Habits of the Heart: Part One
We're sharing the second part of our 2025 slow read.
As our team takes time off for the holidays, we are sharing the conversations Sarah and Beth had this year about Habits of the Heart. This second episode originally aired in May for our premium members on Substack.
Whether you’re also taking a well-deserved break, spending time with family, or just looking for something meaningful to listen to, we hope you’ll join us to revisit (or enjoy for the first time!) this thoughtful exploration from Sarah and Beth of this powerful, prescient book.
In this episode, they discuss the value of doing things in community, the social construct of marriage, the authors’ disdain for therapeutic culture, and the structures of friendship.
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Episode Transcript
Alise Napp [00:00:07] This is Alise Napp, you’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. This holiday season, as our team takes time off, we are sharing with you the conversations Sarah and Beth had this year about the book Habits of the Heart. We slow read this wonderful book from the 1980s about American society all throughout 2025 with our premium community on Substack. The episode you’re about to hear covers part one of the book and originally ran at the beginning of May. It includes conversation about individualism, marriage, what it means to find yourself, and the values and dangers of that pursuit. Plus a few spicy takes like Sarah’s suggestion that we dust off the idea of hell. You’re going to enjoy this one. We hope that you like hearing these conversations and that they inspire you to pick up the book, have some conversations like this of your own, and to join us on Substack in the new year where we have conversations like this every week. We’ll be sharing the final two installments of the Habits of the Heart slow read series next week so make sure you join us for those. Then we’ll be back to regular programming on Tuesday, January 6th. Thank you so much for listening, we hope you have the very best holiday season available to you.
Sarah [00:01:18] Hello, everyone. Welcome to our Habits of the Heart Slow Read for 2025. We are on to part one, Private Life. But I’m so completely obsessed with this book.
Beth [00:01:32] I love this book!
Sarah [00:01:33] I love it so much. If I had read this book when we were starting the podcast, I’d be like, JK, let’s just make everybody read this books. Let’s just focus on that.
Beth [00:01:43] I think that’s right. I do feel good that I can see my own and our collective evolution in this book in a lot of places. It is also just a complete mind-bender to think about therapeutic language and its influence on me and how I feel like my life has been at this intersection of the evangelical Christian and the therapeutic language, and it just is blowing my mind.
Sarah [00:02:11] And they knew it all the whole time. This book was written in 1984.
Beth [00:02:15] Since the ‘80s. I know. I texted Anne Helen Peterson and I said, “Have you read this book?” And she goes, “Oh yeah, it’s phenomenal.” Because there’s a lot of Anne Helen’s work in this book as well. And I was like they knew all of it. And she’s like, “I know.” Like how? They didn’t even have the internet. They knew it all.
Beth [00:02:34] They knew it without the internet is incredible. And I so wish that I could just sit down with all of them and be like I got some new questions for you.
Sarah [00:02:44] Surely someone’s done that. We’ll get through the book and then we’ll work up what they’ve been doing since.
Beth [00:02:49] Okay.
Sarah [00:02:50] God, I love this book so much, I don’t even know where to start. I mean, I just want to get to whole entire sections and be like, well, that’s a gospel text.
Beth [00:02:54] Well, look, just look. I don’t flag anything, but look at my book. It’s flagged from top to bottom.
Sarah [00:03:02] Yeah. Mine’s just written in everywhere. All right. I guess we’ll just going to have to start somewhere though. Let’s start with finding oneself. Okay. So this is where they’re really talking about identity and purpose. We love to find ourselves in America. We love be true to ourselves. But they talk through all these interviews and they push people, okay, but what does that mean? What does that means? And they don’t really get vermin in places. This one, this was a tag. This is a place they get pretty quickly in finding oneself. “In the eyes of these successful children of professionals without strong religious beliefs, parental love is narrowed to a reward for doing well.” Beth, did that hurt a little bit?
Beth [00:03:45] It hurt a little bit.
Sarah [00:03:49] Personal attack. Did you, like me, gather your children around and be like this is not what I care about.
