Episode 34 Transcript

Elise: My guest today is Noah Toly. Noah is Professor of Urban Studies and Politics and International Relations at Wheaton College, where he is also the director of the Center for Urban Engagement and the Aequitas Program in Urban Leadership.

Some of the publications where you'll find Noah's writing include Books and Culture, the Hedgehog Review and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and he's been interviewed by NPR, the Atlantic and the New York Times. He's the author or editor of seven books, including Cities of Tomorrow and the City to Come: What is Mercy Ministry? and most recently, The Gardener's Dirty Hands: Global Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics.

Noah, thank you so much for being here.

Noah: Great to be here with you, Elise. Thanks.

Elise: So much of your recent work has focused on global environmental governance and the practical and moral questions that present themselves in that context. And I know we're going to have a lot to discuss about those issues. But I'd like to begin with some of your earliest work, which is in the built environment in cities and urban landscapes. What drove you to study cities?

Noah: That's a great question. It really traces back to my undergraduate days at Wheaton College. I had come to Wheaton to do four things, which if you're keeping track at home, that's three things too many, probably. And to keep a long story short, it wasn't long before all four of those things were taken away and evaporated as opportunities.

I had decided against one. I had shattered my ankle in an Army ROTC training exercise and was no longer able to pursue that goal and served in the military as medically disqualified. I was no longer able to play football. And I was actually two weeks too late, once I was finally medically disqualified, to apply for our Human Needs and Global Resources program, which also interested me.

And so everything was gone. I went through a period of deep vocational disorientation. I didn't handle that in incredibly mature ways. I was about nineteen when all of that fell apart. And I was not even mature for a 19-year-old as I was handling that. And I went into, I guess, a period of, I described it as vocational disorientation, but some people have said, “Well, maybe you were even depressed.” And I don't know if that's true. I never talked to anybody about that, but I did sort of wait for other things that interested me to come out on the other side of that. And through a series of, I guess, we could call them providential steps – I'm sure that God ordered them – I encountered the study of cities and urban life. And it was awfully late in my time here.

Really what had intrigued me was a summer spent in Mexico City and I was really intrigued by environmental challenges there, by economic development challenges there, by challenges having to do with community empowerment. And that was the end of my junior year, beginning of my senior year. And really I came back from that trip thinking “I have to study this more.”

Now, if I'd been a freshman or a sophomore, I might have studied it more as an undergrad. But I didn't have a lot of time left here. And so that intrigue was channeled into graduate study. The question was “Where and how can I study this further as a graduate student?” And so I pursued graduate studies in urban affairs and public policy.

Elise: That's a really remarkable story. Thank you for sharing so much of it. And I also think that for anyone listening who has ever faced those disappointments where all your best laid plans fall apart, it's really comforting to know that you can find your way and that sometimes it does involve that patience and reorientation. And as you said, it wasn't something that you could continue to pursue as an undergrad, even, that it was something that you carried on into graduate work.

What do you think makes a good city, then? I mean good in the most general sense. We'll get to moral good and flourishing, but just generally.

Noah: Sure. In the most general sense, if we're going to get to moral good and flourishing later, but what occurs to me when I answer this question is something like, well, what are my favorite cities? And Mexico City is still one of my favorite cities. What a lovely, diverse place that is with all of its challenges. It's a huge metropolitan area, but it also is so culturally rich. It has some of my favorite museums. It's got literally layers and layers of history in the city, some of that layered with its own tragic history, its own difficulties, but all of that adding up to a beauty that's more than the sum of its parts.

I spent a lot of time in Berlin, and that's because I taught at Freie University of Berlin for seven years, and every time I'd go, I'd spend an extra couple days exploring the city. Also just a gorgeous place, also full of just deeply challenging memories that we all need to wrestle with, but also just the beauty of things like Museum Island there in Berlin.

And then finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Chicago. I would not just be remiss; I would be in trouble actually with quite a few people if I didn't say that Chicago was among my favorite cities. A friend of mine here at Wheaton likes to call it “the Venice of North America” because of all of the ways the river flows through it in around the downtown area. It's a beautiful place.

Elise: Now I thought that Pittsburgh was the Venice of North America with our rivers. No, I'm teasing.

Noah: You do have three of them.

Elise: We do have three of them, that's right. Yeah.

Berlin is one of my favorite cities too, actually. I was there not for an extended period as you were; I was just there for a conference. But I stayed in the part of the city that was once East Berlin. And so walking across what was once a divide, obviously is not now, was a very rich and poignant experience as well as thinking through the Holocaust and the Nazi history there. But the Museum Island, you're right, is stunning. And it is a place where you can almost feel like you're on the eave of all the tragedies that transpired there, like you're just kind of in those places and out of time, which is something that I think cities do generally. They exhibit all of these layers, as you said, and these temporalities that are built into them.

