Mere Fidelity
Mere Fidelity
Measuring Wealth
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How can each subsequent generation both be making more money and be considerably less wealthy? The answer is obvious. The solution may not be.
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Derek RishmawyThis episode is brought to you by Lexin Press, who publishes books that love the Word, love the faith, and love the Church. Lexum Press was recently acquired by Baker Publishing Group, and there will be more news to follow. Our July book of the month is The Culture of God's Word, Faithful Ministry in a Post-Christian Society. You can receive a 30% discount on this title and all previous books of the month by visiting BakerBookhouse.com backslash pages backslash Mere Fidelity. You can find that link in our show notes to get 30% off of our book of the month from Lexin Press.
Why Young Adults Feel Behind
Derek RishmawyHello and welcome to another episode of Mere Fidelity, a podcast by Mirror Orthodoxy, where we think about the Word of God and the world we live in. My name is Derek Frischmowney, and I'll be your host for today, and I'm joined by regular cast and crew members Alistair Roberts and James Wood. Fellows, good to see you. Good to be here. Happy to be here. So today we thought we'd take up kind of a different subject. Um not not our not our usual book or theological fair, although I think it has, you know, uh ecclesiastical and and cultural implications here. Uh but there was a there was an article that came out, I think there's a fellow named Johan Kurtz, uh, Young Adults Are Poor Despite Every Metric Whichs Otherwise. It was published on X, and I'll call it X because that is what we call it now. But um it was a really interesting, kind of short, we'll probably link it in the notes, uh, argument around uh the the way that we measure prosperity, the may that the way that we measure um the the the metrics of of social mobility, stability, et cetera, from generation to generation. And part of the argument is around, you know, that there's there's always there's always generational arguments between Gen X and Boomers and Boomers and Silent Generation and so on and so forth. The question is, uh, you know, is is the next generation doing better than the last one? Like are our kids, are our kids going to do better than we did, right? That's the that's that's often summed up as you know one of the main hopes of the American dream. And part of what this guy's arguing as I take it is that in fact, despite certain metrics that might suggest that we're right on track, in fact, every single generation, like after the boomers, is slowly falling behind across several important ones. And so what what I thought what we thought we'd want to do, and this was this is kind of your idea, James, uh, is is launch in and start to actually just think about some of the metrics, think about some of the implications and and wrestle with that for our pasturing and our just recognition of where we are as a culture today and some of the pressures that we we kind of walk through.
SPEAKER_01This is gonna intersect with so many discourses. I imagine it'll be fascinating to see where we go. But it's probably there's two particular paragraphs that like almost everybody who's commented on this article have flagged. And I think they're pretty representative of the main argument. So I think it's even though we have generally a rule against reading on the podcast, I am gonna read those, they're short, but like one of the things he's trying to get at is like, look, there's a lot of people say, like, man, everything's going well, you know, uh the economy is growing, young people are making more money than they're uh the generations prior to them, people are educated, all these things. So why why are they complaining? You know, and all these goods are cheaper, you know, you get you can get your cheap phone, your TVs are cheaper. I never had a big screen TV, all these things. So this guy, the the two paragraphs that are pr particularly um provocative, and they encapsulate his argument
Social Capital And The Destroyed Commons
SPEAKER_01are these. He says, it's about a probably about a quarter of the way into his piece. He says, like, uh, and yet this generation is not marrying, not buying homes, having children seems pretty miserable. What's going on? My argument is that previous generations received an enormous stock of social capital, trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon. That stock, once given for free, has now been substantially liquidated. That's the first paragraph. Second paragraph, instead, the young must now buy back, item by item and at retail prices, what their grandparents received as a bounty of prior civilizational investments. The young must do so out of incomes that rose modestly, while the prices of the essential elements of life rose radically. Price indexes measure the individual cost of the street goods, but they are not intended to convey the total cost of personally repurchasing a destroyed commons. And so he's kind of lamenting, like, look, all these things that earlier generations in America primarily, uh, I think is where he's writing from, um, receive for free and could have just assumed, you know, take for granted these are things that they all everybody enjoyed. They enabled a certain sort of stability and social mobility that really just now is inaccessible except for the super wealthy. And so now the average person, the average family is trying to piecemeal retrieve all these things with income that has lower and lower marginal value. And it's also then, therefore, a luxury. You know, most people can't do this. And it's also therefore privatized. So it's also this kind of comment on the shrinking of the commons. Like even the people who can secure these things, they're increasingly done in a in a privatized way, either through a bigger home or you know, where you can have all these services provided in your home, but not everybody in your community benefits from that.
