Strong and Weak

by Andy Crouch

  Games confer authority. But video games (and most screen-based forms of recreation) confer authority more quickly and more completely than any real-world game does. To become the quarterback for the pickup game in my neighbor’s backyard would require me to demonstrate some level of mastery of the game of football to other human beings. Even being a backyard quarterback is probably beyond the reach of my puny arms, but to become a quarterback in the NFL requires nearly superhuman abilities and discipline.

  To become an “NFL quarterback” in the video game Madden Football, however, requires little more than choosing an avatar and pressing a button. Suddenly you are vested with all of the authority, and much of the ability, of your chosen celebrity player. Of course there is a learning curve in Madden Football—if there were not, it would quickly become repetitive and boring. Your onscreen self will drop passes, get sacked and make poor decisions. But with a little dedication, almost anyone can become a capable Madden Football quarterback. The learning curve is far shallower in the video game than in the real game—if it were not, almost no one would find it rewarding to play.

  The game also gives you an experience of vulnerability—exposure to meaningful risk—but even more than the ersatz authority you gain with technology’s help, this vulnerability is well and truly a mirage. Play enough Madden Football and you really will acquire certain kinds of skills, thin though they may be—that is, you will gain some real authority in understanding and playing the game of football. But no matter how much you play, you will never get a concussion, you will never be cut from the team, and you will lose nothing of value in the “real world” outside the game (except, of course, whatever real capacities you could have developed in the time you spent becoming an expert at Madden Football). The authority may be largely simulated, but the vulnerability is entirely an illusion.

  This is the power of video games—the reason they are far more absorbing than TV, with its one-way, passive consumption, and a bigger industry than movies after just a few decades in existence ($93 billion worldwide in 2013 compared to the movie industry’s $88 billion). They give us accessible simulations of flourishing life, the life which we all crave—the life of action and risk, the life of adventure and conquest, even (in some games) the life of romance and the satisfactions of community.

  But they are only simulations. There is a marked asymmetry between the skill you acquire in the world of space, time and flesh-and-blood bodies, and the skill you acquire in the virtual world of screens and controllers. Skill from the real world translates well, generally, into the virtual world. If you are skilled at the actual embodied game of (American) football, you will likely be good at the video game Madden Football. If you are an accomplished race-car driver, you can probably quickly master Forza Motorsport 5. But the skills do not transfer, or transfer only minimally, in the other direction. Being good at Madden Football will have very little effect in your neighbor’s backyard, let alone on the turf at Soldier Field.

  Ironically, the reason video games develop so little real skill is that they are too rewarding.

  Ironically, the reason video games develop so little real skill is that they are too rewarding. Real authority is a tedious business. Developing the depth of competence required to play an instrument, pilot an aircraft or transplant a human organ requires thousands of hours of unstimulating, unstinting practice that gives us little immediate sense of authority.

  And yet this kind of patient development, which is itself a form of vulnerability, is the only path to real authority. In video games, every warrior has qualified for the Special Forces; every basketball player has a 30-inch vertical leap. Not to mention that wielding lethal violence leaves no emotional scars, just a pleasant sense of victory—and the bodies on the screen stay perpetually young and vital. The more you give yourself over to simulations, the more true authority and true vulnerability recede from your life. Video games give us a shortcut to the godlike figures we wish ourselves to be but are too inconstant to actually become.

  Friction-Free Activism

  If this simulated flourishing were restricted to the world of leisure—cruises and games—at least we would know that it was not the real world. But the reward structure of video games—the simulated authority and vulnerability of virtual reality—is increasingly colonizing our interactions with the most serious matters of the real world as well. Like technologically mediated entertainment, the technology of social media is becoming more “gamified” by the year as developers learn how to tap into the deep human hunger for simulations of authority and vulnerability. In social media, you can engage in nearly friction-free experiences of activism, expressing enthusiasm, solidarity or outrage (all powerful sensations of authority) for your chosen cause with the click of a few buttons.

  Like all media (including books like this one!), social media are largely what we make of them—escapist or transforming depending on what we expect from them and how we use them. In far-flung places in the world, an emerging generation has used media like Twitter to coordinate impressive examples of meaningful action combined with ­extraordinary risk—the 2014 protests in Hong Kong and the outcry in the United States about police practices and race being recent examples as I write this book.

  But these two uses of social media have two key features in common. First, they were largely used by people living deep in Suffering—exposed to meaningful risk without being granted meaningful capacity for action by their societies. Second, they led to embodied, in-the-flesh experiences of action in community. When media are tools that help those who have lacked the capacity for action take action, and bring them together to bear risk together rather than be paralyzed in Suffering, they can lead to real change.

  But when the residents of the comfortable affluence of Withdrawing use media to simulate engagement, to give ourselves a sense of making a personal investment when in fact our activity risks nothing and forms nothing new in our characters, then “virtual activism” is in fact a way of doubling down on withdrawing, holding on to one’s invulnerability and incapacity while creating a sensation of involvement. Only when technology serves a genuine, embodied, risky move toward flourishing is it something other than an opiate for the mass elite—the drug that leaves us mired in our apathy and our neighbors in their need.