And maybe we can use that to pivot into those questions about moral good and the city in scripture, because certainly we have Augustine's City of God against the Pagans, which is one of the earliest theological texts that we have that uses the city as site and metaphor to say something about human nature, human relationships and human relationship with God, but of course, scripturally Hebrew texts and the New Testament use the city as a powerful metaphor for heaven, but also as very real places where things happen biblically.

So what is that connection then between a Christian worldview, theologically, scripturally, and the city?

Noah: That's a great question. There's so many dimensions to that question, so many ways that we might approach answering it. One of the things I think we would want to say is that a certain angle on that question is: what does the city represent in scripture? And there's a lot of debate about that. That's not exactly a settled debate.

There are people like Jacques Ellul who weigh in on that with The Meaning of The City, which is a favorite book of mine. And I think it's actually quite a misunderstood book actually, but some have even called it “The Demeaning of the City” because it seems so anti-urban. I think what a lot of those people don't understand, especially if The Meaning of The City is the only book they've read by Ellul, is that what seems like Ellul’s anti-urbanism is really his, to put it crudely, his anti-everythingism.

And he wasn't even anti-everything. That's my next step. I want to say that he actually is very clear. This book is not about being anti-urban and promoting the rural, or being anti-urban and promoting the agricultural. He would have the same things to say about, for example, agricultural technology. And the things he does say about all of that: technology, the state, administration, bureaucracy, the city, all the things that we know Ellul was anxious about, he actually says “As a thing, it's fine. Technique as a thing is fine. The machine as a thing is fine. Administration as a thing is fine. The state is a thing is fine. But when it becomes an idol, that's when we're ready to sacrifice people to it.”

And he, to make his argument in The Meaning of The City much shorter and nutshell-y, if you will, he is willing to say that we've made an idol of the city. And that, especially at the time he was writing in 1970, that was manifest in various ways among public intellectuals, scholars, planners, and others, policymakers, and we were sacrificing people to this vision of the city.

And he found evidence for this idolatry stretching all the way back to Cain. He says Cain founded the city as an act of self-actualization, self-realization, of faithlessness, utter faithlessness. He kills his brother. God says, “You're going to wander now” and Cain says, “That's too much for me. I can't handle that.” God says, “Don't worry, I'll give you a mark.” And the idea has always been that this mark is somewhere that Cain can’t really see, like his forehead, and he doesn't trust it because he can't see it. He doesn't have the faith to believe in the thing that he can't see. But what he can see are walls, city walls. What he can see is strength or security in numbers.

And so the city he builds, Enoch, is an act of self-realization, an act of faithless self-actualization and independence from God, for Ellul. And he thinks that this is actually what characterizes cities throughout the centuries. I think Ellul takes that a little too far in saying this is now the spiritual reality of all cities, but I understand the point he makes and it's useful for us in terms of how we think about our own communities, our tendency to make idols, our tendency even to lean on acts of faithless, self-realization in the city and beyond.

That said, there's another angle on this question that I think we need to spend more time with generally, and that's this question of, “Well, what makes for flourishing? What makes for thriving?” I think that as Christians, we ought to be seeking the thriving of our neighbors. We'll be for God, for our neighbors and for creation. And we ought to be expressing that in all of our ways of being together as a community, seeking out together and building communities that are expressions of flourishing to the extent possible.

And one of my favorite projects on that is called the Thriving Cities Project. And listeners can look this up online. Look at the Thriving Cities group. They've built a whole framework, human ecology framework, it's called, around the good, the true, the beautiful, the just and well-ordered, the prosperous and the sustainable.

And what's interesting is that in a place-based approach to these things, you can see how variables that we think of in one of those areas affect outcomes in another. It's not merely that investment in the true, let’s say the realm of education, happens in schools, but it happens when we promote public health. It happens when we promote sustainability. It happens when we promote the arts and the beautiful. And I think mapping out those relationships in each concrete particular community is some of the important work we need to do as Christians.

Elise: Fantastic. And I hope that listeners will look up the project and it certainly relates to so much of your own work and what we're going to continue to talk about.

All of your ideas are making me think about the ways in which a city brings people together with aspirational tendencies. And you or listeners might be thinking, “Well, duh.” But I do think that as you're pointing about Ellul's critique about what we turn into an idol, we forget the human, forget the person, our neighbor, next to us.

I'm thinking here too, of Jane Jacobs and all of her activism in New York City, and of course her most famous mantra may be “eyes on the street.” That there's a neighborly governance, that kids can play on sidewalks, people meet and have these brief interactions on sidewalks and people watch one another. They self-govern. They don't necessarily need the intervention of major structures at all times because there is a kind of community involvement.

Are there certain liturgies, like Jane Jacobs’ sidewalks for example, that you think we as Christians need to be thinking about more as our practice together in cities?

Noah: Yeah. I think one of the things that we need to think about practicing more often is probably – and this is Lent, maybe that's why I'm thinking of this – is probably lament, it's probably acknowledging the distance between what we realize in our communities and what we're called to. What we realize in our communities and the kingdom of God, of the new creation or what God intended for community.