Derek RishmawyYeah, a public park that you can let your kid run around in versus, hey, my kids are active. I pay really well for them to join the soccer traveling team that now uh operates at at these levels and you know, this much my time, this much my this much equipment, et cetera, et cetera, versus like, hey, hey, dude, come back before sundown. Um, okay, I'm gonna go do some stuff. Um there's a different, those are those are different social.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it connects really well with the Fourth of July, right? Like the video that was cycling around on Fourth of July is the sandlot video. Yeah. All the kids running around, every, you know, the parents feel free to let them get free-range parenting. And there is in the the baseball field is this type of like archetypal symbolic American commons, right? And like, well, that's gone. Like, why does that we watch that and there's some yearning there? It feels, you know, I don't I don't even play baseball, so I don't have a yearning for baseball necessarily, but that whole ethos, that whole world seems to be gone.
Derek RishmawyYeah. The question, we'll we'll probably come back to that is the question of how much of that's an optical illusion, how much of that is is self-enforced in ways that like we don't have to in terms of the the intense safety parenting that, you know, we actually do have lower kidnapping rates, do have. So we'll come back to that. But Alistair, I wanted to I wanted to have you continue to pull pull that thread a little bit and add, because I know you had some thoughts here.
Alastair RobertsAaron Ross Powell One of the issues behind this is how we measure wealth and well-being more broadly. We tend to take the overwhelming metrics that we use are ones that measure things by money. And yet there are a lot of criteria by which
The Sandlot Yearning And Safety Culture
Alastair Robertswe can measure that are far less favorable. And for instance, the number of children that people have. That is one of the things that's related to this. The uncertainty that people have about the future, I think, leads to a a lower number of children. You can think about the degree to which families are far more brittle. There's a lot more mobility in ways that lead to people putting down fewer routes. They don't invest in communities to the same extent when community value tends to be a lot weaker and more fungible. And so you don't want to put anything too firm within a community where you might have to leave in five, ten years' time. I think this is something, of course, that plays out within neighborhoods, but also plays out within churches. I don't think that the generations after boomers are going to be as invested in their churches because they will tend to move around churches more. Um they're less inclined, I think, to be putting down deep roots because the wealth is not in the commons anymore. And that's a lot to do with mobility, it's a lot to do with the degree to which the future has become less certain. And what we have instead is people liquidating the sorts of things that would formally be invested within the commons and then starting to place their weight within private affluence instead. And a lot of things are lost in the process, but things that aren't caught by our metrics because our metrics tend to be built around money. And the more that actually we dislodge from the commons, often the more that we can make money, because money often substitute the money economy substitutes for the sort of things that were produced by the commons that would not register within the money economy. So we're making more money, but it's producing things that supplement for what was formerly produced in the commons.
Derek RishmawyYeah. I mean, so there's there's the upper that's that's that describes some of the upper end element. There's there's folks who make financial decisions that are um, in a sense, corrosive, not necessarily perversely corrosive, but just they just are. Hey, I moved for the job to get up and move, move, move up the org chart, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which means I didn't stay longer than two or three years, which means I didn't build deep relationships of trust with my neighbors and their neighbors and so on and so forth up the street. There's also like, I think the negative element of uh I, you know, the the other portrait is, you know, person B also didn't stay in the same spot. Why? Because they got in renting. And rent over the last few years has continued to increase, increase, increase. You couldn't save, you couldn't put down roots, you couldn't buy a house the way your your older, older siblings or your brother or your father, whatever could at the same age with about the same purchasing power. And so you you are locked out of actually investing. And so, you know, if you get locked into a mortgage somewhere and you're you're stuck there, okay, you're gonna you're gonna invest, right? You are in but if you're getting mortgages later, which is one of the biggest, um, one of the clearest examples that uh I think uh Kurtz points to is the the com the the totally different rent and home mortgage purchasing capacity. Um there's people who move to increase their opportunities, there's people who and and don't put down roots, and there's people who can't put down roots because they're in a sense priced out of it to some degree in some of those same kinds of neighborhoods or or what so on and so forth. So I think that's the other kind of negative dimension of that that
Money Metrics Miss Real Wellbeing
Derek RishmawyI think he points to.
Alastair RobertsAnd that mobility is I think part of the issue is that this is culturally how you do rise. There's not a sense of doing that within your local community and being rooted in somewhere for a long period of time. If you are going to rise up, you will tend to need to be mobile. And so there's just a a process whereby any deep investment in place, in community, in family, we tend to put less in that simply because the very script of modern life requires us to be mobile for education, for work, for um housing, for kids' schooling. We need to move around in order to rise in any sort of way. But also, if you're trying to stay still, that's difficult as well, because as you say, rent and other costs increase, and often you're priced out of things that are important aspects of the commons that you do need, and you do need to move for those.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, like he gives examples about related to the rent thing. Like one of the examples he gives is, you know, people say, like, well, look, one of the kind of the kind of right-wing libertarian rejoinder to a lot of this discourse is like, look, people are complaining they can't buy houses, but they're they lack contentment with more simple houses that maybe earlier generations would have started with. And they and then they one of the data points they go to is like the average house is so much bigger these days. Like I went back to my I did a family reunion last week. Uh my mom grew up in Michigan, had set there were seven kids in their family, and they lived in a thousand square foot house. And I drove, you know, drove by it last week. It's like, yeah, there's some of that that's true. I think standards have gone up. At the same time, one of the things he draws attention to, I think, is also accurate, is a lot of those starter homes aren't being built, right?
