Praxis Reads // Two Ways to Build, Spring 2020
Exploring the books and articles capturing our attention during the “winter” of coronavirus.
Though now vacant, Praxis HQ is almost always buzzing with activity and conversation. As with many other workplaces, the office is not simply the place for getting work done; it is also the place where our team debates the merits of competing trend diets, swaps podcast recommendations, plays practical jokes on our more gullible members, and shares successes and failures in the kitchen. (Who knew you could put mozzarella on kimchi fried rice?)
At the risk of extreme understatement, our circumstances have changed. In this strange new normal, our team has grown accustomed to seeing both more and less of each other. Shared lunches are on pause, but through the magical powers of Zoom we all now know what each other’s kitchens look like.
One big part of what has held us together while we cannot be proximate is the willingness to share the passion projects, think pieces, and poems that are sustaining us. As Saint Augustine so clearly taught us, any society, however big or small, is bound together by “common objects of love,” and while our circumstances are certainly new, our interests and loves remain largely unchanged.
We’ve also found ourselves paying sustained attention to pieces with the particular capacity to surprise, sustain, nourish, inform, or point us forward. This edition of Praxis Reads celebrates a sample of those.
A great discussion has been sparked by the somewhat speculative piece from Derek Thompson called “The Pandemic Will Change American Retail Forever.” As we hope you know, we’ve spent a great deal of effort to give our best sense of the challenges organizational leaders face in the coming months and years (and you can read it all here), but what could happen to the streetscapes of the cities we inhabit? In Thompson’s view:
We are entering a new evolutionary stage of retail, in which big companies will get bigger, many mom-and-pop dreams will burst, chains will proliferate and flatten the idiosyncrasies of many neighborhoods, more economic activity will flow into e-commerce, and restaurants will undergo a transformation unlike anything the industry has experienced since Prohibition.
Thompson suggests that after closures will come a period of consolidation, followed by the possibility of a new kind of urban creativity. At the center of that new economic order is what Thompson calls the “all-delivery economy” wherein the general population’s hesitation to return to densely populated spaces — restaurants, shops, movie theaters, music venues, etc. — will put added pressure on retailers to bring their goods and services to customers’ homes. One byproduct of this will be a rapid acceleration of pre-existing trends in the low-skill job market. As Thompson notes, “Instacart is currently seeking to add 300,000 contract workers in the next three months — more than the total anticipated new hires by Amazon, CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens combined … ” From this data point alone, it is not hard to see a coming fracture between those able to #staysafe at home and those whose livelihoods will require substantial risk.
Given our mission to support the work of redemptive entrepreneurs, it is not surprising that Marc Andreessen’s punchy and provocative piece, “It’s Time to Build,” piqued our interest. What it lacks in narrative cohesion it more than makes up for in entrepreneurial mojo. Beginning from the basic (and undeniable) premise that we’ve found ourselves woefully unprepared to combat this pandemic, Andreessen calls the entrepreneurial community to double down on its basic commitments. As he puts it:
The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.
While there’s much to admire in his enthusiasm given that we share in the business of building, Andreessen’s call to build brought to mind a similar call from Yuval Levin. While the title of Levin’s book, A Time to Build, is so close to the title Andreessen gave his post that it is hard to see it as accidental, when we pay attention to Levin’s full title, the points of tension between the two manifestos come into focus. Published as A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream, Levin’s dispute with the worldview Andreessen’s post represents is fundamental. At a very basic level, Levin is an unapologetic institutionalist, and as William Galston rightly notes in his review for the Washington Post, Levin sees the history of the world not as a series of innovations or companies, but as the rise and fall of institutions intended to form an individual’s character.
Hence, while Levin and Andreessen both see our moment as one for building, their points of emphasis differ greatly. Where Andreessen sees a great deal of creative energy that needs to be marshaled and directed towards solving pressing problems, Levin sees institutions suffering not only from a lack of investment but from a basic misunderstanding in purpose. Many of us, much of the time, see our institutions less as occasions for formation — what he calls “molds” — and more as platforms for self-realization or even self-promotion. At the heart of our commitment to redemptive entrepreneurship is a desire to do both — to build, surely, but to build for formation.
And what should we be forming people towards?
Two pieces by C. Kavin Rowe of Duke Divinity School have stuck with us over recent weeks. The first, an essay called “Christianity’s Surprise,” surveys how the earliest Christians learned to both narrate the world and consider their neighbors afresh in light of a new story — of a God creating, sustaining, and redeeming the world in Jesus Christ. The early church, as Rowe has it, “surprised the world by developing enduring, structured forms of life that both embodied and broadcast their story and what it required of them to live it.”
What has made Rowe’s claims about the revolutionary power of the early church stick is the substance of his remarkable op-ed in The Wall Street Journal a week later. Published under the anemic headline of “Dying Gives Us a Chance to Confront Truth,” Rowe vividly describes how being confronted with our own mortality can, if used well, form us into better people. And he comes by it honest: Rowe has been caring for his ill wife (now in hospice) for some time. He concludes:
When we accept the truth about our mortality, we can also experience remarkable freedom: to take the time to say “I love you”; to stop nursing resentments, thinking that forgiveness can always wait for another day; to cease pretending that little annoying things matter so much; to pick up our heads and look at the beauty of the world; to examine our beliefs about what really, really counts in life; to mend relationships; and, for those who’ve never tried it before, even to pray.
Rowe points to one of the strange mercies of these days. Surely, as he indicates elsewhere, there is no sanity in giving thanks for a global pandemic, particularly as it destroys both life and livelihood wherever it roams. The only reasonable response to such devastation is grief and lament. And yet, for many of us, these days are not only marked by the features of our everyday lives that are no longer available to us. Real as those are, so too are the serendipitous opportunities we now have to give ourselves anew to the things that provoke, reassure, and sustain. And if we do so, perhaps we’ll find, with Christian Wiman, that survival is a style.
