safe. It's just uh, I need something, and you are my friend. Would you consider doing this for me?
SPEAKER_03That's that's really powerful. Um, I was thinking about that. Are you gonna do it? It's weird.
SPEAKER_00Are you gonna do it, you guys?
SPEAKER_03I ask people for help all the time.
SPEAKER_05So I mean I have young children and I get them to do stuff I could do myself all the time. So that's you know Yeah, but do you fear their judgment?
SPEAKER_00Like kids aren't as ashamed of people asking for help as other peer and grown-ups are, right?
SPEAKER_05That's true. That's true. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03No, I I so and if you hear this, you'll you hear this. I I actually saw I have to fundraise for my ministry. So I actually have to ask people for money to go do my job and talk to college students. Uh and if you're hearing this and you want to email me, RUF is giving a matching grant. Sorry, I'm gonna plug my own ministry. Uh but but it's actually it's deeply uncomfortable. It's deeply uncomfortable uh to do that um at times uh for all sorts of things. So you'd rather I that I I thought your your chapter on or your your discussion on on the the freedom that we'd like to have with um uh uh paid services and the way we have uh made everything subject to market um kind of market relations, the the labor of love and and uh all all the discussions around um what is it? Oh, uh emotional labor and so forth. I mean, I was this I was listening to another podcast, and two two very wealthy people were talking about why they still work and what what money is good for, that at a certain, at a certain range, you tap out of like stuff you can buy, unless you're just insane and you just yeah, I just want a tiger for no reason. And what they said was the reason they just keep making money is the promise of freedom, absolute freedom, because you don't have to depend on anybody for anything. And that was such a revealing statement between two extremely rich guys uh that that that's what they want. It's it's it's the illusion of the pure autonomy of of having uh tons of money. Uh and I so I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about um that dimension of the, in a sense, the the marketization of our thinking about our relationships, uh, because that I think is endemic everywhere. Uh and it's one of the worst things that we we all walk, walk with. So maybe pull on that through a little bit.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think you can talk about two different parts of the marketization. I'll touch on one lightly and one more deeply. One is just the sense of endless choice, which I think is a big problem with things like dating apps, where you have the sense of there's this endless carousel of people I could go out with. And now I have this obligation to be a canny consumer of people rather than encounter them each one by one. And I think that's pretty destructive. And we experience that a lot of ways, where there's just this ever-multiplying, increasingly customized uh thing that sharpens our appetites without satisfying them. That's marketization problem number one. The marketization problem number two that I hear people complain about less, and where I want to give a lot of credit to David Graeber, author of Debt, for putting very beautifully is the sense that a market relationship is one that ends, where I buy a book from you, Derek, at your bookstore. I've never met you before. I hand you the money, you hand me the book, and we both agree that's a fair exchange. We don't ever have to look each other up again. We're done. I think the expression people use is we're quits now, right? We've paid each other in full. We're able to part. In contrast, if instead of buying the book from you, Derek, I borrow it from you, Alistair. Now I owe you something. I'm entangled with you. Now I have to return the book at some point. I've tell you what I thought of it. If I borrowed it and I hate it, that's much more difficult for me than if I bought it from Derek and I hate it. And you have this ongoing relationship. Graeber talks about the way that people who live in a barter economy or a gift economy don't pay each other back exactly. If I get a chicken from Brad, I do not bring him a chicken to pay him back. That's rude. To pay him back exactly means I'm done. I'm as done with you as I am with Derek, the bookshop owner, but I'm not done with you. I'm your neighbor. So instead, I should bring you like two loaves of bread so that I've paid you back roughly, but I'm not saying we're quits. And I think a lot of our relationships, including relationships with the friends, get structured in that quits mode where you don't want to have a debt sit for too long, where you split your meal exactly at the end, or you even tally up, well, who got which dish? And I got this drink, and you know, now we're totally fair. And one change I made in my life after reading Graeber's book is that I would have a monthly dinner with a friend. And I said to her, Yeah, I've read this book, I gave her the recap I just gave you. I said, April, how would you feel if I picked up the check completely this time and you do next time? And ideally, we'll forget who's ahead over time. We'll just know that we always try and alternate. Probably someone owes slightly more than the other, but we don't worry about it because we know there will be a next dinner and it will always work out as long as we keep having dinner with each other. And she said yes, um, which I loved. And at some point she moved. So there was a last dinner, and I've no idea if it ended fairly or not, because we've done it for long enough at that point.