Derek RishmawyYeah, I was gonna say, like, where are these? They're just weirdly enough, and you in certain places, I'm I'm in Southern California, Orange County, it's it's terrible. Um, but some of those, some of those, some of those starter houses, if you're in the right, if you're in the neighborhood and it's like, okay, we'll move somewhere else far. Okay. Um for for me, this is whatever, I my my call and my pastorate is here, my people are here, I I live where I live, whatever. But if you're gonna talk about social commons and rootedness and all these other sorts of things, like if you try to live where your parents and your grandparents lived, and that suddenly becomes impossible because of the demand level in there, that there's another way of like eroding uh the social commons, the the loss of the capacity to actually stay and put down roots to some degree. Now, I think there's always been a mobility factor in American culture and society. We've always people have always moved. But yeah, I just don't see people building the thousand square foot houses that are more available either, as more affordable either, as as is what you said, James. Like I I think there's a lot of people who, if they were putting those up, they'd be buying them, right? Um so or or they're or they're not where their jobs are, right? So if
Mobility Versus Roots In Place
Derek Rishmawyall your jobs are in one location, I mean it doesn't matter that there's like a really affordable price, affordable home, you know, in a in another state, in a in a county that's dying where there where there is actually no, there's not a good job market available. It's like fine. If I move there, I have no job. Right? I can't actually there's so so you've got you've got some of those um issues going on as well.
Alastair RobertsThere's also, I think, one aspect of the article is that this functions in part as a sorting mechanism because the degree to which you value these goods of the commons, a stable neighborhood, a good school for your kids, you value a host of different things, you're just going to have to pay a lot more for it. Because if you pay less for it, the goods of the commons, law and order, safety, a good um school for your kids, those won't be available. And so one of the ways in which you keep disorder at bay is just by pricing poorer people out of it. And so part of the question here is the degree to which law and order and healthy communities, stable families, um, all these things are accessible for people lower down the socioeconomic ladder.
SPEAKER_01And that and that really is also that plays into, he doesn't bring this up, but that plays into a lot of our political dramas as well. Like one of the things that I've I'm not the only person to observe this, but I've thought about a lot over the years as I've kind of watched I I live in a lot of different worlds and networks and kind of watch how they talk about political issues. And I noticed that some people who are most impatient with kind of, for instance, like right-wing concerns about violence and maybe how that's related to immigration or something like that, or policing or whatever, often themselves live in very elite enclaves that are shielded from the the impact of those policies. And so they they they they can kind of be they they they have a privileged position to remain oblivious uh to to the impact of those policies. And I think that's part of this sorting. And it's so as these these kind of wealthier people themselves sort and are able to uh privatize the blessings of the commons that were previously shared by a broader uh part of the public, uh, this also is a further source of our political uh polarization, I think.
Derek RishmawyYeah, I mean there's super zips and there's there's all sorts of you know, economic and college sorting things. And even that, the the thing that struck me in the article that was that was interesting was the the way the buying back element um it it happens in multiple ways, right? So, so even you know, this is this is the this is this is old. This is old. But you know, if you're if you want to afford the new house, if you want to afford the next set left, I'll level up, whatever it is, and your your spouse goes out and gets a job, okay. Well they go out and get the job and so you've suddenly you've got an extra income, but you're now having to repurchase a whole bunch of the labor that you know she was doing or whatever, childcare, cleaning, all these sorts of things. Like, okay, well, did did I did we make money or did we lose it? I don't know. Like, but we now just have left time, less time. So all all of those sorts of things, and it's increasingly, it's increasingly necessary. So um with, you know, when you make the college degree, the the the necessary bottom rung to get your foot in the door, it's like kid to get your foot in the door for a job that doesn't require college education, you have to take on, you know, 60, 80k in debt. And that's for like a low, let's like for like a state school. Um, you know, what are we doing here? Uh so that that is, I mean, that's something that's a that's the tension I really feel. We're, you know, looking at some of my own college students who are at like, you know, a state university, it's a h it's an elite one. But,
Housing Costs And Missing Starter Homes
Derek Rishmawyyou know, depending on the degree, um, what they're gonna be able to do afterwards, to be able to start families, build productive homes, all those sorts of things. It's it's a different, it's a different um it's a different proposition than it was in the sixties, seventies, and eighties.