Beth [00:03:56] Can I tell you a little bit of our family lore? Many years ago now, when Chad and I were first getting married, we had a conversation about a relative of mine who has been, in many ways, finding himself for a long time. And my parents I was asking them what he was up to these days, and they said, “Well, he’s still kind of finding himself.” And I don’t remember which one of us said it. It is just now attributed to both Chad and me. We were like maybe he should get a mortgage. You find yourself so fast when you have a mortgage that’s due every month. So we were very much of at peace with some of the traditionalists in that way though, right? Like you find yourself through work and material success and the ability to pay your own bills. Like that is where we were at that point in our lives.
Sarah [00:04:45] I just feel like what they recognize in the 80s that people could not articulate really objective values beyond independence is just playing out in one way or the other in our culture right now. It’s like, I think, they would be both horrified and confirmed.
Beth [00:05:07] Yes.
Sarah [00:05:07] Because when you push this so far, hey, listen, I know I sound like the Southern Baptist I ran away from when I say we need objective truth. Something we said in front of some college students once and said we don’t really believe in and kind of blew their mind. Now I’m like I was wrong. I even told Griffin the other day, I was like, I don’t know Griffin, should we dust off hell again just so people have some motivation again? I’m just saying, it’s a question I’m asking myself. Should we just dust it off a little bit? Just a little bit, not a lot. I don’t want people to live in perpetual fear of going to hell. I’m not looking for that. But just maybe like a dusting of hell. I just need it! We need some frameworks! We just need some framework. I’m just saying.
Beth [00:05:52] I was unprepared for dusting off hell. I’m going to have to gather myself.
Sarah [00:05:54] Just a little bit, like just a sprinkle. Like a tiny bit, that’s all I’m saying.
Beth [00:05:59] I did leave this chapter thinking finding oneself is too much pressure and that is what modern life has revealed to us. Finding oneself is too much pressure.
Sarah [00:06:07] Listen, I’m not going to say bad things about Oprah because I’m legally obligated to love and protect Oprah and her legacy at all costs. But I think I have been clear, and I think if you talk to Oprah she would admit to this, that growing up watching her every day be like find your passion, find you passion, find your fashion was so stressful. Honestly, was that existential dread really that different from people who grow up afraid of going to hell? I’m not sure it is. I’m not really sure it is. I think we’ve just channeled it in a different area. We’re all afraid of messing up. We just put different words around it.
Beth [00:06:47] I love Avenue Q for so many reasons, the musical, and there’s a song in it called Purpose where the main character is singing about trying to find his purpose, and he says, “Everyone has a purpose, so what’s mine?” And I thought, I just don’t know. I think we all have a way to have a good life. But I think maybe thinking about purpose is too much, especially because I have pursued mine so much through work. I mean, just so much chasing my purpose through work. And my husband does not do that. And he does not contribute less to society than I do. He probably feels more fulfilled than I do honestly in a lot of ways, more rewarded. So at least my way of going about finding myself I think has been misguided and exhausting.
Sarah [00:07:37] I found myself when I stopped trying to find myself all alone. I mean, the biggest turning point in my life was becoming a mother. And I mean that like professionally, too. It wasn’t all the education. It wasn’t all the private reflection or coaching or mentoring. It was the clarifying of having other people in my life that I wanted to be with and do right by. I love this part, it says, “It is a powerful cultural fiction that we not only can, but must, make up our deepest beliefs in the isolation of our private selves.” It’s lonely. It’s lonely to tell people to go out there and find their passion and their purpose. I would say the second biggest turning point after becoming a mother was forming a partnership with you and coming into community with these people that we’re in community with. It just changed everything. That’s why we have such powerful purpose and incredible work is because we don’t do it alone.
Beth [00:08:42] And at the same time, I have had to really work in myself on not just turning this into my purpose in the sense that if it goes away tomorrow, I wouldn’t be okay anymore. We are in a volatile industry at a volatile time. Every day that we do this is a surprise and a gift and a responsibility. And so, I want to feel all that gratitude for this and feel all of that it’s brought into my life, but also know that if I say this is my defining purpose, then what happens to me if it goes away? I’ve got to find that space. And that’s why I finished this chapter and I was like, I’m done. I’m not going to find myself anymore. I’m just here and I am. I’m going to think of myself the way that like a puppy does, I am just here. And I am meaningful because I am. The end.