SPEAKER_04The asymmetry of dependence, it seems that for people to be dependent, there also needs to there also need to be people who are dependable. And how do we navigate the dynamic also where there can be in certain settings an incentivized weakness because dependency can function as a claim for some people upon the resources of others? And there are bad dependent forms of dependence in addition to good forms, forms of dependence that arrest people's growth rather than actually f facilitating and being hospitable to their growth. How do we balance, first of all, dependence and dependability those times when we maybe need to be using as much of our agency as possible to be there for other people who need to be dependent upon us? And then on the other hand, to avoid the dangerous forms of dependence where people are incentivized to be weak.
SPEAKER_00So this is where you're going to all your listeners will understand exactly how old my kids are. But one of the ways I find it helpful to think about if I'm allowed to depend on people, how much do I owe anyone? How much should I do? When should I grow in strength? I like the Montessori image of that you try and explore the edge of your mastery. Wherever you are right now, the interesting place to be is just a little at the edge of what you can do. You can't spend all your time there, or you'll kind of pass out. Um, but that zone of maximum effort at the edge of what you can do is a good place for everyone to spend time. Whether you're a child or an adult, whether you're very strong in your body or have a profound disability or difference, just a little time saying, here's where I've been. What else could be possible? That sense of curiosity. I think that pushes away from a complacency about what you receive from others or a delight in weakness or only being served, though it doesn't make any guarantee you'll be able to repay others in the currency you hope you would be able to. But I think the other thing that draws us out of ourselves is just a tremendous love for others. That that sense of, oh, I could rest happy and content in just receiving, even though I have things I could give, only works if you aren't around people you want to be able to care for. And as Christians, we do always have something available that we're able to give, and it's our prayer. So in a period of profound illness, in a period of profound physical weakness, I can always return love in an asymmetrical way, possibly returning the greater to those who are bringing me food, binding up my wounds, by offering up my sufferings for them. So even in moments of profound weakness, there is a way we can return the love that we receive, but it may not look very returny in a worldly sense.
SPEAKER_03I did want to talk a little bit about like continue to explore the dignity angle. We've been talking about dependence, we've been talking about all these sorts of things. Um the title itself just says the dignity of dependence. I I'd love to hear you actually just articulate what is what is the fundamentally dignifying thing. Is it is it because some people can read it as no, it's it's dignity despite dependence. Uh that that, you know, hey, we're all made in the image of God, and yes, we're all we're all um, you know, we all have intrinsic dignity and we're all dependent, and but but there's a sense in which the dignity is there despite the dependence we all have, but we're all dependent in different ways. And so, you know, we we have a dignity that's unerased by dependence. The other way of taking it is no, dependence itself is a unique form of dignity. It is a it is a dignity conferring or a dignity generating condition. Um which of those two is your claim, or is it both, or or is it either? Or or neither, something else.
SPEAKER_00You in some ways I'm going to I'm going to offer, I'm going to offer a third alternative. What we are is dignified, and what we are is dependent. So these two things do sit alongside each other. We are dignified because we are beloved sons and daughters of God. And that is a relationship of dependence, that we are as elevated by his love in a way it could not be purely by our own matter or by our own effort. Um, we are so formed by being his that there's no separating out the goodness of our being and the goodness of dependence from each other.
SPEAKER_03Okay. Splitting the difference, I like it. Or not splitting the difference is is just is fully smashing me together.
