A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar
Mixing a cocktail of philosophy, theology, and spirituality.
We're a pastor and a philosopher who have discovered that sometimes pastors need philosophy, and sometimes philosophers need pastors. We tackle topics and interview guests that straddle the divide between our interests.
Who we are:
Randy Knie (Co-Host) - Randy is the founding and Lead Pastor of Brew City Church in Milwaukee, WI. Randy loves his family, the Church, cooking, and the sound of his own voice. He drinks boring pilsners.
Kyle Whitaker (Co-Host) - Kyle is a philosophy PhD and an expert in disagreement and philosophy of religion. Kyle loves his wife, sarcasm, kindness, and making fun of pop psychology. He drinks childish slushy beers.
Elliot Lund (Producer) - Elliot is a recovering fundamentalist. His favorite people are his wife and three boys, and his favorite things are computers and hamburgers. Elliot loves mixing with a variety of ingredients, including rye, compression, EQ, and bitters.
A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar
Miroslav Volf: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse
Is the drive to be better than others making us worse? We talk with theologian Miroslav Volf about his book The Cost of Ambition and explore why comparison-based striving saturates our schools, churches, workplaces, and politics. Volf separates healthy aspiration from superiority-seeking and makes a compelling case for excellence without domination, rooted in agape, i.e., unconditional love that affirms people beyond performance.
We dig into the Christ hymn of Philippians 2 and why self-emptying is not weakness but a different kind of strength. Volf shows how resurrection and ascension empower humility rather than feed triumphalism and why honoring everyone is both a spiritual discipline and a democratic necessity. From the academy’s “one-up” culture to the marketplace’s imitation traps, he argues that obsessing over competitors blinds us to our unique gifts and corrodes joy. Even stalwart capitalists like Warren Buffett warn against competitor-fixation. Volf adds a deeper moral and theological critique as well, drawing on Paul’s piercing question: What do you have that you did not receive?
We also test his claims against Nietzsche’s will to power, happiness research on social comparison, and the rise of Christian nationalism. Is Christ a moral stranger to our priorities? Volf challenges both sides of the aisle to recover mere humanity—Kierkegaard’s vision of belovedness before achievement—and to practice agape toward others and ourselves. The result is a bracing, hopeful vision: strive for truth, craft, and contribution, not for status; pursue excellence as stewardship, not self-exaltation.
If you’re weary of the status treadmill yet still hungry to do meaningful work, this conversation will give you categories, language, and practices to recalibrate your aims. Listen, reflect, and share with someone who needs a healthier way to win. If the episode resonates, subscribe, leave a review, and let us know your thoughts.
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Cheers!
I'm Randy, the pastor half of the podcast, and my friend Kyle's a philosopher. This podcast hosts conversations at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and spirituality.
Kyle:We also invite experts to join us, making public a space that we've often enjoyed off-air around the proverbial table with a good drink in the back corner of a dark pub.
Randy:Thanks for joining us, and welcome to a pastor and a philosopher walk into a bar. Miroslav Wolf is a name within the church and within theology that um is is a name that needs no introduction. His his book, Exclusion and Embrace, is um one of the like the great classic, modern classics, I would say. Would you agree within theology?
Kyle:Certainly, yeah, it certainly has that stature.
Randy:Yeah, and um Miroslav wrote a book called The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse. And um, to be honest with you, when I saw that on the list of you know one of my favorite publishers, Brazos Press, um, I was shocked. First of all, that Miroslav Wolf is publishing a kind of a pop culture, you know, Christian book, but also that he's talking about this. And I get get to this in the beginning of our interview, but it was intriguing to me. And then as soon as you read the book, you realize he is brilliant, and this stuff is um, this is kind of like written into the fabric of our culture and our way of being in ways that many of us don't really even understand or care to pay attention to.
Kyle:Yeah, that's right. And of course, he brings a lot of uh material, a lot of background knowledge, a lot of deep analysis of certain thinkers into it as well. It wouldn't be one of his books if he didn't. So um, yeah, it's it's it's intriguing, it's relevant to all of our lives, um, and it's also very informed and insightful as you would expect from him. Um, I'd only previously read one of his books, and so was not familiar, super familiar with the breadth of his work. And so this was kind of, and that was a long time ago. So this is kind of like a um a refresher and also an introduction uh for me. And he's delightful to talk to and super insightful, and was very happy to have me play devil's advocate and get into the weeds a little bit on some some philosophical issues, because this is one of those books where this is a rare experience for me. I agree with 95% of it. And the 5% is like stuff that I don't know anything about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if you're a Christian, as he says in the conversation, this is kind of given, and yet why isn't it given? Like for most of us, right? I mean, his thesis is that we ought not to be striving for superiority over others. As you state it kind of simply, that's a wrong thing to do. Uh, and yet, you know, there's a whole book about it, and there's a reason that there's a whole book about it. So fascinating conversation, a topic that I would not have expected to talk to somebody about, much less a theologian of his stature, but really fun.
Randy:Absolutely. Well, Dr. Mirzlav Wolf, thank you so much for joining us on a pastor and a philosopher walking to a bar.
Miroslav:Uh excellent. I I've never been to a bar with a pastor and a philosopher. I've been with pastors and I've been philosophers, but never together.