  The Safety Generation

  Before the current era, almost no one could stay in Withdrawing beyond the early years of childhood. The world was too harsh and human cultures too demanding of real maturity. Society could not afford to tolerate those who shirked the authority and vulnerability that were necessary to eke out flourishing from the world. Consider the eight-year-old child sent to the barn to milk a cow. She has already been granted real flourishing—the authority of dominion over a creature, responsible for its flourishing and benefiting from its abundance, along with the vulnerability of being a small human being next to a massive bovine. It is a kind of flourishing that a child milking a cow in Minecraft (accomplished, I’m told, by right clicking while “holding” a bucket) will never know.

  But today we have to constantly choose to move up and to the right. If there is one temptation that seems to me endemic to the emerging generation of young adults, it is to choose Withdrawing—to retreat from authority and vulnerability alike. At a worship service one evening in the spring of 2014, I presented these four quadrants—especially the three where all of us spend far too much of our lives—to several hundred college students. We invited students to come forward for prayer, to be liberated for the abundant and flourishing life we were made for. We were astonished and moved as more than one hundred students came forward for personal prayer. It was one of the manifestations of the power and presence of God that you cannot orchestrate but can only receive, and we stayed long into the night praying alongside these friends.

  The next day, the college chaplain and the team of counselors who had offered prayer gathered to debrief the previous night’s event. I was curious about which quadrant most of the prayer requ
ests had come from. Were students wrestling with experiences of persistent vulnerability without authority? Or the temptation to grasp authority without vulnerability? Or the retreat from both? Overwhelmingly, every prayer leader reported, it was Withdrawing. The domain of inaction, of fear of exposure, of safety. One young man approached me for prayer and confided that in each of his four closest friendships, he was experiencing overwhelming temptation to minimize risk, avoid real engagement and abandon them.

  Amidst safety the world has never before known, the greatest spiritual struggle many of us face is to be willing to take off our bubble wrap.

  The Path from Withdrawing

  The good news about escaping the Withdrawing quadrant is that pretty much any move, toward either authority or vulnerability, is a step in the right direction. Perhaps the two best beginning moves, for those of us swaddled in affluence and intoxicated by our technology, are into the natural world—the world of stars, snow and rain, trees and deserts—and into the relational world—the world of real bodies with heartbeats, hands and faces.

  Turn off your devices and go for a walk or a run, not just on days when the weather is pleasant but on days when the wind is fierce, the rain is falling or the humidity is high. Shiver or sweat, feel fatigue in your limbs, hear the sounds of the city or the countryside unfiltered by headphones. Choose to go to places—the ocean, the mountains, or a broad, wide field—where you will feel small rather than grand.

  Choose to go to places—the ocean, the mountains, or a broad, wide field—where you will feel small rather than grand.

  Dare to walk across campus or across town without looking at a screen.

  Decide to introduce yourself to one new person each day—just to learn their name and give them yours, with no further agenda.

  Brew coffee or tea, sit with a friend and ask them questions—questions just one step riskier than the last time you talked. As you listen, observe the flickers of sadness or hope that cross their face. Try to imagine what it must be like to live their story, suffer their losses, dream their dreams. Pray with them and dare to put into words their heart’s desires, and dare to ask God to grant them.

  The next time you travel, decide not to be a tourist, who uses material wealth to purchase experiences of vicarious significance—being in places that make us feel grand and worth noticing. Instead, travel like a pilgrim, who travels to encounter people who have been sanctified by suffering. Seek out people who live on the cruel edges of the world. Accompany them in person, at least for short seasons, in their authority and vulnerability. Share what you have with them in sufficient measure that your generosity feels vulnerable, emptying your bank account to the point that you instinctively start to pray for daily bread.

  Our affluence has left us unready for the tragedy and danger of the world. But what we cannot see when we are caught in Withdrawing is that there is something far better ahead, pleasures which we must be made strong enough to bear. We will only discover them if someone unwraps us and calls us forth. And the great glad news of the gospel is that someone has.

  5

  Exploiting

  As I write these words, the world’s most apparently successful tyrant is a man named Kim Jong Un.

  Along with a small band of elite leaders, Kim rules the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—better known to the rest of the world as North Korea—with absolute ­authority. Like his father and grandfather, he has ruthlessly eliminated anyone who might pose a threat to his power, including ordering the execution of elder members of his own family. Causing even the most minor disturbance to the leader’s authority or his sense of national pride—say, turning in an insufficiently pleasing design for a new airport—is a death warrant for officials high or low.

  If we believe the reports of former chefs and, improbably enough, movie directors employed by the Kim family, Kim Jong Un has enjoyed a life of extraordinary privilege and comfort. But in spite of the relentlessly upbeat reports that emerge from the state-controlled news agency, this abundance never spreads beyond a tiny circle. Most of Kim’s subjects live in profound poverty, and every one of his country’s citizens lives with well-justified fear.

