Why I Haven’t Been Publishing

What to expect in this space going forward and a preview of a bigger project I’ve been working on

You may have noticed that I’ve not shared anything here since November. This silence hasn’t been for lack of writing or reading or, obviously, forming opinions. Just in the last couple of months I have written and placed with magazines two theological essays, which I’ll share here when they publish. I’ve also been reading some exciting, challenging books that I believe will forever shape my thinking. All good things. And my decision not to publish here is also, in my judgment, expressive of a good thing.

For years, I entertained a fantasy about myself, that I could be the sort of person who could thrive at blogging. And in one sense, I can write the sort of thing that is suitable for online consumption: current, opinionated, easy to digest, and even easier to forget. The problem is that I don’t enjoy writing that sort of thing, which takes considerable time and effort to remain well informed and to produce consumable content quickly and well enough. I have a job—I don’t write for money, and I am not scheming to live off my writing. I also don’t crave validation from writing. For as long as I can remember, I have loved writing, and the simple fact of the matter is that I write because I suspect there are other people out there who might benefit from what I have to say: for me, writing is ultimately a gesture of telling another person, “You are not alone.”

I am free to write only those things that are worth the cost of time and energy. For me, that means longer form writing. One of the essays you’ll see here soon—or, at least, see an excerpt of, with a link to read the whole thing—is a little over 4,000 words. The first draft was around 5,300 words. It was the product of months of reading and distilling down the right questions and concerns, until I was clear with myself about what problem I was addressing. I’m proud of this imperfect essay I produced, and I’m looking forward to being able to share it with you. Similarly, I’ve been chipping away at a book for over a year (see below). In both instances—longform essays and books—my goal is to write things that are timely but not fleeting, reflective about concerns that are characteristic of our age, not our news cycle.

For this Substack, that means a few things.

First and what you know already: I shan’t be publishing on a schedule. I don’t ever want to be in a position of trying to come up with something to say because I have to write something; the goal is to have the freedom to write when I find I have something to say. For that reason, I have no plans ever to monetize this Substack.

Second, while I can’t promise you’ll agree with or enjoy everything published here, I’m committed to publishing only those things that I believe are worth your time and the minor annoyance of another email in your inbox. I hope you’ll find everything I publish worth your time, attention, and serious consideration.

Third, half of what I publish here will be just for Substack. For every essay I publish in a magazine or journal that I share here, I will write an original piece just for you. Additionally, because I am blessed to have outstanding editorial support, I’m confident the quality of original material will match other things I share. I already have a rough list of pieces I’m planning to write in the coming months, so you’ll see more from me soon.

For now, though, here’s some early draft material of the book I’ve been working on.

Crypt, mosaics illustrating the shepherd Jean-Baptiste Jupille fighting against a rabid dog

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1.

A few months after my wife and I were married, her mother got us a kitten. I came home one day and my wife confessed, “My mom got us a kitten…” And then, sheepishly, came the question, “Can we keep it?” And that was that.

Life with the cat, whom, even though she’s a female, we named Skeletor, has been an education in where nature ends and civilization begins. A domesticated animal embodies the strange borderland between the two. No amount of breeding or training or affection can abolish the fact that a cat is a cat—a wild animal who has no business being in a human habitat. But neither can a domesticated cat return to the wild: having learned to depend on the humans, they become just harmless enough not to survive on their own. To domesticate an animal is to take responsibility for this wild thing, and to take responsibility for its crippled impulses, its domesticity and vulnerability.

When we purchased a second kitten as a friend for Skeletor, a process that was called an adoption, the staff at the shelter made us sign a piece of paper (as legally binding as a pinky-swear) promising that the cat would be an “indoor cat,” both to protect the cat herself and the local birds, whom she would, given the opportunity to be an “outdoor cat,” happily slaughter. After some initial hissing and pouncing, Skeletor and Cleo accepted each other like sisters. Each day they lounge around together, occasionally clean one another, play, and then, usually at night, have outbursts of violence towards one another. They are animals.

And yet early each morning Skeletor frantically leads me downstairs to the kitchen, where she wails until I feed her and Cleo, who has followed by this point, a few treats. Otherwise they have no specific feeding time; the bowls of food and water are always full. Sometimes one will insist that I play fetch with her, usually with a hair-tie they’ve stolen from my wife. Both have lived longer than the average cat who lives outside. They meow and chirp at the birds they see through the windows, but they know nothing of hunting out of hungry necessity, nothing of enduring rain and snow and wind, nothing of natural predators. They have received vaccinations and regular visits to a doctor. They even know their own names. A child born prior to the Industrial Revolution would be rightly envious.