And the point isn’t merely to acknowledge that or to be moved by it emotionally or spiritually or even merely to appeal to God, to work in the world and change those things. That's absolutely one of those things that we ought to be doing. But it's not only that. It's that before we recognize that distance, we have a hard time being motivated to do anything about it.

So I think that one of the liturgies we can practice is a liturgy of noticing that distance, a liturgy of lamenting that distance so that our desires are changed, our judgment has changed. The things we hope for are changed. They're made more true.

Because it's not just the knowing. I think Christian history teaches us this over and over and over. It's not just the knowing. It's the desiring, the judging that affect our willingness and effectiveness. When you can see this with Augustine, for example, in his Confessions, he actually recounts knowing about God, knowing God, knowing who he was, and also not desiring God, not wanting God. And the difference wasn't made until the distance between the knowing and the desiring was collapsed. So the desiring was brought along with the knowing.

Elise: That's really fascinating to me about the desire and the knowing because I think the built environment, it seems neutral and it seems like it doesn't have anything to do with our shaping desires, with our orientation toward one another and toward God.

But I think about this sometimes with campus design, since that's where I, prior to the pandemic, spent most of my time. And the proliferation of luxury dormitories for students or the most pristine or top-of-the-line facilities, whether they be dining halls or gym facilities. And then we've got faculty in asbestos-ridden offices or classrooms that are not shaped or accessible for faculty and student populations. And I think it shapes the desire of students and some people who come onto campus to see themselves as consumers of education. That I can consume, certainly whatever's in a dining hall, but also this kind of lifestyle and miss some of these problems of accessibility.

And you've also got me thinking about broader historical arcs of urbanism that I'd like to ask you about, and if you see this as shaping our desire culturally. And I'm really thinking about what I understand to be two of the major wings of early 20th-century urban design: the Garden City, Ebenezer Howard, and then Corbusier Radiant City.

The Garden City, really low. Everything is kind of self-contained, but with hedges around the houses, keeping you away from the dirty inner city where all the pollution in the industry is. So an early suburb, essentially.

And then Corbusier: monomaniacal ideas about skyscrapers, lots of concrete, lots of steel, lots of glass, very tall buildings that are just spiking up in a great park, I think he called it. But where the people were or how they were interacting, I think is one of the biggest critiques. And yet I think we live with both of those still today.

Do you think that that's true? Do you think that those kind of models, the suburban model and this highly, almost Tower of Babel model with Corbusier have really shaped our understanding of what it means to be urban dwellers?

Noah: Yeah. I do think both of those models have shaped what we think it means to be urban dwellers, shaped our imaginations about the city, perhaps more than anything else or, like you said, our desires for it. The built environment certainly does that. Urban design certainly does that.

But what occurs to me when you tell that story is actually the thing that those models had in common and just about everybody else writing at that time, in fact, as far as I can tell, everybody else writing at that time, the thing that they had in common was this assumption that the city was a problem to be solved.

So Le Corbusier approaches this as the city that can be sort of quantified in a design sense. It wasn't heavily on quantification like we think of that now, with big data for example. But it was as close as you could get in architectural and planning sense at the time.

Ebenezer Howard with the Garden Cities movement. Patrick Geddes to some extent alongside him with his Biopolis idea, thinking of the city as a sort of problem vis-a-vis its relationship with nature and this must be solved.

But not just those two. Robert Moses thinks of the city as a wild problem to be tamed, and it's going to be tamed through his power to displace people and communities and reshape the city in favor of the car.

Lewis Mumford, who I think is a wonderful writer and someone that I would love to study even more closely, ends his book The City in History by talking about necropolis, the city of death, right? If that's not a problem, I don't know what is.

And I've actually mentioned in this vein Jane Jacobs, and people have said to me, “No, no, Jacobs didn't think the city is a problem.” But indeed she did. The last chapter of her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities is the kind of problem a city is.

And then Ellul, who we've already talked about for a second, who, for all his contrarianism, probably thought himself to be outside of the vein of all these other thinkers in critiquing them. But what he had in common with them, as a person of that same age, was thinking of the city as a problem. And the difference is he didn't think it could be solved except by God, but they all thought it was a problem.

And now what we've shifted to in the last part of the 20th century, early part of the 21st century, is, to a significant extent, public intellectuals, scholars, activists, policy makers and planners thinking of cities as solutions to all the levels. So now we get Edward Glazer's book, which, the title of which I will forget, but it's something like “How Cities Make Us Greener, Happier, Healthier, Stronger, Wealthier” and so on, right? You can just keep going with that list. And that stands in for a whole subset of literature on how cities will solve all of our sustainable development goals, how they will solve climate change. I've contributed to some of that literature myself, but in a very ambivalent way because I don't think that either this notion of the city as a problem exclusively or this notion of the city is a solution exclusively does justice either to what a city is or what it's for.

