The art of yielding
Gorillas, $20 bill auctions and holy indifference (discernment part 6)
Why is it so deliciously compelling to be right? The thrill of it - picking the right team in your March Madness pool, being proved correct about that trivia fact everyone quibbled over at dinner, showcasing your brilliance to the rubes around with with a confident “I told you so” - is a delectable morsel. It’s a little like playing God notes Kathryn Schulz, so that “our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.”1
Trouble is our enjoyment of being right is also the ego-bloating fuel for self-deception. The desire to be right pulls the wool over our own eyes, which is generally a dangerous spot for any person. Meaning many of the threats to a healthy capacity to perceive rightly are an inside job, the blinding and binding dynamics of self-deception.
The work of discernment, then, involves chastening this thrill of being right and working its opposite, loading the muscle of humility. This is a daunting challenge since no one likes to be wrong. It feels like a little death to admit error, meaning the emotional deck is stacked against us.
Those stakes are jacked even higher for the personal convictions and instincts that guide our lives. We need firm convictions to live well. No one wants to live rudderless, tossed about by any idea or movement; an endlessly open mind is folly. G.K. Chesterton helpfully reminds us that “the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”
So how do we discern if the instincts and persuasions we hold are sound and true or silly, ill-informed, or plain wrong? This is a live issue with so much misinformation, alternative fact, and suspicion swirling everywhere. It reveals how sin is real, shadowing the mind and clouding judgment. The deceit, deception and falsehood of the devil are not cartoon spectres but real real forces at play — and the amp of the internet only expands this wicked work.
The discerning person is especially alert to the blinding and binding dynamics of self-deception when God gets involved. Discerning people know there is no more self-assured bigot than a religious one, no more dangerous villain than one holding up divine authorization, no greater cover for unholiness than Sunday clothes.
What are these blinding and binding dynamics?
Many of us have likely heard of the invisible gorilla experiment by psychologist Daniel Simons (if you haven’t seen it, you can watch it here - or if you’ve seen the original you might consider watching this updated version). In the experiment, you are asked to count the number of passes a team dressed in white passes the basketball back and forth, while another team in black is also passing another ball back and forth. At the end of the video you’re asked a strange question: did you notice the gorilla that walked through, beat his chest and walked out of the scene? Simons, a researcher in the field of psychology called visual cognition, notes that about half of participants completely miss the gorilla passing through the middle of all the players.
I was a bit gobsmacked the first time I saw the video and missed the gorilla. How could I miss something so obvious? The point of Simon’s experiment is that what we see is shaped by the focus of our attention. Put another way, it’s attentional blindness. We are so busy focused on one thing that we become blind to so much more. Focus narrows our frame of perception, leaving so many other things hidden in plain sight.
Theologian Andrew Root argues that attention blindness describes well the current mind of the Western world. Our keen attention to science and technology has blinded us to what was previously a basic given to life: God. “God is in the background, and our day-to-day, moment-to-moment attention is on material things … God is the gorilla to whose appearance we have been blinded.” What we experience in the West is less the story of growing atheism and more a matter of attentional misdirection.
You see this dynamic in the church of Ephesus in Revelation 2. It was a church laser-focused on orthodoxy yet a community which had lost sight of the obligations of love. Jesus commended their passion for right teaching but saw a cramped faith that needed the wider frame of love.
What are the things that we grip so tightly or give our attention to so intensely that narrow our frame of vision? It doesn’t mean we give up these convictions but instead begin to realize how the tightness of our grip or intensity of our focus might blind us to a larger vista.
Then there’s the sticky factor to our instincts and convictions that pulls the wool over our eyes — the binding power in our commitments seen in the $20 auction. Max Bazerman, professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, holds an auction on the first day of class. He holds up a $20 bill and auctions it off. Anyone can bid on it but there are two rules: all bids must be made in $1 increases; and secondly, the winner wins the $20 bill but the runner up must still honour their last bid and receive nothing for that bid.
Early on there is a flurry of bids for a bargain $20 bill. But around the $12-16 range most drop out except for the two highest bidders who now find themselves pulled into a situation they can’t get out of. The auction keeps going with the fateful two stuck in a financial death-spiral together as the bidding goes well beyond $20, with each one now playing not to lose. Bazerman reports the bidding goes well beyond the value of the bill - $23, $50, $100, as high as $204.