Sarah [00:09:35] We are in a volatile industry, but I think all the time what really gives me a lot of comfort is it’s not amorphous- our purpose, our work, or our success. I know the people, I know they’re out there. That’s why I love the Christmas cards. That’s when I tell myself, I’m like, this is all crazy, but these people are in it with us, and I do not believe they are going anywhere. Now, it might look different based on how the industry evolves. But I’m like, man, these people are in it with us. And it is so deeply confirming. And I had this conversation with one of my best friends. We were talking about being yourself. That to me is a better way to put it. You’re not finding yourself. You’re just being yourself. And we were talking about as women like we’ve been in places. I can feel what people want from me and I am unable to give it. This is why I’m bad on girl strips, okay? I know. It’s not that I don’t know. And it’s not that I’m just trying to be mean. I just can’t do it. I can’t fake it. And we were talking about why we’re like this. And I said, for me, it was a very powerful foundation of unconditional love from many, many adults in my life. The story I was telling her, my friend is, in second grade, my teacher taped my mouth shut. I have no memory of it. My classmates do. Very strong memories of it, but I have no memory of it. I love this teacher. I still love her. I don’t have any memory of it. And I’ll have friends be like that person was so mean to you, you don’t remember that? And I’m like, no. I think part of it is because however mean somebody was or whatever terrible choice that teacher made, and I don’t think she was being cruel, I think she was trying to be funny, but whatever. Whatever it was, it just couldn’t get past that foundation of people telling me, you’re great just the way you are. I was impervious to it to a certain extent. And that’s what I think they’re saying. It’s like the wall you build yourself is too fragile. The walls that last are built by other people. Not that we look to other people for approval. That’s not what I mean. Because there’s something different for striving from someone’s approval and accepting their unconditional love, right? And I just think the fragility of what we try to build all alone and that we’re told we can build through consumption or individuality or whatever, it is fragile. It’s fragile. They were telling us since 1984 that it’s so fragile.
Beth [00:12:19] So I think that’s a good transition to the love and marriage section. I thought it was so interesting to search for language about why we try to love each other, and why we tried to form lasting, intimate love with each other.
Sarah [00:12:37] Well, it definitely gets to something we’ve even talked about in our own books, which is we’ve just changed the perception of marriage. We went from a social contract to-- and I think they do a good job of being like it wasn’t just patriarchal exploitation. There was a mutual benefit to both men and women under that social construct.
Beth [00:12:57] And there still is.
Sarah [00:12:58] And there’s still is, but what we’ve made it is a vehicle for self fulfillment. It’s not even self-fulfillment. It’s like self-actualization. And that’s a really hard bar. That’s a hard bar. It is a lot to ask of another person.
Beth [00:13:16] And yet it does feel essential to me. It feels like a better shot at self-actualization to me than going it alone would feel. And it’s not that I don’t think that you can self-actualize alone. I think a lot of people would say I’ve made the opposite calculation. I would lose so much of myself in partnership with someone else forever. I definitely have found my marriage to be the most freeing institution or decision or vehicle in my life.
Sarah [00:13:50] I don’t even know where to start. I’ve been with Nicholas since I was 19 years old. I was not self-actualized when we met. And I think that Nicholas and I’s alignment on our understanding of moral and social commitment through marriage really led to more mutual satisfaction and that individual connection. I think the fact that we saw and agreed, even at very young ages, on the emptiness of that popular conception of marriage helped us stay married. Especially Nicholas, from the beginning, has always said, like, you marry who you marry. That’s it. His parents have been married for like 50-something years. They have an incredible marriage. But it wasn’t built on this like I’m going to change you and you’re going to change me and we’re all going to become better. That was definitely never his-- more mine than his. His conception was you marry who you marry. That’s who they are. It’s taking me longer to get there. But it’s so freeing. I think people ask a lot of marriage thinking they’re building better marriages but they’re just making it so hard on themselves. Well, let me put it that way. I made it hard on myself. I made it hard on myself and Nicholas when I had a view of marriage built on 1990s romantic comedies that you complete me and you’re my reason for being and all of that. Like it just was a little too much. It was too much to ask.
Beth [00:15:46] So what I related to most in this chapter was Marge and Fred. I called Chad and I was like, I want to read to you about Marge and Fred because I think this is us, where they talked about the growing sense that the relationship is natural. One does not so much choose as simply accept what already is, which maybe is in line with Nicholas’s, you just marry who you marry. And I loved the phrase, “It just felt right and it was like being caught in the flow.” That is how I feel about my marriage. And that there is that combination of spontaneity and solidity, freedom and intimacy. I feel like just page 91 is my deal with Chad, I think, and where we have been. But then as they like press into, okay, well, what happens if you don’t have those things or what happens when those things change? I thought it was so interesting. I especially loved the observation that most people both admire and don’t want to be like their parents in their relationship.