Elise: How would you like to add on to it then?

I'm really taken by all that you just said, especially by that dynamic of power that's at play. Because when something is a problem and you situate yourself as the one to solve it, and especially in that early to mid-20th century context, there were some real dangerous stakes, I think, to the “urban renewal,” which was often kind of a code for massive displacement of marginalized vulnerable communities.

And I'll just add here, since Beatrice Institute is in Pittsburgh, we saw this very clearly here in Pittsburgh with the utter decimation of the Hill District, one of the most vibrant black communities in the country, where homes were just razed in an effort to kind of have one of these “super blocks,” basically, with a big arena, which at this point itself has also been razed and a real destruction of community.

So how would you like to reframe, if not problem and not solution and thinking ambiguously about it, how would you like to talk about the city?

Noah: That's a very good question for me because I haven't quite settled on it.

And so I'll give some preliminary thoughts. I should be more settled about it, but I'm so taken with the dichotomy there between problem and solution and still figuring out what may be the dividing line, what demarcates that move. How much have we really dipped into the solution side of things and how much does that apply to, say, cities around the world and not just in the U.S. and Western Europe, that I haven't spent a lot of time settling on what I would like to add. But preliminarily, I do think we'd want to say that both problem and solution lead us to challenges with power of the sort that you mentioned.

So in the first case, naming the city as a problem just invites your Robert Moseses or whoever razed the Hill District in Pittsburgh to come in and exercise that kind of power in the name of solving the problem.

In the second case, city as solution, and then we invite somebody to use the city as a sort of ring of power, right? Here's the city, it's an idol, or it's a sort of ring of power by which we will master the rest of the world. We'll master ourselves as individuals through this ring of power. We'll build the city in such a way to nudge people just the right way to make individuals do the right things for their own public health, whatever it is, to make them smarter, healthier, wiser, et cetera. But we'll also use it to master global food security or insecurity, global environmental injustice, global terrorism, global climate change.

And I think that creates two problems. One is that wielding the city instrumentally is not fundamentally different in terms of our relationship to power than just solving the city. It displaces the problem, but they're both obsessive approaches when it comes to instrumental value. And the other thing is it makes invisible a lot of ongoing challenges with community flourishing within a city. So instead of coming into a neighborhood and asking, “What are the levers that can be pulled by the people who live here? The assets that they can leverage in order to promote their own wellbeing and perhaps extend that into neighboring communities,” we stand at a distance ready to wield the city itself and make those people invisible.

I think that any approach I take would have to avoid that. It would have to avoid this obsessive instrumental power approach. My guess is that I would lean right now to something like the city is a social, geographical, community-based approach to dealing with the tragic in our lives, the way we experience our own finitude, the way that we have to up give up, undermine, destroy, or forgo one or more goods in the interest of securing one or more other goods, and by coming together in community, we diminish, as a collaborative project, the costs of having these goods together and sharing in a life that's enriched by that togetherness. But that's a chapter I've yet to write.

Elise: Well actually, I mean, that was really a good lead-in to where I wanted to go next, which is your ideas about the tragic that you expound upon in The Gardener's Dirty Hands, your most recent book, where you really are trying to insert that category of the tragic into global environmental governance and bring these ideas together. And I'm just wondering, you talked just a moment ago about how you understand the tragic; could you maybe just recapitulate that in terms of the argument that you lay out in the book? And hopefully we can talk about scarcity and risk and tragedy as well, but how do you see tragedy in governance working together?

Noah: Good question. I think I will recount the story that is in the first chapter of that book. The one that troubled me for so long and resulted in me finally writing a book about it that drew on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other Christian thinkers that have talked about the tragic in ways that helped me out.

But in 2006, I was actually interviewing for the position that I currently hold. I was here at Wheaton College giving a talk in a class on environmental justice, in fact, environmental justice in Wilmington, Delaware. I was coming from the Philadelphia area. I'd been studying at University of Delaware and I had participated in a number of studies on brownfields and other environmental justice challenges in Wilmington.

And I mentioned at the end of the lecture the idea of a “zero brownfields future.” It was something that had captivated the imaginations of some policymakers and activists and others in the Wilmington area. It's also a clever name for an initiative, right? It's your community, “zero brownfields future.” Who wouldn't want that? I mentioned it, at the end, I said, “There are a number of ways to approach this challenge of environmental justice in urban context. And here's one challenge that I've recently been paying attention to.

The lecture ended really well. There were some questions from students. It was a very late night class, and it had been a long day, and I was ready to go back to the hotel and get some rest. And the dean, who was supervising the interview asked if there were any more questions, and one hand went up. And I thought, “Okay, well, interesting. One more question.”