SPEAKER_05Okay. I want to uh look, we've been we have just been far too nice. I haven't we've barely even had a we haven't had a fight yet. Leah is a is a famed fighter. Um so so fight with me a little bit, and then if we have if we have uh time, I want to see if we can get you to fight by proxy with someone else.
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SPEAKER_05All right, Leah, I think we've been too nice so far. Uh you're a you're a debater, you're a fighter, and we should uh pick a fight or two. I have I have one in mind uh uh in terms of what I've heard you say, and then one or two in mind of conversations around your book over the last month or two. So I thought you were going to say, and I'm happy to be corrected in my interpretation, I thought you were going to say uh we don't need the word same or equal in terms of equally dependent, but that women are not more dependent than men. In other words, that it is an epistemic thing. Women notice it earlier, girls notice it earlier. It is some, it is a kind of experiential subjective thing, but that men and women fundamentally are equal, and I'm happy to accept a different word there because I know it's differentiated, equally dependent upon God, of course, right? As I tell my students regarding like the doctrine of creation from nothing. An angel has more in common with a gnat than an angel has in common with God, because the angel is a creature. They're both created and entirely dependent upon God at every moment of their existence. Um, but also men and women, right, the the food I eat, the air I breathe, um, the bed I sleep in. Um The internet I'm dependent upon, and that has shown us in this conversation how uh how dependent we all are. So I'm wondering if you can maybe clarify or tell or or or fight with me on that, because I I don't know that I think it is true that women are that the asymmetry between men and women makes women more dependent, or that the relative strength or weakness, it's not even obvious to me that weakness itself is a proxy here for dependence, because you could be comparatively weaker to anybody and not more or less dependent than they are moment to moment or for your life across time. So, what what do you say to all that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so on that ontological point of view, men and women are in fact equally dependent on God. No argument there. But when it comes to the ways we depend on each other, what our bodily risk looks like, I think women's lives are more marked by risk. And that's partly, you know, that pregnancy doesn't change very much, even as we become more prosperous. But a number of the ways men expected to put their bodies on the line and put themselves at risk because of their love for other people have really diminished or gone away. Mostly for good reasons. And in fact, pregnancy has gotten less risky in the most absolute terms of mortality, et cetera, because of medical breakthroughs, but it's still profoundly, if not disabling, differently abling for large swathes of being pregnant, breastfeeding. It interrupts what we think of as a normal life. Where do men encounter those interruptions in what we think of as the prime of their life rather than when they become ill, when they become elderly, et cetera? Well, often it was by taking on very hard physical labor, by experiencing the weakness of their body as they spend it down for their family, or by putting their body and all its associated fragilities directly between their family and danger in war against marauders, et cetera. And we live in an increasingly prosperous and safe time. And I don't regret that. But it does mean that the particular physical vulnerabilities, exposures to risk that men have experienced throughout history are less severely or keenly felt, while women's paradigmatic experience of bodily risk remains present and urgent.
SPEAKER_05Leah, are there good non-Christian or let's say non-theological reasons to be skeptical of artificial wombs and the purported benefits for this particular asymmetry?