What’s going on here? It’s the dynamic of protecting your investments, the compounding power of sunk costs. Sunk costs are a financial metaphor describing investments that cannot be recovered. The convictions we hold, the ways of life we lead are a kind of personal investment. Alan Jacobs, in How to Think, notes that “the more people have invested in a particular project, the more reluctant they are to abandon it, no matter how strong the evidence indicating that it’s a lost cause.”2 Driven by compounding self-interest, even as collateral losses mount, we become deeply attached to certain convictions or a way of life that the need to protect that investment is paramount.
Because so much time, emotion or relational capital has been ‘sunk’ into a matter or conviction, we may continue to tightly hold on to it, feeling compelled to recoup those costs and fool ourselves, bound to lost causes. There’s the aversion of personal loss (to change would mean you admit you were wrong, perhaps lose face or lose certain relationships or status), the sunk cost of personal responsibility (what if you convinced others of this same thing), or the general distaste of wastefulness to abandon this project (how much time and energy did you invest in thinking about or studying or talking to others about this). All these real factors often bind us from seeing truly and acting wisely, from discernment.
Holy Indifference
So what to do with all this self-imposed fraud? St. Ignatius offers up discernment gold. In outlining his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius spells out a small but critical element to discernment, something he calls holy difference.
Much resistance to discernment is found in the tendon-like attachments of the heart. Since we are less a rational creature and more so heart-centred lovers, we grow heart attachments, some of which are disordered loves. We may simply love the wrong things, attaching ourselves to ideas or beliefs that are stale-dated, silly or misguided. Or we might love the right things wrongly, over-focused on them, giving them more weight or space than they warrant. These attachments effectively blind and bind us from perceiving rightly.
Ignatius advises a sober consideration of the things to which we have attached our hearts, to name these attachments of the heart (whether a disordered love or a proper longing). He calls this holy indifference.
The indifference Ignatius recommends is not an apathetic “whatever,” a resigned shrug of the shoulders or a hardened lack of care. Rather it is an openness of the heart where we loosen our grip on our hopes and will in favour of God's will for us. It’s about pausing long enough to make space, to give the heart and mind “air, to convince it that there [is] something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.”3
Earlier I mentioned how being wrong is hard and can feel like dying; holy indifference is a form of good dying. In it we are asking ourselves, what needs to die in me, in my community, in order to receive God's gifts in our lives? Are we able to release our well-defended positions to seek God's will for our time? Are we able to become indifferent to our ego and agendas, our desires and comforts, our hobby-horses and pet projects?
Ignatius aims for a freedom of heart, to cut the attachments that blind and bind us in order to open ourselves to God’s will and purpose. Sometimes resistance to God’s purposes are the well-guarded, well-intentioned agendas we anxiously clutch. Indifference means being detached enough, freed up enough from these projects, ideas, people, persuasions or experiences to be able either to take them up again or to let them go, depending on whether they help us to serve God. Indifference frees us from the feverish anxiety of trying to make something happen and slowly forms in us an open-handed trust to receive God’s activity.
Holy indifference is connected to imagination. It’s not a loss of conviction but a widening of faith’s imagination. Is there more to see, know, and account for in this matter or situation?
I do wonder if we have a “lost in translation” problem with holy indifference - Ignatius’ term for this really doesn’t play well today. I’ve landed on yielding as a hopeful equivalent (without the “let God take the wheel of your life” trope which betrays the gift of agency God gives to every person). In this traffic reality, you slow down, look for other cars and evaluate your circumstances before moving forward. Sometimes you need to stop and wait while other times you continue forward but there is always a deference happening, a granting of right of way.
This feels like the right posture; indifference is a posture of heart, “yielded and still.” This moment of surrender is an incredibly tender and vulnerable thing to do, one not without struggle. It’s what we see in Jesus the night of his betrayal when he prays “Not my will but yours be done.” It’s holding loosely while being kept, the unfurling of your grip to find your hand held by the One who guides your life.
Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong, p. 4.
Alan Jacobs, How to Think, p. 129.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.