Alastair RobertsAnd it does feel that as you were mentioning, James, many of these issues are politically difficult to deal with because they touch on some very um very obvious third rails. This is related to the um white flight from the cities, it's related to debates about immigration, it's related to debates about class, all these sorts of areas that we don't want to talk about, and yet are very clearly in the back of the these debates in ways that are troubling on all sides. And gender very much as well. Um, the loss of, for instance, a society where women were largely at home, you had eyes on the road, safe communities, uh again, there are the technological debates here. A lot of this is a result of cheap travel, the car, and societies that have been broken up in order to allow us to get from A to B very quickly. This does seem to be far more of an issue within the US than the UK and elsewhere, but in different ways. So in the US, there has been, it seems to me, a lot of a weaker social commons. There has been a clear social commons, but nowhere near as pronounced as there has been within Europe and other countries that primarily developed most of their um towns and cities and contexts before the advent of the car. In those sorts of contexts, there is a lot of shared life that depends upon high trust, that depends upon safe communities and neighborhoods, people knowing each other and intergenerational settled life, extended families, these sorts of things. And what we have within what is within the US, it seems to me, is a society that's a lot more resilient when you have a loss of shared norms, when you have a loss of shared culture, because people live in almost these, in many places, in these vast archipelagos of detached communities. And there is not the strong common life that you would have within the town center, within the UK or within many parts of Europe, where people just have to live alongside each other. So a lot of, I mean, I think of many places in the UK where a city can be largely given over to disorder and people can live in these amazing communities within that same city, which is largely surrendered to disorder. The commons has been abandoned, and yet what you have are these luxury communities where everything that was formerly in the commons is now private affluence. Whereas in other parts of the world, if disorder is admitted, everyone has to suffer from that because so much of your life is within the commons, and the commons just gets destroyed. You can't retreat from it into private affluence. And that, it seems to me, is the increased problem within the UK and Europe at the moment, which is a different form of the issue in the US, where there are places to retreat to and to have these sorts of readouts of luxury within a context where the commons are being stripped.
Derek RishmawyYeah. Um as a as a as a as a as a lifelong resident of suburbia who spent a few years close to a big city, I I I I I have seen I have seen some of these things. It doesn't stay that way forever though. Inevitably have to be dealt with. And now for a quick word from one of our sponsors. Beast and Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical seminary on the campus of Stanford University in Birmingham, Alabama. I've been there. It is actually a lovely campus. Uh led by world-renowned faculty. Beast informed students in person in a kind of a community-oriented model of theological education and have top-ranked scholars who engage their students at kind of very uh small um class sizes. It's a warm, uh, it's a warm environment. And now, thanks to Generous Gift, Beaston is actually offering uh new full tuition scholarships for the 2025-2026 incoming class for their flagship degree, the Master Divinity. So this kind of makes the whole thing more affordable than it's ever been. Uh now these scholarships cover the cost of tuition for and fees for three years, which is the average time it takes to finish the MDiv. And I'll be honest and say I wish I had known about this or had an opportunity to look at this one when I was heading to seminary. So if you're interested, you can apply and learn more information at beastendivinity.com. The interesting thing I will say that this this article doesn't really give much in way of solutions, right? And I do like that it wasn't entirely given over towards um finger pointing at this or that generation. Some of this stuff, some of this stuff you kind of just don't even know how it could have gone otherwise. Some of the stuff is there were very there were definite decisions made uh that I don't think were good. And then some of the stuff you just kind of wonder, okay, what's the solution right here? There's no solution being proposed. And what was the alternative choice 10, 20, 40 years ago uh to kind of deal with this or or or cut this off? And I I don't think that there's really easy choices that would have presented themselves.
SPEAKER_01I think like one of the reasons I like pieces like this,
Sorting By Neighborhood And Politics
SPEAKER_01even if they don't give clear answers, I kind of gravitate towards this type of literature generally. Because I think most of the solutions to these types of problems are really, really complicated and difficult to determine. And I but I think one of the things this an article like this exposes, like you like as you as you were talking, Derek, I was thinking, like, how would we have done otherwise? And some of these decisions were made and like they were bad. And yet most of those decisions weren't nefarious. Um and I think this is like the one of the reasons why I like a figure, like two figures are in my mind reading this that have been that I think really resonate with this type of argument are like Jacques Elul or Ivan Illich. Like the on the gender stuff, the Illich stuff is very relevant to what he's saying. When he talks about especially about like the shadow economy, the shadow work, like all the work that women have often done throughout history does not get reflected on GDP measurements. And therefore, in our world, that tends to be denigrated. And I think one of the things Illich is saying, even though he doesn't get so explicit, is like you could also value those things that don't measure economically. That's one of the things we could do. But that means FYI, that's gonna be costly. Like your economy's probably going to shrink. And I think that's where the conversation ends for a lot of conservatives. Like if you like propose something like that, if you go down this line of analysis and be like, look, we're gonna have to make some decisions, and it's probably gonna mean we're not gonna grow as much economically. That's where the conversation's over. And I think to me, that isn't that is a mammon worship, a version of conservative mammon worship to me. Like I'm not I'm not a socialist at all. But like if the conversation just ends there, I know, man, you live in Canada. Yeah, it's like if every conversation ends there, then I think we we probably need to reconsider how much we're giving ourselves over to man. That that's one thing. But the other thing is like why I was thinking of of of Elul as well when I when you were talking, Derek, is is it because like one of uh his best insights to me is how every form of progress is at least ambivalent? You know, yeah. So like like you like you'll bring up things like here, like, yeah, more women in college that you could look at that as a version of progress or cars, just like air, you know, or tech not now late devices on our phones. These are all forms of progress, but has the human condition improved? And all the are these are there a bunch of unintended consequences that we couldn't have foreseen here?