Randy:Well, here we are, in a theologian. We we should change the name of the podcast.
Miroslav:Right there.
Randy:So, Miroslav, um, when I first came across this book, to be honest with you, my first question was of all the things Miroslav Wolf could write, why is he writing about ambition and superiority? I it it it was a bit of a mystery to me. And then I read the book and it all started making sense. It's particularly of the idea of laying down our our own obsession with superiority and holding on to a sense of humility. It's all over the scriptures, especially when it's kind of one of those things that when you actually see it in plain sight, you realize that you've been looking at it all along, but really never realized it. So, what drove you to write this book? What was that process like?
Miroslav:Well, I I think it was um a personal experience as experiences uh teaching, um, observing um uh the culture uh which made me uh kind of puzzled uh about this idea that we strive for superiority and that there is uh implicit ideology that this is how progress in the world is uh actually uh achieved in various domains of life. And there's very little reflection about the attendant problems of precisely that striving for superiority in all domains of life, from education and education from uh uh from cradle almost all the way to through PhD and beyond uh in sports, obviously, in arts, uh in economy, in politics, it is just about uh everywhere. And you can't find a domain where you don't find it, and then in our private uh imagination, uh obviously. And that got me then uh then going because I saw the negative sides and haven't seen uh those actually addressed. Whereas in previous centuries, these have been thematized and reflected upon.
Kyle:Can I ask real quick? So I was gonna put the question, who is this book for? Which you just kind of uh started into, so I'm gonna skip right to it. Um I I I hear all the things you're saying about that being pervasive in culture, and that's undeniable. But I I don't think I've ever encountered anybody seriously defending the idea that striving for superiority, superiority over others is a good thing outside of like niche you know intellectual circles. So I always interpret that. I have this thing where maybe sometimes I interpret too charitably, but I always interpret, uh, unless you're like, you know, a certain kind of politician or economist or something, I generally interpret that kind of thing as we all know deep down that we're not actually trying to like win over in some significant sense that other person. We just participate in these kinds of structures and we do it in some in some ways with like higher ideals in mind or something like that. But you seem to think that this this is actually a more pervasive foundational thing that actually needs a serious critique. Where why am I wrong about people not really buying into this?
Miroslav:Um I I don't think we're sufficiently reflecting about it. Uh I think I would argue uh that the practice is ubiquitous. Right. Uh in I have particular so the example that I give, uh I'm I'm in Chicago Airport and I'm walking uh from terminal B to terminal C. I'm going underground uh there through this uh through this passage uhway. Uh and there are 60 stairs to go down, and there are 60 stairs uh to go up, and I decide I'm going to climb those stairs uh and carry my little whatever I have. And then I start feeling superior to the folks who are using uh escalators uh and think, oh, I'm a better specimen of humanity. And that's just the ordinary everyday experience which is there. Uh but if you uh if you uh practice it consistently in domains like education, which uh which I experience, uh it is extraordinarily conducive to creating a self-loathing, uh and self-loathing that then uh very quickly morphs into depression. Um, if one thinks that depression is the malady of uh sense of inadequacy, uh and the kind of sense of I need to be better, uh, of which the flip side is I'm not good enough. Uh, and that flip side gets consistently confirmed because there's always somebody in the in my group, uh, and and uh often often more than just somebody who proves me to be inferior, and therefore I'm constantly climbing. And for all the climbing, I'm staying in one and the same place. Although this is precisely what was supposed to me uh to to bring me uh uh up into the higher realms. Right.
Kyle:Yeah, there we talked to Willie James Jennings about this back in the day, about this culture in education specifically, of um it's almost like in the production of knowledge and expertise, there is this battleground and there's a kind of survival of the fittest kind of thing. And I have to not just stake my claim but stake it better than you did and prove myself. And when you add, you know, professional pressure to get a job and publish, it just makes all that worse. He had his own take about a different way it could be. Why do you think do you think there's anything intrinsic to the educational process or the formation of expertise that makes that kind of um posture, that aggressive posture necessary? Or is there a better way to do that?
Miroslav:Uh I I don't think it's necessary, and you can you can run in varieties of uh of domains. I think that um I want to distinguish what I'm trying to argue um uh uh uh uh in terms of striving. Uh striving as such, I don't have problems, even ambition and such, I mean maybe we can talk a little bit about the character of ambition. Even that I don't have problem uh as such. It's particular form uh of striving that I have a problem with, and namely striving to be, have ambition to be better than somebody else. So where the somebody else is always uh the measure of my own uh achievement and measure not just of my achievement, but measure of my self-worth. So indexing the idea of who I am uh to the idea of uh comparative uh performance strikes me as uh as the most problematic, and it strikes me as something that can be avoided. There are examples in uh the top levels of sport where it's uh avoided. There are examples in all domains of life where people have actually uh made it their spiritual practice uh not to strive for superiority. Indeed, there are domains in economics like Warren Buffett, who is not just making it matter of spiritual practice, but who is arguing that actually you don't perform as well if you uh index your performance to somebody else and tries to adjust, which you say you imitate others and therefore might not be acting out of your own uh your own strength. So um I think it's it's possible, but structures are also built in such a way that it makes that they make it difficult. So, my one of my goals is kind of push a little bit to ask that question and then see what we might do in order to release much more fruitful ways of excelling in things uh and uh being uh at one with my ourselves.
