Dear Friends,
I’m trying to figure out a way to play last night’s bottom of the 9th inning on a continuous loop in my house. If you don’t care about baseball, feel free to skip ahead.
It has been a miserable baseball season for the Minnesota Twins Baseball Club. Built to win, they’ve had their projected starting lineup healthy and playing for a grand total of one half inning on Opening Day. Combine that with some terrible performances on the field, and the season is very nearly lost already.
Last night they faced getting swept three games by the Evil Empire—the New York Yankees. I will not bore you with the history here, but suffice it to say that the Yankees are the source of unspeakable misery for Minnesota fans.
Down 5 to 3 in the bottom of the 9th, they faced Yankee flame-throwing closer Aroldis Chapman, who came into the game sporting an impossible ERA of 0.39. In the span of five pitches, the game was over. Twins win, 7-5.
Single.
Home Run.
Single.
Home Run.
And that was that. I will never understand why people leave baseball games early.
Under The Sun
My wife and I had a mundane conversation that reminded me of a more profound truth: life “under the sun” (as Ecclesiastes puts it) is full of tradeoffs. This is a lesson forgot in a million ways. Politicians go to great lengths to forget it; people won’t vote for you if you tell them that there might be negative and unintended consequences to some policy or another. But it isn’t just politics. It’s everything.
It started with a gift from someone: a Roomba. You know, the little robot who slowly tools around your house cleaning the floors? We named ours “M-o,” of course, since he’s one of our favorite characters from Wall-E:
We love M-o. He does a great job, and having a servant like that gives us an extra incentive to keep all our junk off the floors so he can sweep away without hindrance. So we were talking about all of the servants we have in our house. One to clean the floors, another to wash our clothes and another to dry them. We even have one that exists exclusively to make our bread. I mean, we are extraordinarily wealthy by historical standards.
So what’s the tradeoff? Is there a downside to having all of these servants? Now, I’m not saying that there are always equal tradeoffs, as if there’s no benefit one way or another. But there are tradeoffs. For instance, I argued that having a washer and a dryer is an unalloyed good, to which my wife replied that it might be a nice thing if every single person in our family didn’t have a thousand separate garments—something encouraged by outsourcing the laundry. We’d probably stick with one or two outfits if we had to wash them by hand. Interesting point.
I argued that technology has clearly freed us up from having to spend our entire day hunting and gathering for our survival and sustenance. Clearly true. Yet maybe having to hunt and gather for our survival and sustenance would actually be a better good for a fat, entertainment-obsessed, frivolous society. Interestingly enough, the kind of human society one finds in Wall-E. People living on a starship, catered to by servants like M-o, drifting purposelessly through space. Perhaps the downside of all our “time-saving” technologies is that it encourages us to waste our time.
I know I’m sounding all Wendell Berry here. I’m not some kind of anti-technology Luddite. I absolutely love technology and modern conveniences. Nevertheless, it is worth thinking about the tradeoffs. To be aware that for every benefit there are hidden costs. One of the things Socrates got right was that an “unexamined life” isn’t worth living, and I’m inclined to think we don’t do nearly enough examining.
Then there’s the fact that sometimes our technology just doesn’t work. I’ve been experiencing that quite a bit lately. “Vanity! Vanity! All is Vanity!” cries the Teacher. Who am I to disagree? My alternator on the Yukon just quit, as you know from last week’s missive, causing a “charging system failure.” That turned out okay. I took it down to the auto parts store and had them test it. Then, thanks to modern technology, they found in their computer system when I had purchased the faulty item and discovered that I had a lifetime warranty. They handed me a new one and saved me a couple hundred bucks. And thanks to my previous experience, I installed it in about twenty minutes.
A couple of weeks ago Apple sent me a beautiful advertisement for their credit card. They did all the things Apple does so extremely well, tickling all the pleasure centers of the brain. They’re not selling a credit card; they are selling a lifestyle. A titanium card? I want one. I can seamlessly sync it with my iPhone wallet and use Apple Pay? I want one. More importantly for me, I can instantly and easily add my 18-year-old as a co-owner and she can start to build her own credit report? I want one.
So I signed up. My titanium card arrived in a beautiful, thick, cardboard envelope with the instructions: “To activate your card, hold your phone here.” You just hold it up to the envelope and voila! Delighted, I hold my phone to the designated spot and… “cannot activate card.” So I wasted time Googling other means of activating the card, and believe me, it wasn’t easy.
My daughter got her card. No problem, except that I had made her a “participant” on the card and not a “co-owner.” The differences were not adequately explained by Apple, but basically, while she can rack up her credit score, she had no means to actually pay on the card. The whole point of this exercise is for her to use the card and pay it herself. I have no interest in being the middle man. She’s a grownup.
So I call Apple. Lovely woman. She tells me to cancel her card and sign her up again as a “co-owner.” I do this. They approve her. Her Apple Card is linked to her iPhone wallet. She tries to order a new titanium card. It won’t let her. Then she gets declined trying to make purchases.
She calls Apple. Lovely folks, really. Over the course of several hours, she gets kicked higher and higher up the food chain because nobody has a clue why she has a credit card that won’t work. Apple decides that this is a problem squarely on the shoulders of their banking partner, Goldman Sachs. They send her to a Goldman Sachs representative, who says, “Why is Apple sending you to us? This is their problem.” She gets kicked back to Apple.
Finally, an Apple representative gets a Goldman representative on a three-way call to try to solve my daughter’s problem and—I kid you not—the two of them get in a little spat about who’s responsible and the Goldman representative hangs up.
The End.
She exhausted all of the levels of customer support and has no working credit card. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.
No matter what that glossy Apple advertisement tells you—ah, let’s broaden it a bit: no matter what Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., or the occupants of Ivy League faculty lounges tell you, there is no Utopia. There is only “under the sun.”
Miscellany
I haven’t read it yet, but some folks I trust found this to be a helpful book on Critical Theor(ies). One of the co-authors, James Lindsay, helped create this chart, which strikes me as pretty much spot-on:
The latest issue of The Journal of Christian Legal Thought is out, with a contribution from yours truly, along with my pals Thaddeus Williams, Jeff Ventrella, and Andrew Sandlin. Check it out here.
Trevin Wax wrote a really nice essay with the extremely provocative title, “Are Tattoos Worse Than Adultery?” Well worth the read.
Peter Leithart on what Daniel’s three friends can teach us about resisting cultural assimilation=Gold. Read it here.
I’ll leave you this week with last night’s glorious comeback. I’ll probably watch it a few dozen more times.