SPEAKER_00I think there's two ways of taking that question. Are you skeptical about whether this is achievable practically, or are you skeptical about whether it's a good idea if you pull it off? I'm skeptical on both fronts. So when it comes to the practicalities, I think it's important to say that by some measures we have artificial wombs now that we can deliver a baby at 22 weeks and our NICUs and incubators are advanced enough to keep that baby alive. And that's a miracle. Is that an artificial womb, you know, when it's just a more advanced incubator? Maybe, maybe not. But I think it's plausible that we'll push that back a little further. Could we get to 20 weeks for some babies? Maybe, right? I don't know. But I do not expect us to push back to birth, to the first trimester. And it's largely because the process of a baby's development with the mother is a profoundly relational development. I don't think we're going to be able to do a good job approximating the moment to moment blood changes, nutrition changes, hormone changes for growing and developing fetus in the way that we can help along the lungs of a premature baby. There's too much happening. That's the first question. Is this something we can pull off technically? I doubt it. But let's go back to that first part. Is it good for us if we could? If you could say, well, the question of abortion is irrelevant now because at six weeks' conception, we're able to transfer the fetus to an artificial woman, bring it to term. I don't think that's good for mothers or for babies. And that's for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's very clearly not an answer to the questions that bother people most about abortion. When people look at post-viability abortions, let's say after 24 weeks, when unambiguously the baby could make it, that's not an answer that satisfies people. We could move this baby to the NICU, so therefore you don't need an abortion. It's because people care a lot about being the parent of their child. And when they don't want to parent, they also don't want to abandon that baby for someone else to parent. They want a continuing relationship or they want that relationship to end. So I don't think artificial wombs touch the question of abortion. And I don't think they're a helpful answer to the particular burdens that pregnancy imposes on all mothers. You simply can't divorce cleanly the hard parts, the exhaustion, you know, the nausea, et cetera, from the beautiful parts that a mother gets to know the baby before anyone else does. That you feel the baby moving first, before any of you guys got to feel your baby, your wives would feel your baby first. And that's a big thing to give up in the name of regularizing or taking away the bad parts if you have to take away the good as well.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. I mean, I think it goes without saying that I'm in agreement with you. That that's why I was reaching for something to get us arguing a bit. But the, you know, my framing of the question was about non-theological. It's for me, it's a kind of hypothetical. What if we had the technology? What if it worked seamlessly? And what if that eliminated the asymmetries of risk and danger? And from a non-theological perspective, not person to person, because there are clearly people who value the experience of pregnancy and motherhood as such in itself, but uh at a structural or systemic level, what would we think about that as an option offered medically to every woman?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but if you if you want to limit your risk, you fundamentally don't want to be a parent. To be a parent is to create people who you love who walk around taking on risks that you don't consent to and can't control.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell Well, the other thing is the risk of what we we don't know is at a society-wide risk of having just tons and tons of, you know, thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of children who did not gestate within their mothers. And the profound, the potentially profound like attachment, uh, you know, alienation, all those sorts of things, like we were meant to be formed and shaped and attuned to our mothers' voices and and all of those other things, like like God bless NICUs, God bless um incubators, God bless all those things that save children, but those are all stop-yep measures that save children in non-ideal um situations, is kind of the understanding that I think we fundamentally have. Um and I think I think that's a non-theological. I mean, it always reduces to the theological ultimately, because you you always end up going back to first principles about what you think.
SPEAKER_05I guess what what I'd want to say is y'all are right. Uh I mean, it goes for me, y'all are self-evidently right. But I think we as Christians and and and folks on the margins of sort of Christian thinking can take for granted how self-evident this intuition or judgment is, and for how many people they sleepwalk into thinking that Gattaca or Brave New World is actually like a desirable outcome. And they can provide like ex post facto or even on the or e or even uh on based on first principles, they actually hold why that future is work worth uh moving towards, working towards. But we'll we'll put the right guardrails up. We won't have the bad outcomes, we'll just have the desirable factory farming babies. Um, and that that's why I framed it that way. Because if yeah, the people on this podcast are gonna agree. Our listeners are largely gonna agree. But as we like do move into that brave new world, as the woman from Orchid goes on Dalfit's podcast, uh, what what are our public square reasoning? What is our reasoning in the public square to try to get the person on the fence who's drawn towards that kind of technological consequentialism?
SPEAKER_00I think sometimes it's good to put your cards on the table and say, I also have some reasons you don't share, and this is what divides us, and I want to tell you about it because it's also part of how I tell you about the good news, that I would live my life so differently for this reason. I think the big thing on this whole topic that is accessible to Christians and not to everyone else is that there can be something good in the middle of suffering. And it's not just that you learn a valuable lesson from it, but that there's a freedom in the middle of suffering that at any moment I can join this with Christ and He is with me. And to say up front, and I understand that's less compelling if you think that's not possible. That is part of what informs my judgment here in something I do believe is available to you, but you don't agree with me on it. But I want to tell you a little about how I conceive of it in case you recognize it suddenly that you've had this moment of grace without knowing it by name, and then want to know more about the person who gave it to you.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Alistair, be mean. Uh, you know her best, so we we were waiting for you.