Kyle:Let me give a quick disclaimer. I'm the philosophy half of the podcast, and that means that part of my role is to um be provocative and ask hard questions. But it turns out that I agree almost entirely with everything in your book, and that almost never happens on our show. Um and so I feel a little bit uh obligated to take up a sort of devil's advocate position at certain points. So if you find me doing that, it's not necessarily something I'm actually uh convicted about or committed to. I just want to make sure that the the the strongest objections are getting aired because I know that you have responses to some of them. So that may come up in the future.
Miroslav:I I I know I I know philosophers, uh, and actually I've been trained actually, uh theology and philosophy. I uh I did in parallel my doctoral dissertation, is is also philosophical and theological. So I I know your tribe, I love your tribe.
Kyle:Wonderful, wonderful. Um, and I know you can handle it. So Nietzsche's gonna come up a lot in this conversation. That's what I'm what I'm saying. Sounds good. Quickly about what you were just saying, though. What about in like specifically dialectical contexts? And this is really related to my philosophical context as well. Um, so where it's not zero sum, but like making progress as we define progress is kind of at the expense of at least another point of view, and but usually the person making that point of view, because the point of view is defined by its strongest proponent. Um, so and I've seen this a lot in theology as well. And for a long time, those weren't really separated fields. So what about a situation like that, which is a large part of academia, where I don't I don't have any feelings about you as a person? In fact, uh, for a long time, the tradition is if any of that stuff comes into the conversation, we've stopped doing the academic thing. We're not doing something entirely different and we've missed the point. Let's put that aside and get back to this. But of course, it's not really possible to separate that in practice or in lived experience. But there is this sense that there's this specific thing that we're doing, and some kind of one-upsmanship is a part of just the process of dialectic itself. What do you think about that?
Miroslav:Well, I uh uh yes, uh I would I would agree with that uh to a certain certain degree. But the question is um the the one uh upmanship uh is one upmanship in what in service of what is one upmanship? So so most sturdy my most sturdy opposition is making superiority the chief of the values that we might have in any given situation. And of course, there are only extreme characters who do that, but but there are such uh such characters. Um and I think they're also the most uh most uh difficult when there are no other um values at stake, which is to say where the the very performance uh as in sports defines what excellence means. Uh in the context of uh debates uh in philosophy or in theology, I would hope that isn't the case. Uh something like um uh commitment to truth uh uh is essential, I think, for those kinds of uh those kinds of discussions. So the fact that I've either won or lost is kind of irrelevant. What matters is that we both agree that uh that that the gain in truthfulness is what we are what we are about. And I think there are other domains in which that is the case, meaning uh to say we pursue excellence, we we don't pursue simply being better than uh than others. And there are also in philosophical traditions, so kind of uh just think of it, uh you can you can have rhetorical wins, right? And uh the tradition all the way since Plato uh has pushed against against that idea. So so uh that seems to me, uh seems to me right. It may not always be easy to draw the distinctions, uh, and we need to be attuned to it, we need to be sensitive to it. And part of the reason for writing is precisely to have that into uh attunement.
Randy:So, Miroslav, as as the as a pastoral half of the podcast, I'm concerned with how this stuff works out and is lived in in the life of the church. Um, and as you read your book, The Cost of Ambition, it becomes really, really clear to me at least that so much of the American church, and I'm putting that very specifically in the American church, um you see so little of this. So I would love to just uh go into just a few of these huge uh uh theological realities that we we believe in as the church. And I just wanted to hear from you how should these things shape our life as Christians, as Christ followers as the church? Something like, I mean, you you spend so much time going into the Karman Christie, right? The Paul's Christ hymn in Philippians 2, talking about how Christ emptied himself and you know didn't want to claim equality with God, something to be grasped, but let go of all of that and be was humiliated and humbled into this state of a slave and even to death on the cross. That famous Philippians 2 passage. How should the incarnation shape the life of individual Christians and the church in at large? What what part does the incarnation play?
Miroslav:Well, it seems to me that um for Christians it should be just given that Jesus Christ is what Charles Taylor, to invoke a philosopher, would call the hyper good. That is to say, that good which uh is a criterion uh of all other goods and which organizes all other subordinate goods that we that we uh that we embrace. And if that is the case, then it seems to me that the life of Christ and teaching uh of Christ ought to be the measure of what we what we do. Indeed, that Christ is in an important sense a measure of our humanity, and that it is in fact, I would say not a moral simply question, but a deeply spiritual question, because I think that the relationship between human beings and Christ in the Christian tradition is not simply a moral one. I see something and I emulate uh that, uh, and that has a moral claim on me, but rather that there's something, uh, if you want to put it mystical about it, that there is a there is a and that's very clear in Paul, that there's kind of indwelling of Christ, Christ present in me, so that the life of Christ as Christ lived it ought to be the life that is lived uh in me and through me uh in the world. And in that sense, uh I really do take this uh this serious, and to me, that's the main criterion, and hence uh Carmen Christie plays a role, not just uh foundational role in these chapter two chapters on Apostle Paul. Interestingly enough, uh, it structures also the great poem, two great uh poems of uh John Milton, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. And it was very significant for a philosopher for uh for Kierkegaard. At the same time, I would say this is not the only uh doctrine, this is not the only uh thing that we keep in mind. And Apostle Paul is wonderful when he talks about the nature of creation, and almost like a like a spirituality is developed out of the doctrine of creation, both uh out of the doctrine of salvation and of creation. And I find this extraordinary so that all of Christian doctrines actually uh inform the kinds of attitude, the kinds of stance toward oneself, toward others that I try to advocate for in this book.