Derek RishmawyThinking about that, I mean I I've been I've been wrestling through that. I've been for another project working, thinking about the whole disenchantment conversation and you know, what caused this and what caused that. And you you've got all these daisy chaining effects of like, hey, you know what? Uh the world is disenchanted, we've lost the fairies and the gods, and we're farther from nature, and we've lost common common goods, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But some of these things are byproducts of like good stuff, like you know, technical advances in medicine that have saved, you know, millions and millions. I'd I'd be dead if we hadn't if our if our surgical, if our surgical means if our surgical uh capacities did not advance, I would have died as like an eight-week old. And and we probably would have had several religious wars where, you know, our Catholics and Protestant it would have looked a lot more like gangs in New York. There's several things that have are positive developments that have as their corollary um other other backlogs of effects that that, okay, well, uh not not a fan of that part. And I I think part of the challenge with pieces like this is approaching them, seeing, seeing the fact that it's mapping something real and not giving into despair or giving into a kind of woe is me, our generation really got uh mistreated in a way that is radically distinct from every other generation prior, in such a way that it just creates resentment and low agency approaches towards your current condition. Right? The other the other thing that's that's interesting, and I would I'd be curious to see somebody map this is he kind of goes back to the boomers, and that's about as far back as he as as we got. Instead of kind of measuring even farther back, even farther back in terms of, okay, well, how many people really owned land 120 years ago, 150 years ago? Uh like how much how much are we how much are we measuring contemporary ill social common economic gains, all these sorts of things against um what was what was a weird, what was a weird anomaly in the post-war economy? This is this Goldilocks zone where we still had high social commons and we had expanding economic progress at the same time in perhaps ways that are unique in human history, right? You think about the Industrial Revolution and you know, that was expanding economic progress in all sorts of ways and massive destruction of like inner city families and all those sorts of things. So there's always there's there's something there that makes me want to say, are we just measuring our current stakes against really a Goldilocks zone in human history and really even American history, um, which is uniquely wealthy among the history of the nations. And so not to say, hey, there's nothing to do about it and it's it's not a bummer. It is a bummer. There's things, but it it's it's helpful to kind of situate that and think each each generation has had weird challenges it's had to deal with. Um, just I I think about that. That's not really a big grand economic solution or something like that, but just as a frame for receiving the information and processing it and not letting it be like, yeah, yeah, we really have, we really are doing worse, and we're doing worse, and we need to use something radical to turn around and burn it all down, otherwise, because so on and so forth. And I I I worry about I worry about that kind of reception.