SPEAKER_04I watched recently or listened recently to your conversation on Dowthit's Interesting Times podcast with Helen Andrews, and I found myself very much frustrated with Andrew's presentation, but also frustrated with yours in various ways. And it seems to me that the sort of difference that Andrews was getting at is a very real difference. There are differences between male and female group dynamics, and within male groups there can often be a lot more of an emphasis upon a certain sort of agonism and combativeness and a joy and uh a dynamic there that is not the entirety and certainly should not be the entirety of male dynamics in relationship with other men and with others more generally. But it's an important dynamic and has been very much a load-bearing dynamic for society more generally, that degree of agonism and encourages a sort of agency, independence of some kind that allows for answerability, dependability, um, responsibility, and a certain degree of um exposure to challenge and risk. And there's within a community of care where there's a lot more of uh a feminine dynamic, that uh uh approach to risk, that approach to combat, that approach to um a certain degree of independence can be closed down and it can change the dynamics of many institutions. In the past, it seems that this has largely been dealt with by keeping men and women in different realms or having far more curate far more carefully choreographed relationships between them. In a context where men and women are very much operating on the same terms within the same institutions. Do you think that there is a way in which your sorts of concerns about dependence, applied more generally, can make a society that's inhospitable to certain dynamics that have been important for male groups, but then also load-bearing for society more generally?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Let me push back historically and then make my contemporary argument, which is I don't think it's really the case that for a huge swath of our history, men and women have done totally different works in different groups. I agree there are different group dynamics that predominate with men and women there. But we had a brief window in America where it was common for women to stay home in suburbs by themselves in neighborhoods of women while men went to offices. But the great sweep of history is of the family as a basic unit of collaboration between men and women, even as they may focus on different tasks, but not as much societal separation. There are different taboos and tribal cultures, et cetera. But a lot of our history is not men and women working on totally different projects or domains. Um, it's of home production of collaboration.
SPEAKER_04So I'm just push pushing on that point.
SPEAKER_00I do want to say I think we have a I do not think we're in an unprecedented time, as Helen says, of pushing on that point a bit.
SPEAKER_04There tended to be commonality of realm and commonality of goal, but also very clear distinctions in tasks within those um various realms. And so although it would be a home economy, there would be a lot of distinctions, differences and tools that were used, whether it was a farm context, but men and women were not interchangeable within those contexts, even if they had a common context and a common goal. And the question is not so much whether we should just separate the sexes, but whether in the homogenization of and the desegregation, radical desegregation of institutions which have formerly been fairly separate, um, whether there's something that's lost, and whether the sort of dynamic that you're describing is something that would maybe lead to a bit more of a distinction, or is that distinction a threat that it's trying to overcome to make a world that's more hospitable for women, but maybe there might be trade-offs for men.
SPEAKER_00I think the strong version, which is the version she advances of Helen's great feminization thesis, doesn't really believe men and women can work collaboratively to set and delegate goals and the way you carry them out. And again, I think that's what a family does at its core. Now I actually really like combative environments. I like risk, I like hard work in all those ways. And the way I've steered towards it in my own professional life has not been just by looking at domains mainly populated by men where I can take advantage of male group dynamics. It's been by looking for people who are working on scrappy projects, sometimes formally at startups, sometimes within a larger group, that have a real risk of failure where there's a concentrated attention on truth seeking because everyone knows if you don't stay laser focused, if you care more about group dynamics than about what's happening on the ground, the project will collapse in a matter of months. So I like that dynamic a lot. And I think there are ways to steer towards it that aren't purely gender-based.