Randy:Yeah, thank you. It's easy, it's it's easier to understand the incarnation and the crucifixion as informing the the shape of the Christian life and what that should look like in regards to this book in particular, in regards to laying down our our obsession for superiority. But the resurrection and the ascension are almost feel like the opposite, where it's this triumphal, victorious. We don't like Good Friday very much, you know, a Yale philosopher. Who did we talk to, Kyle?
Miroslav:Oh, that was uh Keith DeRose. Oh, my uh you you're you're naming all my friends, you know. Keith Keith is I I we we Keith and I have regular Saturday uh afternoon uh or late afternoon uh dinner together.
Randy:Well, tell him hi for us, please. I will.
Miroslav:I definitely will. I love Keith.
Randy:He calls himself a Good Friday Christian more than an Easter Christian. He identifies more with Good Friday than Easter. And I think in regards to your book, that makes sense. So how would you how would you hold and frame the resurrection, the ascension? Two things that we Christians feel really good about championing and worshiping and holding up, how might that fit within this paradigm of laying down our ideas of superiority? Is it in the universality of the resurrection of the ascension? Help us up.
Miroslav:Well, I mean, if you think of yourself as uh as a good Friday Christian, then you have also the foundation for thinking yourself as a resurrection Christian. If you don't have a Good Friday, resurrection stuff ends up being just a boosting of the power that I have, right? So I'm gonna fly. Or ascension ends up being, right? Oh, we're gonna fly up into that uh sphere. Or we we we we we we're filled with this uh new liveliness, right? And and the victory is there. But I think it's very important in the in the Christian tradition to combine uh uh exactly this. It's uh ash and cross on our forehead, uh uh, and we don't say hallelujah until the resurrection comes, and then we say the same people who had ash and cross on on their forehead, they say hallelujah uh on the Easter, uh Easter Sunday. And I think that's that's uh that has that has not only it's not a matter of church calendar, but but the cross is the cross of unconditional love, and the resurrection is precisely promised to the Christ-like life, to the life that has been uh that is bound uh with Christ. And uh in the just maybe one thing to add, uh so when I when I speak about um uh not striving for superiority, but holding others to be more important than ourselves, I'm speaking here of our agapic love for others. But I want to argue, and maybe we can talk about that too, and I mentioned that in the in in the book, but though it isn't highly emphasized, I think that we can have, we ought to have agapic kind of love toward ourselves. Indeed, I find that this agapic love toward ourselves is really the key to the whole uh process, that we don't love ourselves only on the basis of performance that we have uh achieved. There's something worth loving, therefore I love myself. I love myself just because I am, right? And this loving myself and loving the other because they are, because I am, that seems to me fundamental in the Christian uh Christian life and holds together this both this idea of giving preference uh to others often, not striving to be better than them, uh, and the the sense that I am too uh worthy of just such love from others, worthy in a in a sense of uh in a sense of uh my sheer being and to be loved in just such a way, both by others and by myself.
Randy:Yes, very good, thank you. Let me this reminds me of what I I really enjoyed your kind of fleshing out Kierkegaard's idea of mere humanity. Um this idea that our humanity is just something that is glorious, doesn't need to be added to. Could you flesh that out a little bit? It reminds me a little bit of C.S. Lewis, but I love this idea of mere humanity and the glory of it.
Miroslav:So we always think that we need to kind of spruce ourselves up, uh, get ourselves ready to face uh ourselves in the mirror in the morning and uh all also the world, so that there could be admiring looks, uh, my admiring looks of myself in the mirror, others admiring looks, they they they kind of mirror the hope for uh admiring looks of others upon me when I face uh face the the the world. And so we we seek to impress and we live uh uh because we think that we have this life in the imagination of uh of others, and so uh that creates a certain kind of uh kind of kind of tension uh in us. And the beauty of this idea of beauty of the mere humanity is that I am uh loved, I am uh affirmed in that, and that has greater value than anything I can make out of myself at with with myself. For the for for you listeners who are uh who are readers of Newman's uh work, you have uh this idea of Christ being declared as beloved at the baptism before he has done anything yet, right? So so these belovedness uh seems to me fundamental in the Christian uh Christian tradition, and I think that's what Kierkegaard wants to articulate in this mere humanity, unadorned um uh humanity that simply is and it's beautiful.
Kyle:Is that how you understand what agape is? If you had to give a quick definition, what would it be?