Alastair RobertsUm, so I do wonder whether that's the right frame to think about it in, though, that comparative frame between generations. My sense is more that this is a rebuke to a society that has tended to depend over much upon measures that are narrowly financial or economic, and a failure to recognize the value of the commons of these less tangible um forms of wealth. And here I've been thinking about the work of someone like John Ruskin, his discussion of categories such as ilf, things that make a lot of can make a lot of money, for instance, that registers on the balance sheet, but yet is actually the formation of things that are destructive to social well-being. Think about the rise of betting companies with online betting and the the wealth that they are generating. It's huge amounts of money. These are some of the wealthiest c companies in many areas, and yet that's a production of social ill rather than social good. And there are lots of things like that, where there are things that are producing money, they are keeping the economy going, they're raising GDP, and yet they're bringing deep destruction to our communities. On the other hand, there are things that are really good for social well-being that just don't register at all. The work of uh someone within a household is not going to register, but it is actually producing an immense amount of social trust, um, confidence, certainty, it's pr putting down deep roots in a locality and investing in that place. And it seems to me that just that whole structure of values is disordered. And it's one of the things that's driving many of the factors that accelerate this. If we were going to think about what are the factors that encourage the building up of this less fungible, less tangible, less commensurable form
Sponsor Scholarship Announcement
Alastair Robertsof wealth, this less alienable form of wealth, the sort of wealth that is represented not in your house, but in your home, a home that you can't sell your home, you can sell your house. That sort of wealth is something that we can establish conditions for. We can't measure it, we can't profit from it in the same way. But we we know how to create many of the conditions for this. We know, for instance, how to create stronger families. Many of these things just require unwelcome decisions, they require stronger principles of law and order, they require social stigma, they require um expectations laid upon people, limits to people's mobility, all these sorts of things that we just don't like. And maybe if we actually considered the cost and factor that in, maybe we would be prepared, a bit more prepared to do so. Again, we thought about these things in relationship to the church, the degree to which we like to choose our communities and opt-in and out the idea of a sort of chosen community, the sort of theological and often not just theological, but the liturgical sorting effect that you have, that's similar to the sorting effect for communities more generally. All of these things I think are key. We might also think about the degree to which our society is just not thinking about producing the sorts of conditions that people form communities around. Public beauty, um pedestrianized places, good streets. These are things we know how to do. We've tracked these things centuries ago, and yet we don't want to do it because partly it obstructs the movement around of wealth and the conditions for raising wealth. The other thing to bear in mind here is as well individual affluence increases, it produces the Baumol'cause cost disease
Progress Has Unintended Consequences
Alastair Robertseffect, where the costs of wages more generally go up, but there are many professions where there are not compensating raises in production that go with that. So all these other costs like education, healthcare, etc., go up because wages more generally are rising.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think uh one of the reasons I like this piece. I Derek, I think I felt when I was reading it, he was um kind of right on the razor's edge. Like you know, you could easily see how this would go to despair and kind of resent resentment intergenerationally. And I felt like he really did try to avoid it. So I'm not trying to defend the author, but that's how I read it, and I kind of read it as the way Alistair read it as well, of like both a rebuke to the kind of dominant social imaginary and public, even kind of public institutional leadership, uh, but also a subtle, you know, a spark to maybe inspire a new imagination. You know, how do we again value these things that don't show up on the balance sheet of the economy? Um, and you know, someone who's, I think, in our circles, you know, or you know, overlapping circles, uh, who's trying to think about these things in a in a pr in a constructive way, I think is Aaron Wren. You know, Aaron's talking about like, I'm he always brings up, he does a lot about urbanism. You know, he talks a lot about urbanism. And uh, I remember just the other day he brought up again, I can't remember what city he was talking about, that they uh developed like a rail system. And like all the, you know, these things are you know very much inefficient economically. They they don't really quickly produce higher, you know, uh economic benefits. And yet, these are a way to continue to invest. What's the it's it's the used car salesman paradox or something he talks about? But these things are ways to like invest in uh trying to make more of a comments possible. And I the other figure that I think about is like Ray Oldenburg, you know, uh, you know, someone like uh people put you know Putnam's been talking about this for decades, but Ray Oldenburg with the great good place, you know, philosophy of just like, how how can we still incentivize and maybe subsidize even like local pubs and like cafes and things like where and but also just having a broader social imaginary that sees those things as valuable, your local places too, not just the ones that are uh kind of franchises from major corporations, but have some connection to the community. Anyway, so I've read it that way, and like, you know, kind of maybe starting a conversation. But then also I do think maybe where he doesn't go far enough to get to your point, Derek, that I would want to get to. Okay, so what do you do as an individual now, you know? And um, and I think there's a lot to be done there. That you st you you still have agency, there's things you can do, like you can also choose, for instance, very practically, just to really like what uh uh Alistair was saying, just invest in your church. And your church can be a source of you know, a beachhead of the commons in a in a fractured in a fractured world. It won't always be, and it's hard for some churches to live up to a lot of that. But a lot of churches can provide a lot of these things insofar as their members give a lot of themselves to it.