Of course, the situation of the cats mirrors our own. It is only in the last couple hundred years that we humans have put real distance between ourselves and the merciless indifference of nature— the unreliability of crop production, for example, or the staggering rate of infant and mother mortality. In human history, it is a relatively recent and almost miraculous achievement that we take it for granted that every person has rights, that people in power are responsible to and for those with less power. It is a relatively recent development that human life has become so domestic. And in one sense, this domesticity, tranquility, and freedom has been the goal of human history from the beginning: if we stop to ask what the story of history is, it quickly becomes clear that history is the story of human failure and achievement towards these things. History is the story of the human struggle to transcend human animality. History is the story of the human animal working out what it means also to be a free spirit. History is “compounded of natural necessity and human freedom,” as Reinhold Niebuhr’s puts it.

2.

In 1992, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama announced that history had ended. In an undeniably persuasive book that more people have discussed and dismissed than have actually taken the time to read, The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama laid out an encyclopedic and philosophically serious case that humanity had reached its goal of a society that satisfies the need for human freedom and the universal recognition of human worth. A popular summary of Fukuyama’s argument is that free markets bring about free, democratic societies; but this reading is wrong. While it’s true that realities like military competition and technological development had motivated nations to urbanize and to liberalize economically, the real motivation for liberal democracy was the innate fact of human nature. The human is the one animal whose nature is to be free and to need its freedom to be recognized, and so it followed, Fukuyama argued, that human history was a struggle for human freedom and recognition. This history was to be understood as universal: not just a series of random events, but a singular and sensible process towards a definite end. While all previous political systems maintained the inequality and domination of master-slave relationships, liberal democracy alone facilitated economic prosperity and structured human relationships to recognize the full humanity of each person, and it chastened the destructive potential of human “spiritedness” and ambition.

Now that human nature was satisfied and the internal contradictions of previous political systems were overcome, there was no longer any serious competitor to liberal democracy. Human society had finally fulfilled its history. If there was a downside to this achievement, Fukuyama understood, it was that liberal democracy would produce Friedrich Nietzsche’s “last man”: an overly comfortable person without ambition for excellence or greatness. Nevertheless, going forward, no one would feel the need to justify liberal democracy against, say, communism or military dictatorship, and it was unimaginable that something better than liberal democracy would come along to replace it. Life would go on, but history had ended.

The following year, Robert Jenson, a Christian theologian, published what would become one of his most influential essays, “How the World Lost Its Story,” arguing, not that human history had reached its goal, but that human history had come unraveled, that at some point the train had come off the tracks but kept plowing ahead and it was now aimed at an abyss of meaninglessness. History had ended—in negation. The West, Jenson argued, had borrowed its concept of history from Christianity, and modernity was an attempt to do the impossible: to interpret history as a universal story but without the religious baggage of a universal Storyteller. Modernity took Christian eschatology—its discourse about the ultimate future, the promise that in the end God would act to transform the contradictions and failures of history into an order of harmony, justice, and freedom—and, dispensing with God’s action in history but holding onto the ideal of a perfected social order, transformed Christian faith into the optimistic belief in human progress. But this optimism was hubris. Modernity’s hope in progress, Jenson argued, had been “discredited.”

So long as Western society unwittingly lived off of its inheritance of Christian ideas and sensibilities, this experiment of modernity seemed like a plausible success. But like a young man flush with cash, the West spent a little of its inheritance here and a little there, nickel and diming its account until cents turned into dollars, and dollars into large sums. And now the account was nearly overdrawn. Modernity’s hope for social and moral progress relied on belief in a narratable history, but with the loss of a universal storyteller, modernity quickly learned that there could be no universal story. And if there was no universal story, then neither was there any plausible hope of progress. But the “mere negation of faith in progress is sheer lack of hope; and hopelessness is the very definition of postmodernism.” People now lived lives without a view of the end goal of human life, stripped of historical meaning. The West had, Jenson said, finally met Nietzsche’s last man—a nihilist whose life was no longer for anything. If modernity had brought about the post-Christian, then it was only fitting that post-modernity had brought about the post-human. If history had ended, it had done so at the cost of canceling out its greatest achievement—the human itself.

Today, somehow both Fukuyama’s optimistic account of technological, economic, and political progress culminating in liberal democracy and Jenson’s pessimistic, or even apocalyptic, account of Western spiritual suicide seem even truer than they did a little more than three decades ago. Their works seem prescient. What they knew by faith, we know today by sight. Somehow, it is true both that we have never been more prosperous, secure, equal, and free in history and that we find ourselves facing the possibility that our history concludes with nihilism— “an historical reality defined purely by negations.” Like any narrative, the end of history must be revelatory—the end must say, in effect, “The story is over and here’s what it all means”—but we’ve come to the end of history, and all that history seems to have revealed to us is nothingness. At the very height of unprecedented human achievement, at the very moment when we finally have grasped what humans have only ever reached for, we have lost hold of the meaning of our humanity, and the uncertainty of the ground beneath our feet is felt by everyone.