Miroslav:Uh you're loved unconditionally. Agape, I would say it's unconditional love. I try to differentiate, you know, that there are these different loves and there are many typologies. Uh they all have their own pluses, and uh, some of them they have have minuses. Uh, this is not exhaustive, but I I think uh I think of love as being on the one level epitumic. Love is simply desire. I love um flowerless chocolate cake. Uh and the goal uh of this love and the entire purpose of this love to devour this thing uh or simply have it uh in in kind of a Picurean way uh uh melt in my mouth and I uh I enjoy it. There's also Eros, uh so one is epithumia, desire, eros. Eros is uh love that that kind of recognizes certain kind of worth in uh in the thing, sort of recognition of worth. And it's a pro first love is appropriate love for many in many domains. Second uh kind is appropriate, I think, uh, as well. But agapic love doesn't uh seek to satisfy uh primarily a desire, doesn't simply recognize a worth, but in fact affirms the other, uh in some sense bestow the worth on the other or recognizes that other qua other uh is appropriately object of love. And even that, as uh Dostoevsky's Zosima says so so so well, even deserves quote unquote uh more love when their life has been uh uh twisted in certain ways, when they become captive to something that destroys, that doesn't uh that makes them ugly. It's a mode of releasing someone into their uh freedom of uh delight in their mere humanity.
Randy:Uh Miroslav, I'm gonna ask you one more question, kind of a major one about the church and what's happening now in the church, and then I'm gonna let Kyle do his devil advocate thing for the rest of our conversation. So as as I read your book, um the the tragedy, the irony of whatever you want to say is that the reality is that about 80%, give or take, of the American church, particularly American evangelicals, voted, whether it's 2016, 2020, or 2024, for a person, our president, who seems to value superiority in competition higher than just about anybody I can imagine, right? Like, I mean, make America great again is what the whole platform is is is founded on, and this idea of Christian nationalism and America first. Um it seems like we're being brainwashed and programmed to swim in the waters of superiority, whether it be for us as a nation, us as a church, and the church has just gobbled this up, and it seems like loves this message of superiority and us over and against others, whether it be ethnicities and nationalities, whatever. Within that backdrop of what's happening, I mean, first of all, did you write it first in some ways because of the as a response to that? And if whether or not you did, how do we begin to take apart and disassemble this obsession with superiority that's coming from the top of our culture on down?
Miroslav:Yes, I have written it with clear uh awareness of that uh reality of uh the political life in uh United States, not just in the United States. States, many other places, but certainly here it is pronounced, and of the captivity of the church to that and uh inability to recognize the problematic nature of um of such striving for for superiority, how deeply destructive uh it is. And um you can see the political dimensions uh expressed there in spiritual way, but uh but they're they're kind of political dimension expressed in uh in Milton's uh Paradise Lost. It's a politics of heaven that's there are being discussed there, uh if you want. Uh somebody who is uh, in this case, uh Lucifer, who is under God, uh, is uh seeking uh to make an insurrection so that the rule can be snatched from God and taken uh over by Satan, who is um in the grip of self-loathing, uh simply for the fact that he is not superior to uh to God. And I think you can draw then the lines from this uh both for earthly politics uh as well as uh for other domains. And that was uh certainly on on my mind. It was certainly on my mind when I wrote about uh church life in the section two chapters that I have on the Apostle Paul. And actually, Apostle Paul spends most of the time talking about politics of striving for superiority in church communities. That's his main concern. And so you can take this uh church politics uh and transpose it onto larger political life, and you see this is a politics of relationships uh with others that can be either toxic uh in striving for superiority uh or that can be healing, that that can be then uh robustly other-oriented. Sometimes we think and and what I'm what I'm troubled also in today's rhetoric is that uh somehow masculinity and being a man are associated with kind of brute uh exercise of brute uh brute power. And I was thinking about this, and uh and Jesus then ends up being uh gentle and meek uh Jesus uh because he's so uh other regarding in some ways. And then I was reading recently in the Gospel of Luke, uh 12, Luke 12, 49, I think it is, and the English translation says, I have come to bring fire on earth. Uh Greek says, fire I have come to bring, right? It's a foregrounded, and then baptism I've come to be baptized, and that's this baptism of uh out of uh unconditional love being crucified uh for the salvation of uh of the world. And I'm thinking this is not uh uh meek and gentle Jesus. Uh this is uh this is the sturdiness uh and hard work, arduous work of doing agapic love uh in the world. That's what we are called upon. And when I see churches then replacing uh unconditional love with kind of militaristic approaches seeking to gain superiority, it seems to me such a betrayal.
Randy:Yeah, just to be fair to both sides, right? When we have we have 80% or or so of the churches supporting the president and all the magistr stuff, but then we also have a huge population of the church who really, really like who don't support the president and feel quite superior to the supporters of the president. We feel completely morally superior and really superior in in many, many ways. Miroslav, tell us the answer. What's the answer to this? Do we American Christians need to check out of the American political process in order to not play the game? Or can we do this in a way that actually looks Christ-like?