Derek RishmawyI I do think I mean, yeah, obviously it makes it make sense for us to get there because you know, we're pastors, theologians, that kind of thing. Um one I'll come back to that. And one one thing that this does, I do, I I think is helpful is just to situate for various generations, just kind of appreciating where everybody is. Um I oftentimes that that sound it sounds bad, but maybe social empathy is helpful. But actually just just kind of knowing where everybody's at, no knowing the pressures, knowing knowing um, hey, this is where our kids are, this is where our grandkids are, this is where uh this is where my uncle is. And and kind of starting to relate to each other in that way. It's hard though. It's hard though to break out of the really intense, intense uh individualism about about um trajectories and what you should be doing with your wealth, what you should be doing with your with your family, thinking about family, thinking about communities as these shared collective projects. And I do think I do think that is one of the places where you are right, the church the church is one of the only places I think that's left that even moderately starts to inculcate uh or still has a monokoma of that kind of that kind of mindset of there there's people who there's people who think about a church and think like I'm all in on this community and making sure that it's here for the next 15, 20, 30, 40 years. Like I want it to be here, I want it to be good for my family, want it to be good for the for the community. Uh it's it's one of the only kind of incubators that's left besides something like a you know a local school board or um you know a local, I don't know, even uh sports program or something like that. Um but in terms of creating a space, I think about the intergener intergenerational commons and kids running around. Um church on Sundays for us, uh, we're at this we're at this um we actually rent rent we rent space from a temple because you know, real estate's insane in Orange County. But it's one of the only places where I see kids running around with almost parents like having almost no concern about finding where their child is until they have to leave and put them in a car. Because it's fine. Everybody here is church, we've got some gates out front, we've got the people who are kind of mindful, but it is one of the only places where there is still that shared sense of like all of our kids are running around together. They're all that's my kid, but also friends with your kid. And I have some responsibility because I saw that, I saw your kid get baptized. Sorry, Baptists, um, and I saw I saw your kid, and they're there all there's this shared familial sense and project that I think that's one of the only places I've I I can see that happening on a regular basis with some consistency across um across a variety of neighborhoods, across a variety of um social standings, across a variety of you know, states and and and income brackets. Although even there, I will say uh one of the challenging things is, you know, the research coming out is that even religion and even church attendance is starting to become a a good that is mostly utilized and um is
Rebuilding Shared Life Beyond GDP
Derek Rishmawyex is accessible, not intentionally, but is use utilized and accessible by the educated and more elite, right? College educated folks go to church in higher rates, people who are married. There's there's something about that that is has to be thought through if our churches are going to I don't know, play roles like this.
SPEAKER_01The other thing I'd want to discuss in the future, just briefly I'll mention, is speaking of unintended consequences. Um one of the things that's been on my mind recently is are are the what are the unintended consequences that like we're gonna have to do a post-mortem on like down the road of like church planting culture, you know? Uh when I when I think about the intergenerational commitment to a place long term, you know, inhabiting that commons mentality there, I do wonder how much of that is negatively impacted uh by church planting culture instead of revitalizing or sticking with the older churches that are around you. I think there's something because and I think about this more only because we've moved out to the country now a little bit in southern Ontario, and now we're going to this URC church. Um, it's still Nay Park, so I'm still in good standing. Um, but it's been around for like 60 years, and it's just wild to me. I've never been a it I think the thing that surprised me, and I'm like, hey man, is this an indictment on me? I've never been a part of a church where there's this much intergenerational commitment. Not only are there people who are there now who expand the generations, but there are people who are there now that their great grandparents their grandparents went there and they've stuck around. And there's that to me, there's something there. And I we've we've experienced another aspect of the commons at this church that's really caused me to start thinking about some things.
Derek RishmawyIt's hard. It's hard because I hear that, and that's true. I was at a church that's been around for uh 150 years uh in Orange County. It's it's amazing. And it's actually the the the thing that it's remarkable because it's still fairly, it's fair fairly vital and outwardly focused enough. And and that having having that mindset of being a shared project over the generations that still realizes that its project is it you're developing those within, you're creating communities, and it is still permeable enough for outsiders to come in and become a part of it and all that sort of stuff, and doesn't lose that outward reaching vitality. I I do think, I think especially church planning is actually probably going to have to be really important for a lot of those areas where those things have just completely collapsed. Like there is nothing to revitalize. You do just have to. restart. Um but it's worth thinking through. Alistair?
Alastair RobertsThe principle of Christ where you where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. I think it's always a good place to start with these things. Invest in the commons. Invest in a local church that ties you down. It's one of the good things about marriage. It's a commons and you're committed to it for life. And so you just have to work at that commons because if you don't, you're just stuck in a really bad situation. And so you just have to labor with the commons that is before you. And then also you have to defend and fight for the commons because so much of the commons is a result of a society that's just very liberal that just allows people to live however they want and isn't prepared to maintain um norms of behaviour, norms of marriage, norms of um the law and order, all these sorts of things once that is neglected then the commons dies.
SPEAKER_01I do I I think there's for the agency for the person, you know, I think I I I I agree really agree with what Derek was saying earlier about that kind of intergenerational empathy. You know, I know that empathy's been dogged on these days, but I I think you're really right. Like pieces that's one of the things I like about pieces like this too is insofar as they can help the generations just kind of understand the struggles that the others are are going through. And if if they can avoid the kind of resentment like low agency you know there's nothing you can do. But I do think whatever agency now okay so the younger people who are facing these issues and we have to help them. So older generations have to help them and I think like okay if you're talking about boomers who who have wealth if you can do what you can to you know to help your younger uh peer you know younger uh uh fellow churchmen or whatever you know find ways to survive and maybe not just financially but helping out with babysitting all these types of things there's that
Church As A Commons You Can Join
SPEAKER_01but then for the person who's facing these plights I think there's gonna have to be um uh some some hard decisions and I think that I I don't I'm not I don't want to get concrete here but if it you know until broader social conditions change I think some harder self-denying decisions will have to be made uh but not in like self-effacing I I think insofar as you keep giving yourself also to your church community and people help you out you can trust that God will be with you. But uh I think there's gonna have to be some depth to some dreams being achievable. And I think what you're saying earlier Derek also we need to keep revisiting how much of our dreams or our assumptions about what should be normal are conditioned by very idiosyncratic historical circumstances like post-1950s America. Like how much of that was simply uh very historically contingent on a set of circumstances that we can't recreate. However, I still think in what we can what we all have to try to help do is retrieve uh not only a sense of the commons but just a reimagining of how we live together and what we value. I think that's the type of moves we have to make.