Sarah [00:16:49] I really connected through the aspect of Christian faith and faith gets you through when love doesn’t. Not because I have felt like that. I would say more just commitment has kept me going during really difficult parts of my marriage. And hearing someone acknowledge that and talk about that was really great. I don’t think we talk about that’s why I’m so obsessed with the last american movie stars, the documentary about Paul Newman and Joan Woodward, like, love it. I’m obsessed with it. Everyone should watch it. Every person about to get married should watch this. Because it’s perfect in many ways because they were this very popular, idealized concept of particularly celebrity marriage. So it’s powerful because they chip away at that pretty dramatically. They had a tough marriage. He was an alcoholic, he cheated on her. Like it was tough. She gave up her career for their family and I think harbored resentment for that her whole life. Like it’s tough. They had a tough time and came out the other side. And just the telling of that-- not like the moralizing like that I think everybody should do that. Just the honest telling of that I thing is so powerful. Because you’re competing with ideas about marriage. At the same time you’re trying to live in a very real marriage or exiting a very real marriage.
Beth [00:18:20] And this chapter is where I could feel myself like firmly influenced by individualism because I both feel a deep sense of commitment in my relationship that I believe and intend to always keep me here. And I have absolutely no judgment for what other people do in their marriages. My brief stint as a domestic relations attorney taught me I have no idea what happens in other people’s houses.
Sarah [00:18:53] No, you just don’t.
Beth [00:18:54] No idea. And no idea why some people leave and why some People stay. And it is just not mine to believe I know because I don’t know. It is unreal what some people live through. And of course they make the right decision moving on from it. And so I really feel that individualist pull against setting down a hard marker that commitment or faith or whatever should always pull you through.
Sarah [00:19:27] I do think we lack some calibration in lots of places around marriage in American culture. I do you think what they say is right. That the more it’s about your personal happiness and you hit an unhappy time, well, then it makes the marriage more fragile under any rubric. Nicholas said this the other day. He said, “It’s too easy for people to get married.” I’m like, what do you mean? And he was like you just can get anybody who’ll be like, yeah, I’m a justice of the peace. You go to the courthouse. It takes almost no thought to get married. He’s like but it sure as hell harder to get unmarried. And I was like, ooh, that’s a good point. I don’t know if we should make it harder to get married or easier to get divorced. I’m not really sure where I would come down on that, but I don’t think whatever we’re doing now is calibration. I think people want to get married that aren’t finding partners. I think we’ve gotten a lot better about not pressuring people to get married under certain circumstances and more accepting of people who don’t get married. I don’t think we fixed that problem, but the polling they report in the 80s of like, oh my God, it was like 60% of people thought there was something sick and wrong with you if you didn’t get marriage. I’m like what were we thinking? Well, I know what we were smoking in the 70s. We’ve made a lot of progress, but it feels like we’ve overcorrected in a lot of areas and there are places where we could-- I don’t know if I want to say emphasize, prioritize. Also, it’s like the having kids thing. I’m just not really sure how much policy can get at this because it’s so complex.
Beth [00:21:11] But policy always will too.
Sarah [00:21:12] It will, whether we want it to or not.
Beth [00:21:13] I think we are better at not being judgmental about people who get married multiple times or never get married or like whatever. I think that we do have much more of a you have to know your own path and walk your own path. But systems aren’t good at that. I think all the time about when I volunteered at Back to School Night and there was this form about transportation that was impossible for a couple that came in who were divorced and co-parenting to complete. The forum did not contemplate how complex it was for their family to operate in the course of a week because the parents were not married and because both of them were actively involved with the child. And so whether we want systems to be a part of it or not, they are for everyone in some way.