Miroslav:Well, I think we do have two hardened fronts, and both, in a sense, have uh their own inferiorities and superiorities um that are being played played out. I'm not the one to simply equalize that. If you have two hardened fronts, uh, doesn't mean to me that they're equally uh both equally equally bad, but that there there are there are problems uh also on the other side uh as well. What I don't see is what I have argued for, namely unconditional love. I don't see honoring of the mere humanity of the other person. I don't see when Apostle Peter uh says, uh I love this, uh there's a two-word command. One of them, I favorite in the Bible, and doesn't count like uh like a command in in nobody's mind, honor everyone. That's a directly quote from First Peter, 1 Peter 2. Uh, where is honoring of everyone? Everyone deserves to be honored, humanity of every person. And it seems to me that that's what we have to major on. And if it turns out that Christ uh is a moral stranger in today's world, that uh neither of the sides will embrace Christ in this, both in agapic love and in demanding for uh of us to honor each other, um that so be it. I think we should follow uh Christ. I think it's a healing, uh healing uh message for today. Uh and it we certainly won't be healed through oppositional politics.
Kyle:Christ is a moral stranger. I like that phrase. Do you just mean his actual perspective is not part of the conversation anybody's having? Go deeper into that.
Miroslav:Uh yeah, this this is a phrase that I've uh we we started working on this at the uh at the center, and it comes out of my sense that, well, I'll tell you, the history of it is this. Uh, we're teaching a class together with a uh colleague of mine, um, teaching a class uh on Christ and flourishing. And so we go through life of Christ and kind of map the life of Christ, story of life of Christ to our life. Uh, and obviously there's a birth, uh, and then of course, raising of children, education. And two colleagues, uh, one colleague and I, we have a small child, and we we're uh uh reading about Christ, embracing children. And then I don't know who came up with this uh uh question. Would we, would I allow Christ to raise my daughter? And and there's a kind of both of us are kind of stunned by this question immediately. Would he know how to properly educate her? Would he care to kind of go through all the different stages that she needs to go through? Would he teach her what he she needs to uh she needs to know? Everything I and and I I'm stummering, I don't know how to respond to what should be obvious question, yes. But it's not it's not obvious, but it's not obvious. So so so even for uh for for most of us, he is a moral stranger. I think that that's a problem, that's a deep problem, and that's that's a very simple uh kind of domain. Uh we can name all sorts of other domains where he's stranger. So, what I do, I basically say to people, well, make a list. On one side, what really is important to you, what do you spend time on? Thinking, doing, and then make a list of what was important to Christ. What did he spend time thinking, doing? And pretty soon you see we have no idea how he looked. Did he have a mirror? I don't know how much time do we spend in front of the mirror in varieties of ways, just the very small first thing in the morning that we that that we do, right? Uh, and that's again something very uh simple, and yet the um clothing industry is what it was about 20 years ago, three trillion dollar industry. Um and I want to ask, well, what's the implication of who Christ is? For how long do I wear this thing? Because now it's too narrow. The fashion doesn't correspond uh anymore to to fashion, right? So I I I can't quite and so forth, right? So so uh and I think it's worth uh stepping back and asking the question in what ways is the world different and therefore we will be different, but in what ways the difference uh between crisis and our situations are difference in profound values that define who we truly are in our humanity?
Kyle:Yeah, that's fascinating. Please write a book about that, and we'll have you back on to talk about it.
Miroslav:We we we are working on that, yeah.
Kyle:That's excellent. Okay, I want to ask a couple of questions that it kind of revolve around the idea of how deep this critique of yours really goes, um, not just at the societal level, but like into human nature. Uh, but let's start at the societal level. What does this do to capitalism? Is capitalism possible uh without this? And if if so, in what form? And then even more basic than that, uh, we have this long tradition in ethics and political philosophy of the social contract. And a core part of that perspective is that the only thing you can really count on people to act on the basis of is their self-interest. And even when we're constructing kind of an idea for what you know principles of justice might look like, for example, one of the fundamental things we're assuming is that people are acting on the basis of a few things, but one of our foundational assumptions is that they're acting for their own self-interest, or at least the self-interest of their small group. So how deep is your critique uh driving into this idea that is kind of at the basis of our civilization and also our economic systems?
Miroslav:Well, you can you can go uh to various depths, I think. Uh in some ways it's it's a profound uh critique. And I think it's a it's a really critique that's more based on the character of Christian love and implications of that than specifically on this idea of striving for superiority. If I take specifically the the idea of striving for superiority, I think consequences aren't as as deep as if I take, say, agapic love, qua agopic love, and then ask, what are the implications? And the reason I say that is I already mentioned uh you you have an arch capitalist, uh one of the richest uh men in the world who thinks that striving for superiority is detrimental for the functioning of modern economies for capitalism. He's a capitalist, right?
Kyle:Warren Buffett, right? That's who we're talking about.