Derek RishmawyAnd that's not very tangible but it is very I'll I'll say I'll say one more thing. None of this so I'm not like a degrowth guy or like a hey just just get used to being poor whatever it is. I don't think any of this rules out uh more active uh more active like political thinking about I don't know uh yimbyism and and and actually uh building building more housing and and and coming up with you know tax solutions and so on and so forth that are uh are more uh encouraging of the building of families all those sorts of things that's all on the table that's n none of this is supposed to be like a hey just just kind of uh quietly accept that life is gonna be not as good yada yada et cetera et cetera just just do it no none of that you know I you also need to think about that it's in the song you also do need to think about it so so yes all over the songs don't envy it's a lot of people I think most of this is just this is so mere fiddle but I'll just say none of this gets fixed immediately so you do have to you you do have to like think about that in a way that does not encourage resentment and and low agency and so on and so forth. But you also start to have to think like okay how many how many of the decisions that got us here are ones that I want to repeat and how how much we're here. We got to do different things if we're gonna not be here or further down the road in 20 years and my kids are going to be I don't I you know what do we have to do now given what we've been handed, given what we have and the fact that we actually have things in our hands that we can do thinking along those lines with greater agency and without resentment and without bitterness but with realism about what was lost and what needs to be rebuilt and how we can do it is is helpful.
Alastair RobertsAnd I think a lot of this just there will have to be a push against some fundamental values, particularly for Americans but I think for people in the West more generally of freedom and autonomy and the idea that life is best in a society that's built around autonomy, I think a lot of the things that we're experiencing are the outcome of a society built around autonomy, where people do not have intact families, where neighborhoods are built around autonomous lives so they don't people don't need to interact with each other in the same way. Really good communities tend to be ones where you're integrated together. But that requires a lot less freedom. It requires a lot more boundaries and it requires certain norms that people who value autonomy and freedom tend to be very resistant to. And so that it's it seems hard to res resolve these issues just with for instance a Yimbi approach. There are reasons people do not want new things to be built in their area because they know that with that tends to come disorder because the society is not committed to maintaining norms and it's not committed to maintaining the sort of limits that are placed upon people's autonomy. And so the question is are we prepared to sacrifice autonomy for the sake of something that's truer to a biblical and historical understanding of a healthy society where people enjoy a commonwealth,
Autonomy Versus Common Life And Closing
Alastair Robertsthe well-being that we have in common.
Derek RishmawyAnd I'll say I'll say as as the I don't know the last American on the podcast right now, um as as as James resides in in Canada, I will say that it's more of a radical autonomy and I and I don't think that this has to be foreign to the American tradition as it is what one of the things I've been reading lately is uh Gordon Wood's um I can't remember the name it's it's on uh it's on the birth of constitutional thinking in the in the American Republic. But but one of one of the foundational uh one of the foundational values of the revolution as uh and the early constitutional thinking was thinking about uh life in a republican context where there was a there was a value of real freedom, real assertion of rights, real all those sorts of things and also for the sake of the good of the community of which we are a part, right? So that that that though that was that was always part of the mix of the American value uh that was being fought for was you know a government of the people by the people for the people for the people right and and not just as yes the individuals but not just the individuals but their families their households the communities of which they were have a part that we had shared there was a real idea real idea of shared interests uh shared interests together rooted in the good right and I think that's actually there and so um you know moving away I think you know more recent radicalized forms of of kind of liberal uh notions of and not even classical whatever I I'm we're we're going into we're going into mixed territory here so I'm right I see James's eyes it's another podcast but I'll I'll just have it is gonna it is gonna take some reevaluation uh and and rethinking making some hard questions but as in true mere fidelity fashion um we have to we have to cut it right as it gets fun so uh for now thanks for the conversation guys if you guys found that valuable obviously this is mostly like a jumping off point thinking about these things you can go look up the article uh if you have any comments questions email us we do not always respond we rarely respond but we always read we do actually value your your comments and suggestions and even for follow up podcasts and ideas uh but for now we hope this has been a benefit and a blessing to you uh but this has been Mere Fidelity