Sarah [00:22:08] And I liked how this chapter ended because they’re basically saying the family is no longer an integral part of a large moral ecology tying the individual to community, church, and nation. The family is the core of the private sphere whose aim is not to link individuals to the public world, but to avoid it as far as possible. In our commercial culture, consumerism with its temptation and television with its examples augment that tendency. Americans are seldom as selfish as the therapeutic culture urges them to be. But often the limit of their serious altruism is the family circle. I just saw a reel with a family therapist the other day that she was talking about her argument was basically the Trump administration. This is part of like authoritarian playbook, is to go after the family and demoralize and normalize leaving your family of origin or ignoring your parents or exiling them. It was really interesting to hear her perspective like pushing back against this. Like the family is important. It is important for every individual. Doesn’t mean there’s not abuse present or pain present that needs to be addressed or even excised, but we’ve gotten to a place where it has lost any moral weight, any heft inside our lives. And it was an anchor in so many important aspects. And I think that that’s what they’re getting at. They also clearly have some beef with therapeutic culture. Should we talk about that next with the reaching out chapter?
Beth [00:23:36] Some surprising beef with the therapeutic culture?
Sarah [00:23:39] They got a lot of beef. They got big beefs. I think they got big beefs.
Beth [00:23:42] And I would love to be able to understand this better from the lens of time. I think I was too young to have any sense of what was going on with therapy in the 1980s, because I read this chapter and I thought this is so interesting because my therapist who I worked with for six, seven years-- don’t anybody go six, seven. That’s what my kids do constantly. And I just walked right into it. But the therapist I worked with for a long time, the constant and persistent question he had for me is like what are the meaningful relationships in your life? Where are you building deep, meaningful friendships? Why are there not more people that you really trust about everything? So he was really pushing me out of individualism in so many ways I felt, but that seems to not be the therapeutic culture that is being described in this book.
Sarah [00:24:34] There’s no way therapeutic culture has not evolved since 1984.
Beth [00:24:37] Absolutely.
Sarah [00:24:38] Okay. So that’s for sure. But also you have to acknowledge where it started and what it’s built on, even if it’s expressing itself differently now. And I think I had not thought about it until they articulated that the therapeutic relationship is built as the ideal relationship where you can just offload on someone and they’re this neutral observer. And we want that from people. I think you used to articulate this really well with your boundaries workshop where you’re like we talk about boundaries, but we want people-- like you’re telling someone to respect your boundaries because they haven’t. And they haven’t means they’re probably not going to react great. That doesn’t mean anybody’s doing anything wrong. No one’s going to respond to a boundaries conversation the same way a therapist is, but that seems to be like what we want from people. We want our husbands, we want our friends, we want our co-workers, we want to our family members to respond to us like a therapist. To affirm everything we have said in a very cool, neutral tone, and to allow us to express ourselves without consequences. That feels right to me.
Beth [00:25:41] And I will say as a person who has tried to do that and has made that a defining feature of who I am in the world, it is exhausting. It is really hard and you lose yourself in it. I just said I’m not going to try to find myself anymore, but I also know where I have eroded myself trying to behave with those expectations, to just always be very open-minded. There’s a person in my life right now that I’m just going to tell you I can’t stand this person. And that is super unusual. Like you just reacted to that right because that’s not how I am. And I feel myself trying to talk myself out of that constantly where I’m just saying like but he doesn’t mean this or this is how he’s trying to help or whatever. And I finally am canceling that side of my personality I am allowed to not like some people. But that’s really pushing against what is so deeply ingrained that I found named for me in this section of the book so profoundly.
Sarah [00:26:46] You know what’s fascinating though? So we are very different. I always say you walk into a room and feel responsible for everyone. I walk into her room and feel responsibility for no one. Like I told you, I can’t, I won’t. I am incapable of calibrating to what people need or want from me. I am not unkind. I am not cruel. I don’t just walk around stomping on all over people. But sometimes when I-- and I’m not impervious to it like when people are asking me for something or they’re looking for whatever. I’m a regular human, I’m just saying. I have realized that I am a little bit out of the norm in this respect, that I don’t feel responsibility and I don’t twist myself in knots for people. I actually have a way higher threshold for people. It takes a lot for me to cancel someone. It takes lot. I can tell you on one hand how many people I’m not talking to anymore. It’s a short list. And often there’ll be times in my life where someone’s like, oh my God, I can’t believe you’re being patient with them. Oh my God they’re being mean to you. Like I said before, I won’t remember it. I won’t even notice it. I almost never carry resentment for people, even if they’ve treated me badly. Sometimes I don’t even notice that. So it’s kind of weird that I seem disconnected, but it’s almost like it also disconnects the resentment. It just allows me a lot more space to just let people be people. You know what I mean?