Miroslav:Yes, I'm talking about Warren Buffett. You should not uh strive for superiority. You should do the best uh uh with the kinds of talents that you have. And so he's a big advocate of being better today than you were yesterday and forgetting about how you stack uh against somebody else. Uh, because he thinks, and I think he's right in that, that that might uh under certain conditions uh make you uh actually much better uh overall, uh, because you you can play to your strengths rather than simply to your general equalizing than to uh what's common uh between the the two uh competitors. Is American uh is is democratic politics uh possible? Well, it seems to me that something like deliberative politics, uh democracy would be possible in this in this, unless you simply say uh unless you demour uh uh politics from from substantive values. Uh and I know that people are going that direction uh as well. Um I would say that that uh doesn't serve uh our politics uh really well. I think in some ways um even uh more fundamental question is can we, can I live a day without um striving for superiority? Um I'll make it confessional. Uh I find it I find it hard. So my in general, the thrust of this book is not extirpate from your heart any thought of striving for superiority, but watch above all things not to make striving for superiority your supreme value, and don't let it uh occlude, relativize, push to the side other values that should um drive or orient your uh behavior. And to me, that that means uh that I have to, in truth to my personal life, I have to be engaged in daily vigilance so that I am uh when uh when the competitive and comparative uh thought occurs, uh I want to make sure that that comparison is comparison. Oh, I'm identifying the difference. Uh, and would I identify the difference if I'm striving simply to be better than the other person, uh to check myself and ask what is my value? And then stay with it. So it seems to me that uh slightly going uh back, it seems to me to be uh one of the conditions of being human, in fact. And one sees that in the story of Cain and Abel. This uh one of the early stories, and they manifest precisely the same uh tendency.
Kyle:Okay, so that's interesting and a good segue, I think. Because as I was reading your book, I'm trying to think, all right, who are his foils here? Who's he dealing with? And a couple came to mind. The obvious one was like the Gordon Gecko character, right? And I'm gonna I'm gonna call that just like dumb greed. And then that's one vision of capitalism. It's not Warren Buffett's vision, so I take that point. But the other one was Nietzsche, and Nietzsche does come up a few times sort of in passing. I would have liked to have seen more of a sustained uh you know dialectic there, but that's fine. Um, and I I like what you just said because it's something he would also say. It does go to the essence of human nature, and there's a reason it's so difficult to get through a day without doing that, right? That's his whole will-to-power thing. So, what do you think he gets wrong? So uh I could put this in a different way, which I may in a moment, but let me just get your general take on that kind of perspective, because the capitalist greed thing is not a direct confrontation with Christianity, but this is like this is very intentionally a direct confrontation.
Miroslav:Yes, yes. Uh, I I fully agree with you. Uh, in fact, that um originally when the book was conceived, uh the plan was to have uh uh to have Nietzsche as well and Max Scheler, who is a critic. Uh and uh then I decided it would be just too too heavy of a of a book. And then as it turns out, I had to do uh the Gifford lectures, which I did in May. Congratulations. And I needed I I needed some of that material for my Gifford lectures.
Kyle:All right, I'm gonna go read that.
Miroslav:So so when they're published, you're you're gonna find there, or you can listen to them, uh, to them uh online. And in fact, I do devote quite a bit of time to just that uh features of uh Nietzsche's thought, uh kind of the will to power. And centrally Nietzsche, that's obvious because the will to power becomes the dominant value. And that's where striving for superiority is uh is uh most most insidious. I think Nietzsche kind of also a little bit relativizes uh or or help us see something or has a way of mitigating some of those consequences. Because a good deal of striving for superiority comes because our value of ourselves is indexed to uh the opinion of others. We're vain. Uh that's a that's a vice of vanity that's that's at place, uh, not so much uh pride. And Nietzsche pushes uh very strongly uh against that, right? That that's precisely what what he thinks is is a problem uh with society. And that shows simply that you don't have strength enough in yourself and a value enough uh in yourself. And he has a very, very incisive, I think, critique of a vanity while at the same time striving for superiority uh is uh paramount uh value.
Kyle:Yeah. And it's not even just a value, it's a fact, right? It's a discovered fact about the world. So like we could come at this from a different direction, not the theoretical, but the empirical. Like the economists tell me, for example, that uh when we survey what makes people happy, one of the things that we find is that comparison to their neighbors is a large chunk, and it plays a large role in whether someone perceives themselves to be happy or stable or comfortable. Like if I live on a block where everybody has four bedroom houses and I have a five-bedroom house, I'm gonna be pretty happy. But if I have a three-bedroom house or my fourth bedroom is slightly smaller than Joe's, I'm gonna be less happy. And it doesn't matter what the number of bedrooms is, right? It could be one bedroom and two bedrooms or six bedrooms and seven. That's like a thing that seems to hold true across the populace. And so, like, are we are we giving a critique here? This is my Nietzsche in that, that is just impossible for humans.
Miroslav:Well, uh, well, and uh except that that you have to ask if you ask the question, what makes people unhappy? Uh the the the answer would be similar, just reversed, right? Having uh having fewer, right? That's right. So uh so so it's a gain and a loss uh in terms of in terms of happiness. One reads this happiness study, oh yeah, yeah, we're that makes us happy when we are, but it uh the the fact that that exists, those comparisons exist, make us in aggregate also unhappy, equally unhappy uh as we are as we are happy and we forget about this other uh other side of it. So um, yeah, it I think it is a fact. I would say uh as a Christian, this is a fact of our uh of our fallenness. And I reckon uh with it. Uh and for us not to reckon with it would be uh would be really uh uh kind of uh short-sighted. But at the same time, I don't want to celebrate it. I don't want to close my eyes for the negative side uh of it. Uh and that's what I see in um in uh contemporary environment. Uh I think uh in 19 in seven uh 18th century, 19th century, that very issue has been um has exercised philosophers uh and and theologians, and then suddenly in the mid-uh 20th century stops doing uh stops doing so, and uh, and I'm not exactly sure why, but it seems to me that we have kind of uh acquiesced to this is this is who we are, um this is what evolution has made us to be, and therefore we just live uh this way and try to make the best uh of it. I think we shortchange ourselves. Absolutely.