And the person who asked the question said, “Well, I have a question. Why would you want to remediate all of the brownfields? And I wasn't even sure if I heard him correctly. I gave I think a quizzical or puzzled look, and I said, “Can you repeat the question?” And he said, “Well, why would you want to remediate all of them? Some of them will be difficult and expensive to remediate, and some will be easy and cheap. And doesn't it make sense to do the easy and cheap ones, remediate those, but with the very expensive and difficult ones, maybe that money would be better used for something else. Public health, nutrition, education, all sorts of other things, even in the same community.”

It's a very difficult question. My answer off the top of my head was, “Well, if I'm a policy maker and I walk into one community and say, ‘Good news, we're remediating the brownfields in your community,’ I don't want to walk into the next community, don't think it's right to walk in the next community and say, ‘Sorry, we're not actually addressing your brownfields. We're not addressing your pollution problem. We're not addressing your environmental justice problem. Your kids still have to play next to the brownfields. You still have to suffer the problems with housing development, education, employment, et cetera, that come with this pollution in your neighborhood.’”

And that was an easy answer for me. But the question haunted me forever after that because I knew that it was too easy an answer. The person who asked the question had a point, and by putting it the way he did, where the tradeoff, that's highlighted as a tradeoff in the same community for other very good things, he didn't let me off the hook very easily, didn't let me get away from the fact that in order to invest in one thing, I would be giving up, undermining, foregoing, or destroying one or more other goods that I value, or that the community values.

More than that, I realized I couldn't have efficiency and equity at the bottom of my answer at the same time. And so even conceptually, even valueswise, there was a tradeoff involved. I had to give up, undermine, destroyer, forego one value in order to have the other one.

And I wrestled with that for a very long time. And that's the governance issue right there. It might be small scale. It might be about the neighborhood level and individual plots of land. It might not be what always catches our attention in the news with climate change, which appears later in the book. But it does capture, I think, the core of the governance challenge that I think is characterized by the tragic.

Elise: Right, and to go back to an earlier moment in our conversation when we talked about a flourishing city requires us to attend and to pay attention, I think part of your insertion of the tragic that we cannot have, as you said, efficiency and equity at the bottom line, that it involves tradeoffs, is actually paying attention to that finitude, to certain impossibilities that we can't have it all, can't have our cake and eat it too.

And you really outline some economic theories that have led to an efficiency model and maybe a technique-driven model as governing how we think of governance in these environmental questions.

And I'd like you to unpack that, but I'll also say I was deeply fascinated by the bioeconomic theories, the thermoeconomic theories, that really bring in economy and ecology and that therefore then take seriously the second law of thermodynamics: entropy. Who knew that that was going to come into a conversation here? So I'm wondering if you can explain that too, because that model of scarcity really, that we're going to run out, we can't have everything, seems to be a bedrock for not only understanding the tragedy, but also a way forward.

Noah: Sure. And I think I'll fit that into painting this broader picture of scarcity, tragedy, and risk that characterize, for me, modern environmental thought. I think that basically all of modern environmental thought can be characterized as thinking through or wrestling with the tragic as symbolized by scarcity, tragedy, and risk.

Scarcity comes in two kinds at least. One is relative scarcity. This is what we're used to talking about when we're talking with economists who have done great work on scarcity, obviously, have been talking about tradeoffs, even when other people are ignoring them. I just don't think they should have the corner on the market on talking about tradeoffs. And I think it's a problem when we leave it all to them and we don't engage the question of tradeoffs rather than running from it. Let them corner the market and we handle it as if there are no such things as tradeoffs.

So relative scarcity involves the fact that our desires always outpace the resources that we have to bring to bear on those desires. We always want more things than we can have. We then have to allocate resources in such a way that we make difficult choices between them. But it's relative. It's not absolute. It's not about the fact that something's going to just run out tomorrow.

Absolute scarcity has to do with the idea that some things you could actually run out of, right? You could actually run out of, the most obvious example here is a species. You could have a species go extinct. You could run out of it. You could overfish an entire fishery and actually destroy a whole species. I use that example because it's uncontroversial, but we can extend the absolute scarcity question to all sorts of other areas like hydrocarbon fuels, coal, natural gas, oil. It's not like we're going to run out of those tomorrow, but there's a finite amount of them, and both relative and absolute scarcity come into play as we think about how we use them.

And note, scarcity actually symbolizes the tragic in the sense that you must give up, destroy, undermine or forgo one of more other things in order to have what you want, no matter whether you're talking about relative or absolute scarcity. Tragedy there is the tragedy of the commons. It's a common discussion in environmental politics, in some of the economic literature, in questions about how we govern through institutions, our environmental impacts. And that literature was kicked off by Garrett Hardin in 1968 with an article called “The Tragedy of the Commons,” in which he comes to the conclusion that unmitigated access to the commons, free access to the commons, will allow each of us to exploit it for our individual gain at a rate that will eventually destroy the commons and keep us from benefiting from it together or individually in the future. What he says in the end, though was fascinating. He says, “So therefore, we have to trade off freedom to access the commons against the need to establish environmental security, stability, and integrity.”