SPEAKER_03Can I just pull on one thread? One one thing about the the household dynamic, and that's a really super important point, is those folks are married. And so historically, uh it seems like the the the big the big shift that to some degree we're we're we're navigating is that um you in order to strengthen the thesis, is now what we're dealing with is uh is domains of otherwise unstructured relationships, uh massive amounts of of men and women in the same shared spaces where you know and you might get a lot of local household economies, uh the division of labor, as it were, and the the natural and organic relation is also structured by a very clear relationship of trust. And we had babies together, and like uh we're just we're just getting on with the business and we're we're doing and it just makes sense as opposed to okay, now we have to have 45 substructured uh HR guidelines about various kinds of conversations you can have because you have all these unmarried people uh operating around each other in ways that are uh collaborative.
SPEAKER_00And so maybe No, no, I like I like where you're I like where you're going with this because this actually gets to in a different essay by Helen on HR department that I really like.
SPEAKER_03I haven't read that.
SPEAKER_00I haven't read that and strongly agree with, um, where she's contrasting what an HR department does in a company and what a union does. Okay. A union says the goals of a worker or then goods of the worker and the goods of the owner are not necessarily in accordance. So what we want is a space to have a fair fight. We want the workers to have advocates and the owner to basically be their own advocate because of the asymmetries here, and then we'll scrap it out and come up with something that maybe satisfies no one perfectly, but takes into account that we're both in this collaborative environment, but we're not the same. And we need to thrash things out to come up with something fair. Versus HR says, We're all a family here. There's no conflict between a family. And of course, a worker would never feel disadvantaged by an employer because we all work together and also you're fired. Um and so that's actually a piece of Helen's I like a lot. And I think it points to a different problem than just there are too many work women in this workplace. It's exactly what you said that instead of in a family where hopefully you've got trust and a shared goal, you have a lot of people who are here for a paycheck, who don't have necessarily a strong sense of how what they do is existentially important for the company, whose goals they may not care about very much, and are at too large an environment to have very productive group dynamics one way or another, and yet doesn't have a political spirit to it as a company for how do we live alongside each other as 300 people who have some level of voice and exit and loyalty here? And you wind up with this attempt to pretend there are no politics here in HR, which I think is worse for people than the rough and tumble of an explicit politics of union dynamics, et cetera.
SPEAKER_04Do you think it's fair to say that these dynamics are very much shaped, have been very much shaped by gender dynamics? It seems that you describe, for instance, your appreciation of a more competitive environment.
SPEAKER_00And I know many women like that, including my wife, but I know far more All the women in this conversation keep being women like me who love rough and tumble environments. No, I'm gonna be able to do that.
SPEAKER_04But in my experience, the more women come into a context, it does change.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm pointing my finger at pluralism instead of gender here as the big driver of this. That you're living alongside a lot of people with whom you don't share values and you know you don't quite have a way of talking about them. So it's trying to find a way of either making the values very quiet or occasionally seizing power and purging everyone else. Um, neither of which is a very healthy dynamic. And I think that's driving a lot of both kind of the uh seizures of wokeness and the HR efication of there are no values disagreements here in Ba Singh Zi, right? Um, which just don't leave people with a sense of, I want a healthy way of fighting with each other. And I think it both men and women get nervous about how to have a healthy way of fighting with each other, about values and about philosophy when they feel like there's no there there, when even for their own sense of philosophy, they have a sense of what's right and wrong and no way of articulating why they believe it or what it's part of.
SPEAKER_05Leah, it's striking to me, well, before I make my comment, uh two nights ago, my my wife and I showed our four children Remember the Titans, and we have two boys and two girls. And at one point, two characters who've been at odds, who are linebackers, start hitting each other. But and my my daughter said, Are they happy or are they sad? Did they she said they're she said, they're smiling, but they're hitting each other really hard. And and I explained, I said, boys, boys show each other they like each other by hitting each other. And and my my son said, right. And my daughter said, that is so weird. And and uh I suppose what I want to say is, Leah, I I took you in your response to Helen and then in the conversation and since to clearly be rejecting the strong version of her thesis. But it sounds to like you may be rejecting even a pretty weak version of her thesis.
