"It's good that you are here; I'm glad that you exist"

Total work, inclusion, contemplation

No real persons

In the same way that efficiency rules our experience of time, it also rules our experience of people.

Consider the jargon of the bro-corporate world, where everything—and everyone—is either a value-add, or else a net-negative. Or think about the sorority rush meeting, where a girl just doesn’t bring that much to the table.

This is the brilliance of HBO’s Succession, where characters talk about their relationships in the same way they talk about the market. “It’s good to know we don’t have an unbalanced love portfolio,” Tom says to Shiv, after reassuring him that she does in fact requite his love.

This bleeding of “market-speak” into our personal relationships is the logical end to what Josef Pieper called “total work”. The philosopher Andrew Taggart (note: not Selena Gomez’s boyfriend) summarizes Pieper’s idea as follows:

(Work becomes)…the centre around which all of human life turns; when everything else is put in its service; when leisure, festivity and play come to resemble and then become work; when there remains no further dimension to life beyond work; when humans fully believe that we were born only to work; and when other ways of life, existing before total work won out, disappear completely from cultural memory.

But in the world of total work, not only do certain ways of life disappear—but so do certain persons.

This, too, is the tragi-comic brilliance of Succession, which makes frequent use of the term “no real person.” When Kendall accidentally kills a waiter, his father covers it up because there was “no real person involved”. The same goes for cruise workers—the family media corporation glosses over accusations of sexual abuse and violence because there was “N.R.P.I.” (no real person involved). In the world of Succession, there are two types of people: not real and real. Rich, or not real. Efficient, or not real. Successful, or not real.

net-postive

Lest we think this is the stuff of HBO, consider the harrowing statistics out of Europe, where:

• In Denmark, in the year 2019, only 18 babies were born with Down Syndrome.

• Iceland has a nearly 100% abortion rate for babies with Down syndrome.

• Out of nearly 1100 abortions in Poland in 2016, almost every one was due to disability.

The point here is not exactly abortion. It is the objective reality that certain persons are disappearing from our world. We could not leave our work at the office. We have brought it home. Persons either “add value” to our lives, or they disappear.

The problem with “inclusion”

In an effort to curtail these developments, the church—like society—has opted for the goals and language of inclusion. Motivated by the the imago dei, which says that humans have intrinsic value because they are created by God and like God, we have tried to “welcome” those who society deems to be “not real persons.”

John Swinton captures the goals of the inclusion movement well: “the driving need has been to ensure that people with disabilities can find a place…within church communities, and more broadly within society, where they can be treated fairly and equally.” In this way, the conversation is framed in terms of:

• equality

• access

• freedom

• autonomy

• justice

• fairness

This list is better than nothing. But as Swinton notes, what is absent from it is love:

the problem with the inclusion agenda is that there is no innate moral mechanism…that might obligate or even encourage people to love…To be included, a person just needs to have access and authority to be in the room. There is no necessity for anyone to think what it might mean to love that person…It is the ability to love, not the ability to include or tolerate, that is a primary mark of discipleship…The vocation of the Christian community is to learn to love God, and in coming to love God, learn what it means to love and to receive love from all of its members.

The problem, then, is two-fold. First, we have traded Jesus’ call to love (Jn. 13:34-35) for society’s call to include. And in doing so, we have also refused to receive love from those we are at such pains to include. We have not asked: what if I need them just as much as they need me?

people being totally inclusive

It is good that you are here.

The question, then, is what is love? And specifically—how do we love the disabled, the N.R.P., and those who “bring nothing to the table”?

Here, Pieper gives us not just our problem, but our prescription. If our disease is total work—and our symptoms are market-speak, chronic anxiety, workaholism, the refusal to rest, and the eradication of Down Syndrome in Europe (to name a few)—he says our solution is contemplation.

For Pieper (and the ancients) contemplation was delighting in something for its own sake. It is the world of art museums. It is a realm in which objects, activities, and people are not simply means to ends, but ends in and of themselves. It is the world of leisure, and play, and other “pointless” activities which hold no extrinsic value.

This leads to Pieper’s definition of love.

Love is saying to the other, “It is good that you are here; I am glad that you exist.”

What I find so arresting about this quote is that it feels like the way out of both the devaluation of others into “N.R.P.s” and our benign inclusion of others. Because if, on the one hand, the world treats people as objects or means to an end, so can any “inclusion” agenda. The ends are simply different. The end of one is efficiency and power and greed and feeling successful; the end of the other is feeling self-righteousness and signaling to the world we are “doing it right.” In both cases, people are still objects—and I am still stuck in the “suck of self.”

But in the contemplation of another, in saying “it is good that you are here,” in wondering at a person’s contingency, at the fact that they might never have existed—but they do—that is the beginning of love.

Who is helping who?

In contemplation, we are able to see not only that others exist, but that we are in need of them. That we can—and must—not only give but receive love from these suddenly real persons.

Like when Fred Rogers asks the 14-year-old with cerebral palsy to pray for him. David Brooks writes in the New York Times:

Once, as Tom Junod described in a profile for Esquire, Rogers met a 14-year-old boy whose cerebral palsy left him sometimes unable to walk or talk. Rogers asked the boy to pray for him.

The boy was thunderstruck. He had been the object of prayers many times, but nobody had asked him to pray for another. He said he would try since Mister Rogers must be close to God and if Mister Rogers liked him he must be O.K.

Junod complimented Rogers on cleverly boosting the boy’s self-esteem, but Rogers didn’t look at the situation that way at all: “Oh, heavens no, Tom! I didn’t ask him for his prayers for him; I asked for me. I asked him because I think that anyone who has gone through challenges like that must be very close to God.”