What you have there are a shallow and a deep sort of tragedy. And I don't mean shallow as in it's not important, but it's a shallow tragedy that you have the inexorable working of things toward a bad end, right? It's a shallow tragedy that in the end, the pasture he's talking about in his model is destroyed. It's the deeper tragedy that in order to even reckon with that, you still have to trade off freedom or environmental integrity. Now, Hardin is a controversial figure for a lot of reasons, some of the very good reasons, but no one has found a way yet to say we don't need to reckon with the tragic, the tragedy of commons in a way that doesn't give up something.

And then the final symbol in that list is risk. I think risk is a measure of likelihood of a bad outcome from what we are engaged in. And risk has multiple dimensions. What's the likelihood bad thing will happen and how will, if it does?” We're really good now at making bad things less likely to happen. Along the way, we've increased the scale and scope of the impacts of those bad things if they do.

So a great example here is nuclear power. Nuclear power is, as far as anyone can tell now, an awfully safe way to generate electricity when it comes to the frequency of problems with it. And it doesn't generate massive amounts of air pollution as an incidental byproduct of burning its fuel. But if it goes wrong, it goes really wrong. Whatever way it goes wrong: with a meltdown or with poor storage of waste or with access to waste to make dirty bonds, whatever it is, there are all sorts of downsides to it that are massive by comparison to the low-intensity risks that we share in other areas.

So those three issues, scarcity, tragedy, and risk you can see in modern environmental thought in the literature about it for 200 years and more. And I think all of them are symbols of this need to deal with the tragic.

To answer your specific question about the physical limitations that we face, I draw there on Herman Daly, an economist who was actually trained by a physicist, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and Daly actually eventually became the chief economist for the World Bank.

When he was there, I think it was when was there, it might have been when he was an academic, he wrote a piece called “Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem.” And in it he argues that the economy is a subset of the ecology, of the global ecosystem. And if it is, it can't outgrow that, eventually will destroy that or cause it to collapse if you pursue sustainable growth forever. So he calls for something, he suggests a sustainable development, which he says has a qualitative dimension to it. Sustainable development has a meaning for Daly that it doesn't have in its colloquial use or its usual use. I think it’s a fascinating argument.

Elise: I do too, in part because I have my own thoughts about, oddly enough, the second law of thermodynamics and a concept of despair, and a kind of entropic desire that we possess toward goods that can never be satisfied. And kind of an outpouring of that desire which fills the system, creating a kind of chaos and proliferation and detritus. So I also think this has effects materially and environmentally. And I think what I recognize in your writing is we need to consider the human dimension, our human orientation toward our desires, again, to revisit some things that we discussed earlier, and ways that our bodies betray us. Our resources betray us. They cannot always last forever.

And when you were discussing nuclear technology, it makes me think of Bill Gates, actually, because he just released this book on how to solve climate issues. That's not the exact title. But it's really, I think, a technocrat’s utopia. That if we have enough technology, we can solve all of these problems. But it's this risk model that you are referencing. The risk is enormous. And he has several very big ideas that are huge cost, but probably his biggest and most controversial is he wants to shift to nuclear energy and he is pouring billions of dollars into a company that can apparently use a form of sodium instead of water for the reaction and cooling and salt storage. And don't ask me more than that because that's the limit of my understanding of the engineering. But he's making appeals to people like Jeff Bezos to dump billions of dollars into these companies because the technology is that expensive.

But I wonder, and here's my question for you, I wonder what you think, how are we going to convince people of this, A, and maybe more importantly, should we convince people of this, what's at stake in a billionaires club, investing in technology that can “save” this? Is this another version of Corbusier?

Noah: Well, I love how you ended that. I hadn't made that connection before, but that's a very good connection to make, and worthwhile and one, to further explore.

What I think we need to acknowledge about all the possible solutions, whether they involve massive investments in new group power, whether they involve reducing consumption, which is actually our one way, our one proven way of actually mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, which we've seen during the pandemic. We've seen during economic downturns in countries around the world, regions around the world, that the one way we can actually finally get this under control is to produce and consume less. And that's a fine approach, but whatever it is that we choose, there are downsides.

I am less interested in which of the possible solutions or good options is preferable and more interested in how do we differentiate between bad options, which we have, and good ones. And I think that the key differentiator there is that bad options involve allowing people, incentivizing people even sometimes, to push the costs onto others of their having more goods at once or integrating more goods at once, right? If the tragic is the need to give up, undermining, forego, or destroy one or more goods in order to possess or secure one or more other goods, the problem there is having multiple goods at one time, right? And that there's a cost to it. Well, the question is who's going to have the goods and who's going to bear the cost?

And any system that allows people to push the costs onto others of their integrating or having more goods at once: to me, that's a problem. That's a bad system, that's a bad approach. Any system that allows or encourages or incentivizes people to bear the costs so that others can have more goods at once is a good approach.