Beth [00:28:27] And I think that there is room for people like me to learn from that because there’s nothing wrong with therapeutic culture. I was just sifting through that here. Okay, this has been exhausting for me in my life. It’s also been really good and helpful. And it’s not like I want to deny the parts of me that naturally go this way or even that I have cultivated to be this way. And as they are describing the way that we are asked to manage ourselves and each other in every single context, that you’re doing this at work and then you come home and you got to do it within your relationships and you got to do it with your friends and you’ve got to it with you relatives. There’s no space where that expectation ratchets down. I think that that is unsustainable and why so many of us have chosen to opt out of a lot of spaces.
Sarah [00:29:33] Yes, that’s why people are lonely because the expectations of being together were too high.
Beth [00:29:39] Yes. I think that’s exactly right.
Sarah [00:29:39] They’re too high. That’s what I say about church. I’m like with my congregation, people piss me off all the time. Not that I think they’re bad people, but I’m like they’re different from me. They see the world differently. And so sometimes I push back against theirs and sometimes they push back against mine. Because to me what’s so hard to realize-- one of my favorite lines was in the finding ourselves at the end. Listen, I’m not going to read the whole second to last paragraph. I believe it to be a gospel text. I posted on Substack. My favorite line in the whole paragraph is, “We are not simply ends in ourselves.” You know why? Because that’s exhausting. It’s exhausting. We think we want to be. We think we want to be because that what our individualistic culture tells us. Is that we are the end in ourselves, but that is a shitty existence. It’s freeing to be like I don’t have to figure it out all myself. I can just take advice. I can try to follow a rule. I can just stay married and not have to find the perfect solution to my individual relationships. I can just try to shine it on and see how that works because other people have shined it on. You know what I mean? I think about all the time in The 12 Steps, the myth of uniqueness or whatever it is. It’s such a burden. It’s a burden, this approach to individualism, to think every problem has some special key you have to figure out. Or some special product you have to buy, which is really where a lot of I think this narrative comes in. And it sucks. I was not sad to let it go at certain times in my life. It’s a constant process of letting go. I don’t have to control it. I don’t have to fix it. I don’t have to figure it out. I don ‘t have intellectualize it all by myself for every individual problem I have.
Beth [00:31:34] Yeah. It is, I think, really freeing to read this and just say some of the things that I do, I just do because that’s what my parents did. That’s what my people do. That’s what my community did. I think about the pressure and I don’t want to say this in a way that is more controversial than I mean it. But there is such a pressure around every conversation because of the internet to be like inclusive of every culture and perspective in everything. It’s a criticism that we get sometimes, and I have always, to an extent, felt like we are going to sound like two white ladies from Kentucky because that’s what we are and that’s all we can be. These are my experiences. I’ve saw criticism to this book in the chat, which I think are valid, that they are mostly focused on middle-class people for sure, probably upper-middle-class, probably mostly white people. There’s not a lot of cultural diversity in the subjects that they’ve told us about, other than that they live in very different parts of the country. And I’m just kind of like, yeah, because not everything can be everything, but this is still a life experience worth probing. That’s where I come out. And all other experiences are worth probing too. They just can’t all be probed in the same place. I’m finding some freedom in that piece of acknowledging and calling out the impact of therapeutic culture on me.
Sarah [00:32:52] I totally agree. That can feel so burdensome. And I think it is limiting. And I thing what they’re telling us is that sense that every individual experience needs to be articulated, makes us feel more lonely. There’s a part in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, The Message, where he is talking about writing about race and the position that a lot of people take that Black writers shouldn’t have to translate to white audiences. And he says, “What has been surprising, pleasantly so, is that there really is no translation needed. That going deeper actually reveals the human. Get to the general through the specifics as the rule goes. Still, even as I have come to understand this, it feels abstract to me.” And when I read that, you can hear me tearing up now, I wept because I have such enormous respect for him especially on issues of race. And to hear someone say you as a white person, I can speak to you and get you to a place of understanding. There is general experiences that can be realized through this specific. Like we can love each other, we can empathize with each other. We don’t have to be stuck on our separate islands of experience. And I think there’s a moment where Brené Brown talks about this. Like you might not understand this particular trauma I went through, but you understand the effects of trauma. That it can make you feel lonely and shameful and ignored. You might not understand the specifics of my marriage, but we can talk about the desire for connection and the important sense of obligation that can keep you going in hard moments through lots of different types of relationship. I think that’s so beautiful. That’s what we’re trying to do. I think we took a turn through this individualistic lens that the most important pursuit is the specific articulation of every individual experience. And I think the reason this book is speaking to me is saying, no, no, no. The pursuit is speaking to the general, finding the universal so that we can all see ourselves in this.