SPEAKER_00Let me let me name the weak version I accept, right? Okay, I don't think of gender as the primary driver of a lot of these phenomena. Um, nor do I think restoring a balanced or tilted male dominance will fix the problems she's describing. But what I am pretty sympathetic to is it's unusual to have women predominate in a lot of work environments. And a lot of our employment norms and law are more tuned to policing male vice than what she would call feminine vice, because we have less of a history of case law of how do you deal with, you know, a group text that you're excluded from? Is that a hostile work environment? What are we doing? Um, a lot of the harms are less acute and intense. It's not, I groped you at the company Christmas party, but I invited everyone but you to an off-site thing, and it's unclear what the company can do to police that. Um, but I think it's true that if we kind of run the clock forward 20 years, we would hope to be in a place where we're better at noticing and addressing kind of failures of female group dynamics than we are now. That's the weak version I'd endorse. Um but both the sense that wokeness is primarily driven by women predominating in the work environment, which is one of her theses, and that uh a culture where women are the majority of lawyers will lose the rule of law, those I reject pretty strongly.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, that's that's that's helpful to me. I I think, you know, in my experience, the people in my world who were reading it and finding and finding something of use in it, they basically dr they basically like forgot within seconds that it was about woke so-called wokeness. Um and they also didn't interpret it in the strong sense either.
SPEAKER_00But it's right there in the T.
SPEAKER_05No, no, no, no. That's right. I'm not I'm not to saying that that is the right way to read it, just that like the reason the you know, these things go viral for a reason, I think. Uh there's there's hate reading, there's love reading, and there's something that that touches a nerve. And the nerve I saw was it named both men and women's in experiences and professional environments, whether they were right, left, or center, Christian or non Christian, where they just can't deny the fact that men and women relate in different ways and they communicate in different ways and they work and they collaborate in different ways. And it is, I think, what what Helen is pointing at being maximally. Charitable is an over-determined phenomenon that most people in professional environments can give anecdotes about. And again, like for me, sort of drop the wokeness part. And for me, it was a conversation starter with many people about like, yeah, we kind of ignore this and we we act different around each other. And then when we're in same-sex environments, we we drop the mask and and we're all trying to sort of be nice to each other.
SPEAKER_03Everybody code switches. Yes, everybody code switches.
SPEAKER_05And for some people, it's no big deal. And some people are not very good at it, uh, male and female.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Um, and they're and they're penalized. So the dude who uh who acts the same in in boys' Bible study as he does in coed Bible study is weird because like, bro, there's girls here. You need you need to.
SPEAKER_00I think I think also one of the one of the actual problems I would say of group dynamics that is under thought about, under-theorized, and under-addressed is just what it means to bring social cohesion-oriented dynamics, which I agree are more common for women, to scales where they don't work, or the tool is not the right tool, or where there's because when I think about what's what's the thing that Helen describes where I'm like, I hate that thing, right? Um, it's not a work thing for me. It's when I'm on a group text with a group of women and someone complains about her husband and then gets aggressively validated by 40 women who have never met him. Right.
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_00And that's something where both I have a rule that like I don't complain about my husband ever in those environments. I think they're not actually helpful for me loving my husband. Um, I can't complain about anything unless I'm asking for help with a single person, not a group, who is definitely knows my husband and is praying for both of us. And I think those things that work well person to person, maybe in a group of three, don't work well on a group text of semi-strangers who have this intimacy of validation. And it's bad for everyone involved. So that's one of the dynamics. That's not something that an HR department even does anything about. And it happens elsewhere. But thinking about, we have these social tools, both men, women, mixed groups do that are tuned to environments and scales that are not the environments and scales we're deploying them. How can we be thoughtful about what these tools are oriented towards, and how can we be thoughtful about when we're using them outside of their intended application?