I know that's a little simple. The book's a little more complicated than that. The arguments a more complicated than that, but that's the nutshell version. And I think there's a plurality of potentially legitimate approaches, even if none of them are self-justifying.

And I think that I would have to say that even about the Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, billionaires club approach. Now there may be downsides. There are downsides to everything, and there's a governance downside. There are equity downsides. There are downsides in terms of who enjoys power over or through the system in the future. But if Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and others are going to invest billions of their own dollars in promoting solutions to climate change for future generations, for voiceless communities, for vulnerable ecosystems, that to me at least satisfies in a basic way some of those criteria about what makes it a potentially legitimate or good approach.

Elise: Thank you. That is really nuanced and a better way of thinking of it than just my blanket critique of the ubercapitalism of the two of them and others.

But you did point out as well that there's no self-justifying approach, which is really an idea that pivots your own argument toward the religious imaginary and toward, as you call it, a cruciform shape that governance might take.

And so I'm hoping that you can explain that now to us too. What might a religious imaginary and thinking about Christ's life and sacrifice have to do with all of the issues we've just discussed?

Noah: Yeah. That has to do with the genesis of this particular book and not just the genesis of the problem I was dealing with for years and years after that haunting question during my interview.

The genesis of this particular book was while I was reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics. And in Ethics, he comes to this one point where he cites Aeschylus, the Greek poet, and specifically cites from his trilogy, “Oresteia,” the middle of the three plays, “The Libation Bearers,” a moment where the main character, Orestes, cries out, “Right collides with right.”

And Bonhoeffer doesn't say a whole lot about that. He cites it. He quotes that, “Right collides with right” and he says, “This is the definitive context for responsible action.” And I thought to myself, “Gosh, right colliding with right sounds an awful lot like what I've been wrestling with since that haunting question in the lecture hall that one evening. Maybe I should look into this further.”

And when I did, I got a little bit of a deep dive into Greek tragedy and into Aeschylus in particular. And then I got to understand how Bonhoeffer was using that and what that meant for him and what it could mean for my project. And if you know the Oresteia, you know that what's happened here is that Orestes mother has killed his father, and Orestes is in this position where he must avenge his father's death or his father's murder by his mother. But to do so is matricide, of course. And neither of these options is great. Leaving your father's death unavenged gets you in trouble with Zeus in that situation. But killing your mother gets you tracked down by the Furies.

And he's anguishing over this, yelling out “Right collides with right.” And the Chorus says something really interesting. The Chorus says, “But still, some god, if he desires, may work these strains into a song of joy.” And they urge him action. He does kill his mother to avenge his father, and he flees to Athens. He gets to Athens and a tribunal of twelve citizens is split on whether he can be acquitted, whether he can be declared innocent, which also reflects the split that he had in his own decision making and the fact that he shouldn't be easily let off the hook for killing his mother even if she killed his father.

And Athena, the goddess, works things out with the Furies, changed their name in exchange for them not tracking him down. So that was an interesting twist because “still some goddess, if she desired, worked those strains into a song of joy.”

But as I thought about what this might mean for Bonhoeffer, and then eventually for my own project, I realized that this problem of self-justification was one that always attended the tragic. Was one that always attended this context, which is the definitive context for responsible action as Bonhoeffer calls it, where right collides with right. Any way you go, you're giving up, undermining, destroying, or foregoing one or more goods to possess or secure one or more other goods. And none of those options are obviously self-justifying. They all involve some tradeoff. “Yet still some God if he desires, may work those strains into a song of joy.”

And so I've pivoted there from these are the challenges we face in environmental governance to as Christians, we don't need to obsess over our self-justification as we face those issues. We don't need to be stuck in paralysis, denial, skepticism, or nihilism as a response to the tragic. We can acknowledge the tragic, acknowledge that there are no self-justifying options and wait on God to justify us despite the fact that we may bear some guilt for whatever decision we make.

Elise: Yeah. This to me is often, frankly, one of the most compelling arguments of Christianity, that it actually requires an acknowledgement of disaster, of horror, of terror, of grief, of failing, and the guilt, not in a kind of self-flagellating way that, as you said, that would paralyze us – that's not the point – but a kind of deep, resonating guilt that can actually be productive and not make you paranoid. And so I really appreciate that you have brought that language into this discussion of environmental governance and what we think we are doing together as a community.

And I have to say one thing that I'm really struck by in hearing you talk about your ideas, you strike me as someone who's willing to give ideas time. You started the conversation talking about your experience as an undergrad and you let that play out and work itself out, and then you were asked that question in 2006, and then your book came out in 2019. You were working on this, thinking about it for years. You can certainly correct me, but I wonder too if this is also a Christian dimension of our approach to these massive problems in urban environments, in natural environments, in human communities, that it requires a working out in time that we sometimes feel panicked about, that we need to solve it now, that it needs to be relevant.

And I mean, with climate change, we are running out of time. That is very real. I don't mean to diminish that or say that that's not real. It is. But a kind of cosmic scope is useful even at a smaller scale.