Kyle:And that's a uh yeah, that's not a great reading of evolution either. Yeah, as Friends Duwall used to say, right? It gave us all the other stuff too, like the the empathy and the reciprocity and all that.
Miroslav:Yeah, because it concentrates on individuals but doesn't concentrate on the on on group and what groups do in internally, right?
Kyle:So exactly. Last Nietzschean question, okay? Yeah. Uh this isn't my devil's advocate thing again. So, and this is based on a quote at the very end of your book, which I really appreciated. You put all the statements in a row and like summed up your argument very nicely. It's in that last conclusion. Um, you say this superior and inferior worth or status are social fictions, powerfully attractive and highly destructive fictions, but fictions nonetheless. Immediately the little Nietzsche in my brain said, But so is equality. And it reminded me of uh what one of my friends used to say when we were talking about politics. He said something like this we hold these truths to be self-evident. Uh, the phrasing of that kind of betrays it because if they were self-evident, we wouldn't have to hold them. Right? They're not self-evident. That's why we wrote the document. But uh the Greeks didn't think anything like that, for example. Um, so if both of these ideas are constructs, equality, striving for superiority, how do we choose? On what basis do we choose? And is the insistence on the one itself a kind of striving for superiority, in this case of a superiority of values? That's my last Nietzschean question.
Miroslav:Yeah, yeah, that's this is a great question. I I think I think Nietzsche, Nietzsche um uh is a critic of i equality, and uh um I if we think that there is no such thing as mere humanity that is in itself a fundamentally valuable thing about us, then it seems to me that Nietzschean position uh or uh a kind of sheer meritocratic position, maybe, depending on where you come from, would be would be a plausible, plausible one. Uh, and that's why I think all by the way, also, why Paul's argument isn't simply from the example of Christ, but it's actually from the nature of who we are as creatures. Uh, I devote a little bit of time uh to this, what I consider to be a really fascinating set of rhetorical questions that he asked of the Corinthians who are all in uh in struggle for superiority. Uh, and he asked, he asked, uh, what do you have that you have not received? Uh every striving for superiority, that is to say, making me being superior to somebody on the basis of some value redound to myself is predicated on the idea that I have, in fact, made myself to be superior so that the fact of superiority redounds to me, to my benefit, and can be ascribed to my person. And Paul asks, What do you have that you haven't received? Uh, answer, expected answer, and answer that he seems to be getting. I don't have very much, I don't have anything. If you have received it, why do you boast? As if you have not received it. And to me, that is really the fundamental question. As a theologian, I speak uh then of mere humanity, I speak of creation in the image of God. But let's step back from that language and let's look at me as a human being, uh, simply from uh uh look at me and my history. And so I ask myself, so uh I'm teaching at Y L. Some people think that that's some kind of distinction. Okay, let's grant that there is some kind of distinction, and then I ask myself, okay, so what percentage to the honor of being a teacher at TL have I myself contributed so that I can boast off? And what percentage I have nothing to do with? And if you ask me honestly to think about it, I mean I I I've never done calculus and I don't think can be calculated, but it seems to me plausible that if I say maybe two percent I contributed, that would be roughly true. Um who am I as a person, gifts that I have, uh parents that I that I have, education that I have none of it is my to claim any credit for. And I think if we look at ourselves in those in those ways, then striving for superiority uh makes very little sense. Uh it elicits humility because we are then now theologically, we are creatures. We are giving to ourselves. We should celebrate, uh, enjoy, love that which we are created, but not elevate ourselves uh over against others, celebrate them in their own way as well, without that making us uncritical about what is true, what is not, what is good, what isn't, what is beautiful, isn't beautiful, or is beautiful. So striving for excellence, yes, but having my excellence redound to me as a person simply, I think it's a deeply problematic. So it's a book that is critical of meritocracy uh as well in a significant way.
Randy:Yeah, what you're saying reminds me of your quoting of Kierkegaard. If you can hear our enjoyment of Kierkegaard, uh I'm sure it rings through, but this joy of being that he talked about in contentment. That that's what it sounds like you're describing to me. That's what I want in my life.
Miroslav:Yeah. Uh and and not kind of uh Nietzschean critique uh of the last, quote unquote, last quote unquote men, right? Who kind of just sit uh half drugged uh on the couch potatoes. Now, this is my language, not his, but uh he says it in a much more poetic way than I'm right now, but it's closer to our experience. Half drugged, I I sit on my uh my couch, uh eat whatever it is I'm gobbling, uh uh, and blink and think I have invented happiness, right?
Kyle:Yeah. Uh what a wonderful place to end the conversation about a really intriguing and interesting book. So the book again is The Cost of Ambition, How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse. Miroslav Wolf, thanks so much for your time.
Miroslav:Oh, it was great. Uh fun to be with you and talk to you and with you about these matters. Thank you so much.
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