SPEAKER_04Maybe just following up on that and connecting it to the HR department, um, I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on it. Seems your description of the HR department is not a favorable one. And HR departments, in many ways, exploit dependency. They want dependent workers who are a docile workforce that will expect them to broker the relationships among employees. And how can a vision of a society that values dependence avoid the sort of predatory approaches where people will exploit dependence and encourage it in order to get control?
SPEAKER_00So I actually don't think that's a fair description of HR. And I say this as a former HR lady. So I ran HR for a startup. I've got to out myself right here, even as I've got to be. Breaking news. Wow. And most HR work is very boring, is the thing to remember. It's filing forms, reminding people to be compliant with certain laws, making sure payroll is run, making sure as people get updated, everything stays in tune. And what it has to be added on top of that is making sure the rules are clear and that the moats of the rules kick in before someone is seriously harmed. And I think this is both a strength of HR when it's going well, and the thing that annoys people, which is HR is always going to police you before you do something profoundly dangerous. It's saying you cannot be next to the railing on the roof, even though the railing is there, because if I say you can't be within two feet of it, I don't have to worry about pulling you off when you're halfway over, right? You're trying, and I think churches think about this a lot too, whether or not under the guise of HR, when you're trying to make sure you're not giving a space for people to commit abuse, spiritual abuse, sexual abuse. You want people's sense of you've broken a rule to go off before the harm is committed. Uh, whether that's you're meeting with this person alone, you're putting their hands on them. Uh, you want there to be a bright line that someone who intends to commit abuse will definitely violate that may catch a couple of people as you go. So that's the strong best case for HR. It's setting rules that are annoying to people day to day, but they act as tripwires before something serious happens.
SPEAKER_03So I I had a question, but we're at the edge of our time. But it seems like to to to to bridge those two, a lot of what it seems like you're trying to do is wrestle with the fact that we we have not we have not, in a sense, fully grappled with women as women out in culture and society, uh as non-intertain non-interchangeable men. And that's coming out both in our our workplace dynamic relationships that are we're a lot of friction. It's almost the the shifts are undigested, uh, and they're we need more time down the road. And that is across culture and society, especially from the angle of thinking through the issue of dependence, uh, which hits everybody. That's how I'm going to try and bridge those conversations.
SPEAKER_00Yes. And here's here's how I'll push back a little, which is the way I think about the physical dependence and embodiment is that that's where you get the stark asymmetries, where you are talking about two very binary different groups.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00That even if a woman never has a baby, never wants to have a baby, she's marked by being oriented towards that possibility in a different way. Whereas when you get into all these social dynamics, you are talking about things that may be true on average or in the aggregate, but you're closer back to something like height, where you've got two overlapping bell curves and a lot of overlap. And as you guys all know, I am very much in the male-coded bucket socially, which is part of why I do push back against the sense of like, well, are women ruining everything? Like, either this makes me not a woman, right? Like, or you know, so that's where I think it's good to draw a strong distinction between there are male and female divisions, strong asymmetries, and then there are male and female tendencies. And it's important to think about what it means to accommodate them, but that's not where I care as much about saying, like, women, while women are not welcome unless they can have giant group text to talk about their feelings, because suddenly I've defined myself out of being a woman here. Let's start with the core of what it means to be a woman and then talk about kind of the numbers and emanations thereof.
SPEAKER_03This has been a great conversation. Um, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for the book. And and I do want to reiterate, we're all big fans. Uh, please pick it up. The Dignity of Dependence. Uh, I'm sure it's available at all fine books, booksellers, at least on the internet. Uh, so go ahead and pick it up there, and the links will be in the show notes. But thank you again, once again. Uh, if you've listened thus far, uh, thanks for uh listening to us. Uh please feel free to rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, all that sort of thing. But for now, this has been another episode of Mere Fidelity.