Beth [00:35:21] And I very profoundly felt their definition of friendship. The idea that it takes three components. We enjoy each other’s company and we are useful to each other and we share a commitment to common good. That just really helped me better understand the relationships in my life that work well and the relationships that feel like something less than friendship. That still feel like relationship, but feel like something less than friendship. I have a friend who I have known for a relatively short period of time, who I’ve just become very, very close to. And this gave me language for that. I realized, oh, it’s because we have all three of these things. And so many of my friendships have really been built on we enjoy each other’s company plus proximity. So that when proximity is gone, you can find new people that you also enjoy their company. But when you have all three of those legs of the stool, it is solid, and it balances and it’s different. And I really loved teasing that out here.
Sarah [00:36:39] Okay, I want to ask you a question. They got into a little godly play space. Makes us wonder if psychological sophistication has not been bought at the price of moral impoverishment.
Beth [00:36:55] I highlighted that as well and flagged it.
Sarah [00:36:57] I wrote, wow. I don’t really wonder. I think my answer is yes. I don’t think it’s new to say that our Emphasis on the enlightenment was not going to, or did not, unshackle us from the burden of humanity, ultimately, right? They are a lot empty promises that whole enlightenment situation. And I think the therapeutic culture is just a manifestation of that. We’ll just figure out enough, and then we’ll be free. We’ll think our way through. We’ll figure out the right answer and solution, and then we’ll apply it to everybody and then we’ll find freedom.
Beth [00:37:41] I think it was Lindsay who in our Subsstack chat said that she’s reading this and wishing they would just be like, okay, now here’s the answer. And I really related to that. Like when I read, I was like, Lindsay, yes, this is how I feel about this book too. Because especially in this part they do a beautiful job of saying it was important in our evolution to break free of some of that morality, because that morality became a tool of oppression. It became so stifling for people. It did not allow for--
Sarah [00:38:09] Magdalene Laundries, anyone? Listen, you don’t have to look far.
Beth [00:38:13] It did not allow for the breadth of human experience. And we are impoverished as a culture when we are contained the way that some of that morality contains us. And this is where I’d love to sit down and talk with them today. Therapeutic culture becomes its own morality too, and has all of those same risks, and has also been stifling in so many ways, and has shut down our relationships with each other. And so I think the balance is what we’re looking for somewhere, and maybe we just never get to find it. We just always keep pursuing it. And maybe we need to build our habits of the heart around things that help us keep pursuing the balance here.
Sarah [00:38:57] So the last chapter is on individualism.
Beth [00:39:00] We go back to Tocqueville.
Sarah [00:39:02] The ambiguities of individualism. I love a pop culture breakdown. I think pop culture is our true eternal language worthy of interpretation. And I thought the stuff about cowboys like they only save the group because they’re outside the group. It is if the myth says you can be a truly good person worthy of admiration and love only if you resist fully joining the group.
Beth [00:39:24] Cowboys and detectives, man. I liked both of those examples so much.
Sarah [00:39:28] It’s so true. And then they really get into the government of it all, the democracy of it all. This is where I was like, oh no, we’ve hit storm before the calm. A bureaucratic individualism in which the consent of the governed, the first demand of modern enlightened individualism has been abandoned in all but form, illustrates the tendency of individualism to destroy its own conditions. I think that’s what happened. I think we have consent of the governed in all but form. Has been abandoned in all but form
Beth [00:40:04] So I read this and then soon after listened to an episode of the Ezra Klein podcast so you can all take a drink because we have brought him up in this episode, I was listening to him talk to two critics for different reasons of his book Abundance. And there was just so much conversation about Europe in that discussion. And I found myself, me, therapeutic Beth, found myself thinking If you like Europe so much, why don’t you go? Because we are not Europe. And a lot of what I took from this chapter is like, look, it is so deep in American culture that you make your own way, that we got here and that life and the country and the economy are vast frontiers to be explored and conquered. And yes, that has had some real downsides and some real upsides, but probably we’re not going to unwire ourselves from it.