Human history has not only been the story of human attempts to conquer nature; by setting up nature as a sphere to be conquered—including conquest in the guise of preserving or rescuing nature—we have also set up ourselves as something other than nature. Human history is therefore the story of humans differentiating ourselves from nature and particularly from other animals, and all our struggling to make history anticipates that in the end there would be an apotheotic “revelation” of our humanity. That history has ended, not with a revelation of our humanity, but rather a crisis of meaning calls into question all our striving—and the premise of our striving, that we are something more than animal. After the end of history, we are forced to wonder if there’s anything so special about the human after all. We’ve lost our confidence.

Our self-doubt as a species is nowhere more evident than in the agony we feel in those areas where the sources of meaning in human life intersect with the fact of human embodiment: the proliferation of sexualities and gender identities, the anxiety about marriage as a constraining and conservative institution, our diminishing drive to have children. In every aspect of life where our animality gives way to humanity, we have lost our footing.

For most of history, we asserted our humanity by reaching out towards some transcendent reality; but having dispensed with that reality, we have also deprived ourselves of the ability to deny with any plausibility that we are mere animals. And yet it is undeniable that we are not merely animals. Human life has therefore become a living contradiction, asserting total freedom alongside a reductive and deterministic materialism: we can’t decide if we are gods or machines. We once understood the human as a symbol―a sign that not only points beyond to the divine, but that has a special relationship with the Unconditioned―but after the end of history the human has become a sign that does not know what it signifies.

After the end of history we find that life must be lived within the question of what we are. The cosmos does not need to burn for the world to end; the world is foremost a story, and only secondarily a place, and while we continue in our place it is clear that our world of meaning has passed away. Fukuyama, following other philosophers of history, differentiated the question of human history from the question of cosmic history, so that “history” and “human history” were synonymous, but this move betrays, even in his profoundly secular account, the hangover of a uniquely Christian and anthropocentric way of seeing the world—the theological belief that the whole created universe is the stage for the history of God’s dealing with humanity. But the unraveling of the human story, that is, the threat of nihilism, makes anthropocentrism untenable. We cannot take ourselves for granted.

After the end of history, we must wonder if the things we continue to busy ourselves with, those things by which we have normally made history, are now exposed as animal compulsions. I am reminded of a haunting sight I saw some years ago at the home of a friend: a declawed cat using a scratching post. She ran her clawless paws down the corrugated cardboard, producing not the expected sound of piercing and plucking and tearing, but only the swishy sound of fur dragging on cardboard. And when she was satisfied, she returned to whatever else it is that domestic cats do. She had been made harmless but nevertheless needed an outlet for her otherwise “harmful” nature, apparently unaware of how pointless her compulsions become. Life after the end of history demands that we entertain the possibility that in the mutilated we behold a metaphysical mirror ―the possibility that the achievements of human life are just pawing at an elaborate scratching post and that a belief that humanity is more-than-animal is an illusion of domestication, that what we have achieved is finally a matter of trimmed fingernails.

3.

We must examine, trace, and eventually defend the ineradicable prejudice at the center of human life, that we are not mere animals. We are not other than animals, but we are more than animals, and whatever that “more than” consists of is what defines us.

The human is an animal unsatisfied with animal life. It is not enough to have shelter and food and sexual partners and offspring. A distinctively human life includes these animal needs and drives, but it also exceeds them. Every parent who has reprimanded a young child at the dinner table, “You’re not an animal,” knows this truth, knows intuitively that there is an intimate connection between human being and the discipline of table manners. And no child, if asked what he wants to be when he grows up, says, “Housed,” or, “Fed.”

Every person hopes for more than the satisfaction of these bodily needs; each of us also requires love and meaning and recognition and the chance to add something of value to the world. To acknowledge one’s need for these distinctively human things is to acknowledge that being a human means being endowed with special dignity and purpose: to be a human being is to be a person. And the story of each human life is the laborious outworking of humanity, the struggle for personality.

Similarly, every human society has always been more than a troop of human animals. Societies are communities of persons, and every society works to realize its potential as a civilization. If the story of history is the struggle to realize human life in a state domesticity, tranquility, and freedom, then it is also the story of striving to discipline our animality in order to bring forth our humanity, that is, our civility.