In James K. A. Smith’s first of his trilogy, Desiring the Kingdom, Smith lays out his Augustinian vision of the human persons not as thinking things, nor believing beings, but loving and desiring beings. This is why the heart of the matter is to bring to the surface what one desires down at one’s bottom level unconscious. I wrote out that the book would have come out much better had Smith focused more upon the agential power of the human person as self-educator or self-trainer as she uncovers her own value sets, unlearning them and relearning positive value sets.
Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, in that regard, allows us to take a sneak peek at what we desire as agents of our destiny. This is why Manson’s book and Smith’s books could be complementary toward one another. Let me explain why this is in the following. I will discuss by and large three topics: one, the relationship between our emotions and our values; two, our values as our immortality projects; three, the middle-class character of the book (and thus the limitation)
One. the Relationship between Our Emotions and Our Values
What Smith calls our desires as the driving force for our lives is not just some composite of groundless animalistic desires. We humans are not only bodies, but also rationalities, willpowers, and emotions. We are the sum of all these things, each of which is interacting with another through complex process of our live stories and their relationships. What is emerged is what Manson calls our values, and what Smith calls our desires, for they are what we justify to pursue, what we feel most valuable, and what we exercise our willpower for. However, the main difference between Smith and Manson’s emphases is that Smith puts less stress on the agential power of the human person as builder and pioneer of such values, yet Manson shows concrete steps to building our own values as active agents in controlling our lives.
What Manson problematizes is the social atmosphere of preferring positive emotions and avoiding negative ones. According to Manson, desiring to have more positive emotions itself is negative, for it begins from a state of lacking in something. On the other hand, beginning with what we feel, i.e., our negative emotions, is itself a positive experience, for we accept who we are. Manson analyzes that the American pandemic of positive emotions is deeply connected to the ideal of success, which forces everyone in the game to be shown as positive person rather than negative one, for it is assumed that that’s how one succeeds in life. However, Manson zooms in on our negative emotions. For they are the key toward what our values really are. Interwoven with our life narratives, our negative emotions reflect what we see as success or failure, as well as our own metric for measuring success or failure. However, even Christian faith has been negligent of our negative emotions in many of its corners, uncritically drifting with the social flow. As a result, Christian faith has been largely unhelpful in challenging people’s values, let alone changing them.
In that light, Manson charts out three concrete steps toward uncovering what we hold dear as our life values, which he calls self-awareness onions, for our self-awareness interspersed with our values are like peels of onions which could never be completely bared. The thrust of self-awareness onions is to pay attention to our negative emotions. The first step is to step away from our feelings and simply acknowledge that we feel them. The second step is to ask ourselves why we feel such emotions. For example, when we get angry in certain situations, we can question ourselves why we are angry. Going deeper with our emotions involves going deeper with our past experiences and relationships, which is often the first step of unlearning our deeply held values and relearning more positive ones. The third step, which is linked with the previous two steps, yet still going further, is to question what I see as success/failure and what metrics I use to measure my success/failure.
Two. Our Values as Our Immortality Projects
What intrigued me as I read through Manson’s book was that he constantly used words like redemption and salvation, or their cognate words. In recounting Mustaine and Best’s stories, Manson employs the term ‘redemptive stories’ (81). Not only that. When we are trying to make ourselves more special beings than others, which all of us are always engaged in, we are usually employing two strategies. One is to present ourselves as victims whose life experiences were full of suffering and tragedies, and the other is to show off our achievements. Manson argues that this is a way of saving ourselves from our current pit, which shows what our values are. Furthermore, in the last chapter of the book, Manson cites Ernest Becker and his book Denial of Death at length, making his point that our values are, deep down, our immortality projects, which means that we are trying to save ourselves through our values. What was interesting to me was that Tim Keller also makes the same point as Manson’s from Becker’s book, even when Keller and Manson are coming from different places. Overall, this helped me a lot what people mean by salvation, in comparison to the Christian understanding of salvation. Unless Christians clearly grasp what is meant by Jesus’ saving us and how people are trying to save themselves, we will never be able to clearly articulate and communicate the gospel message of salvation to those who need it.
Three. Manson’s Middle Class Orientation (and the Inherent Limitation it has)
Now let me wrap up this review by briefly explaining why Manson’s middle class orientation embedded in this book sets up its limitation. Manson’s middle class orientation is shown here through his emphasis on the agential power of unlearning and relearning our own values. This should be thought out in perspective, for those who grew up in the culture of hopelessness cannot even begin to think that they can do something. For example, I am reminded of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Vance constantly argues that in his younger days he could not imagine that he could muster his willpower to do something great. In other words, Vance’s cultural background makes him feel that he is powerless over his destiny. However, the way Manson poses himself here is that he can do anything and everything. What I am saying is this cannot be cultivated unless one grows in a particular culture treasuring the agency of our personality. Let me quote a portion of my book review of Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.
This is not all. Your friends hanging out with you, and their parents are all similar to the foregoing. No one wants to go to college. No one has gone to college among the parents of your friends. There are so many of loafers like that who beat up their wives and abuse their children while drinking regularly to the level of being alcoholics. They are not even working 20 hours a week. Added to all of these is the Steel company which used to provide all kinds of support for your town has decided to leave the town, excusing itself from skyrocketing labor fees, forcing those who are capable of leaving to leave the town with the company. So the remaining people were the ones who were helpless either due to the lack of money, or to suffering from something else. If this is all you have seen and heard while growing up, what would you feel? What is your mindset like? You probably are filled with a sense of defeat.
But what is more serious is that your sense of defeat is not just about you, but about the town and its people living there, eating away at their hope and self-confidence, for they are not even sure that that is wrong now. So Vance describes the dominant emotional atmosphere among hillbillies “feelings that our choices don’t matter.” Translating this into psychological terms is “learned helplessness.” (163, 177) In brief, I cannot overcome this state of hopelessness no matter what I do. Those feelings become a town culture, a hillbilly culture. So you don’t need to make effort in doing something. Nothing will change. You are here for a while, and buried in the ground later. Make sure that you are aware that this is not a fiction. Vance is talking about the kind of reality that he has grown up in. It is such a sadly dramatic yet realistic reality.
Despite such inherent limitation, once a person gets out of such culturally embedded helplessness, Manson’s book will be of great help. One more weakness of the book is that since Manson’s book is all about developing individual values, it overlooks systemic and cultural value transformation. This is where the gospel message can not only be critical of, but also complementary toward Manson’s message.
Lastly, I feel refreshed in reading how Manson unfolds his arguments, which was mostly unlike what I experienced in theology books. That is primarily because I am so used to the dominant social imaginaries of Christianity in both US and Korea. I am challenged and changed by how I think about God, sin, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit as I engage with books written by non-Christian authors, and this has enormous implications for how I do theology. Thanks to the transcendental character of God which is never confined by one particular culture’s way of doing theology or particular Christian communities.
At any rate, Manson’s book stimulated my thinking in many ways, and it seems that it will take some time for me to sink in some of the insights and implications of Manson’s. I will do a series on some of the important books on self-help, and I am planning to do a project on the relationship between Christian faith and self-help. Thank you!