Sarah [00:41:04] Look, we were just never serfs or peasants. That changes shit.
Beth [00:41:09] It changes everything.
Sarah [00:41:09] I’m reading War and Peace right now. It changes shit when you’re just that everything wasn’t built on a foundation of the way you were born defines who you are for the end of time. You’re a serf, you’re a peasant, end of story. And I think that there are complicating factors in American history, like of course slavery, in which how you were borne did define who you were. And we didn’t escape all limitations of status or social standing. Obviously, we did not, but it’s just different. I just think it’s different.
Beth [00:41:45] Well, and look, it is transcendently different too because immigrant populations, recent immigrants who come here, come for this aspect. you want to hear a sermon on hard work, you talk to someone who has recently immigrated to this country.
Sarah [00:42:03] But also bringing within the history of countries that did have that sort of history or did have or still does have a caste system. That’s the other super complicating fact about American individualism.
Beth [00:42:16] But bringing it in the context of explicitly rejecting it for this. So we keep compounding, even as we learn the lessons of the places where this was horrible, where it led to enslavement, where it lead to the displacement of indigenous people. Like so many places where we have done so wrong because of this, we still keep growing the sense that there’s something right and good about it too. And I read this chapter and I thought, you know what, this just makes me feel free to take it as a neutral. To just say this is just what our culture is. And as much as I might think there’s something better out there or something we could learn from out there, to do good policy, to restore some trust in our systems, to build systems capable of meeting the moment, maybe we just have to take this as a neutral and accept it for what it is and figure out what that means in the context of trying to do things together.
Sarah [00:43:11] Well, and I think we also just see America as an individual and we put all that individualism on the country itself. Like we need to make some final judgment on whether it’s good or bad and whether it failed or succeed or whether it was trying hard enough. And it’s like is that working?
Beth [00:43:26] It’s just a place.
Sarah [00:43:28] It’s just a place. It’s just a country. It’s lot of people at once. And I do think Europeans and definitely in my experience of Japan the country is a we, not an I. And I think that’s one of the big ways America is different. We kind of see the countries and I, even though the whole time we’re like the we. I love that they talk about like we are articulating this individualism and also it’s so ambiguous because the whole we’re also articulating we need each other. You don’t read a write-up of Trump right now in his first hundred days without somebody talking about how we’re still divided and they don’t want us to be divided anymore. Like some man on the street interview. You don’t got to turn half a circle to find somebody ready to say that. So it’s complicated.
Beth [00:44:08] It’s complicated. And, look, I am inherently contradictory about this. Two things that drive me crazy in politics right now, anything that feels like I alone can fix it, I hate that. Hate that. At the same time, I also do not like candidates who speak of themselves as we. Our campaign, we’re doing this, we are running because. No, you’re running.
Sarah [00:44:30] That’s a real pickle! How do you want him to say.
Beth [00:44:32] I know. It is a real pickle, right? But this book helps me see that, like, that comes from something. That is the pickle. That is a pickle of American life right there. We want people to take responsibility for themselves and act with agency, and we also want to be bonded to one another.
Sarah [00:44:51] I love it here.
Beth [00:44:52] I do, too. I wouldn’t take it a different way.
Sarah [00:44:55] I love what a hot individualized mess we are. It’s my favorite. I love America when she’s a hot mess most of all. This is the truth.
Beth [00:45:03] And that’s where I come out on the questions presented about love and marriage and friendship and community service and civic organizations that we didn’t even get to like is everything we do actually selfish?
Sarah [00:45:16] No, of course it’s not.
Beth [00:45:17] I think it’s not, but I think there’s some fair questions raised there. But where I came out is like, yeah, it’s a pickle. And it’s both things always, but gosh, when you just articulate the pickle, it’s amazing the amount of success that we have in it.
Sarah [00:45:33] Well, we’re about to get into it in part two. Part two is public life.
Beth [00:45:39] Let’s go.
Sarah [00:45:39] Getting involved, citizenship, religion, the national society. I’m excited.
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