  Kim Jong Un lives up and to the left, in quadrant IV, Exploiting. But the people he leads live deep in quadrant II. Tyranny and suffering, exploiting and poverty, always are found together. Indeed, you know you are encountering a situation of injustice when a few people in a system enjoy authority without vulnerability at the price of most people in that system suffering vulnerability without authority.

  Tyrants and dictators live at the most extreme edge of exploitation, with their people living at the most extreme edge of suffering. But Exploiting is found anywhere people seek to maximize power while eliminating risk. And it turns out to be the most seductive and dangerous quadrant of all.

  Risk and Reward

  We human beings, as one ingeniously devised experiment after another has demonstrated, are considerably more motivated by the fear of loss than the possibility of gain. If I give you fifty dollars, then give you the choice of simply walking away with that fifty dollars or wagering it in a bet where you have a chance of making five hundred dollars, you are far more likely to choose the safe fifty than take the bet. Just a few moments ago, you had nothing—but once we have something, we want to keep it.

  This tendency toward “loss aversion” is not universal—some of us will take on much more risk than others—but overall it is consistent and powerful enough to affect whole industries, economies and nations. The completely rational actor of economics, that fictional creature sometimes called homo economicus, would balance risk against reward in strictly mathematical fashion—but we homo sapiens weigh risk and reward using very different scales.

  And this explains something interesting about our 2x2 grid. Flourishing, I’ve been arguing, requires both authority and vulnerability in equal measure. The true life for which we were made will require us both to act and to risk. But we do not pursue these two good things with the same wholeheartedness—or even the same halfheartedness. Most of us are far more willing to move up than we are to move to the right—indeed, we are more likely to spend significant amounts of energy moving away from the right than toward the right at all.

  It’s loss aversion in action. Authority corresponds to the ability to add something to the world—the possibility of gain. Vulnerability corresponds to the possibility—though only the possibility—of loss. In our daily choices, both conscious and unconscious, the possibility of loss counts far more than the possibility of gain. That is why so many of us end up moving to the left, away from vulnerability.

  That is why, to many of us, authority without risk sounds like a much better deal. Perhaps the only real difference between us and Kim Jong Un is that for him, by an accident of birth, that dream of living up and to the left came terribly true.

  Your Brain on Drugs

  Take a social situation every human being has to deal with at some point: walking into a room full of people we do not know. For most of us, that is a meaningful risk. (For a few ultra-extroverts, it’s sheer delight—a hundred friends you haven’t met yet! You know who you are. The rest of us know who you are, too, and we both envy you and think you are truly bizarre.) After the first blissful days of our earliest childhood, we learned, usually the hard way, that there is vulnerability in crowds.

  Think about the vulnerability of the first days and months of your adult life, your first season away from home, perhaps on a university campus, and the simultaneous excitement and trepidation of your first big on-campus party—full of seemingly happy, confident, attractive peers.

  What if I could hand something to the eighteen-year-old version of you walking into that party—something you could hold in your hand, something that would increase your authority and decrease your vulnerability? Something that as you held it—and sipped it—gradually eased your discomfort and enhanced your excitement? It wouldn’t be strictly legal, in the United States at least—but it
would be very appealing indeed.

  At the moment that you begin to use alcohol to manage your vulnerability in a social situation, you are heading up and to the left. At first, and up to a point, it will work wonders. A few drinks will take the edge off the sense of risk and exposure you felt when you walked in. They will give you a heightened sense of power and possibility. You will be living the intoxicating life of a minor god.

  But over time, as with all addictions (and all idols), the effect begins to wear off. A higher and higher dose is needed for the same effect. And gradually, the thing that once delivered authority without vulnerability begins to expose you to risk and rob you of authority. In the long run, unless you are delivered by a miracle of grace, you will find that the very thing that promised authority without vulnerability has betrayed you, handing you over to the depths of suffering—vulnerability without authority.

  Our daily lives are filled with these small choices—small at first, but over time, becoming a deep dependence on strategies that preserve our sense of action while minimizing our sense of risk. The church once enumerated seven deadly sins—lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Most of them are ways of pursuing authority without vulnerability. Sex without commitment (lust), food without moderation (gluttony), goods without limit (greed), anger without compassion (wrath), and above all the pursuit of autonomous, godlike power (pride)—all these are forms of what Scripture calls, most comprehensively, idolatry, the use of created things to pursue godlike power without risk or limit. (Sloth, of course, is the deadly sin that corresponds to Withdrawing, the safety of risking nothing in the world; and envy may be the besetting sin of Suffering, the jealousy and bitterness of those who can see only their own vulnerability and others’ authority.) All these are just variations on the promises that accompanied the very first idol, the fruit proffered by the serpent in the Garden: “You will be like God”—unlimited authority—and, “You will not die”—none of that vulnerable creaturely dependence.