Is that a fair assessment or a fair way to think about these really big scales of time and our own present moment?

Noah: I think it is fair. I think there's an element of patience involved, an element of recognition of, or smallness, that comes in the face of seeing that cosmic dimension, that cosmic scope or scale you're talking about.

And on the one hand that could tempt us to want to move even faster, right? “I don't have enough of the resources. I don't have forever. I'm not God, so I'd better really get on it.”

On the other hand, recognizing that we represent such a small part of that cosmic scale and scope of things, such a small period of time in the scope of creation, but also eternity especially, which is outside of time. That we aren't the only ones working on this. God is working on this, God will deliver us, not us, it's God that justifies, it's God that delivers both from the errors of our ways and the terrors of the world, whether that's climate change or something else.

I think I'm a bit informed by a little active pessimism. Back to Ellul again: in The Meaning of the City and a couple other places, he talks about taking an actively pessimistic approach, which is not having high expectations but still getting involved. That's really foreign to most of us in the United States. We're so obsessed with efficacy. We're so tempted to think that we are efficacious, we get things done, and in fact, we think we're not stewarding our gifts well if we don't. Your calling has to be something where you're getting something done. If not, it must not be your calling and you're being a bad steward of what God's given you. But he points out that there are good reasons to believe. So we're so obsessed with efficacy and we think we have, we have effects, and if we don't have effects, we're not stewarding things well, we can't imagine that it's our calling to do something that maybe doesn't ever yield fruit, or rarely does, or doesn't yield what we think that it will.

And I think that being informed by that approach, that active pessimism, as Ellul calls it, has helped me even with patience. I don't necessarily expect things to come at all, much less quickly. So I'm okay if it takes thirteen years.

Elise: I love that. For myself, this is one of the biggest lessons I've had to learn, too. And when you talk about vocation and when you talk about the specific language of gifts, especially gifts that yield products: if I don't do this, then that must mean I'm not using my gift or doing things properly, and then all too easily it becomes a self-referendum, that “I'm a bad person” or “I'm not doing good work.”

And I wanted to ask you about these things in the context that we're both involved in, which is higher education, which can be very product-oriented. And I mentioned just a second ago that I've had to learn this lesson in large part because I've spent most of my professional career as a contingent faculty member. And the particular pains of that and the sense that I'm not productive and what does this mean for my vocation? I thought I was called to this and it's not working out. That took more than six years to work through.

So I know that you're thinking a lot about the liberal arts and questions that the humanities ask, and I know that in your classes and in the centers that you run, you've got students on the ground doing good work.

How are you instructing them? How are you leading them to think about these issues of vocation and the questions that a specifically liberal arts orientation toward the world can ask?

Noah: One of the things that I want my students to think about vocation… I think we have a problem with how we talk about vocation in higher ed in general. We've been in a lot of pressure in all of our institutions to equip students to think about vocation. And the way we interpret that and measure that typically has to do with whether at twenty-two, if they're undergraduates, they know what they're going to do with the rest of their lives and they have their next steps mapped out. And I tell my students, very first thing that we talk about when we enter the subject of vocation is that is not where we're going with this. If we do that, we've actually failed you.

So one way to fail is not talk about vocation. Another way to fail is to talk about vocation like it's our job to make sure they know by the time they're twenty-two, what they're going to do for the rest of their life. Because I have needed vocational discernment over and over in some big or small way every year of my life. It's either, “Am I going to take this job?” “Am I going to consider that overture?” “Will I write this book?” “Will I take on that multi-year project?” “Will I serve on this committee?” “What's the good way to steward the resources I've been given?” Or small things like “How am I going to spend this morning? How does that fit into my call?” And I tell my students, “Teaching you vocational discernment means to teach you to discern your vocation over and over for the next fifty years.”

So that's our starting point. Our starting point is how do you learn how to do that and take some of that with.

Elise: What are you doing then, I guess I want to ask you? So, when you are doing this, how do you remind yourself that you're in a process of discernment and not capitulate to the very real pressures that are just part of the jobs that we do and the structure of the society that we live in? How do you remind yourself to put those into their proper place, not make idols of them?

Noah: Yeah. I have a loose framework for thinking about vocation that's sort of ready at hand for me and that I can easily share with students too and often do. And that involves thinking through gifts, desires, credentials, opportunities, God's revealed will, the needs of the world, my prior and higher callings and my community context, basically, the relationships and responsibilities I already have.

And I won't necessarily get into all of that, but I'll say that I think gifts are things that we have, but we can either develop them or neglect them. We can steward them well or poorly. I don't think all of a sudden I expect to wake up tomorrow with a bunch of new gifts. They're things I can probably discern now and either neglect or invest in.

Desires, I tell my students and myself, are more trustworthy the more I'm taking advantage of God's means of grace in my life and they're less trustworthy the less I'm taking advantage of those things. But I do think they're God-given and either distorted or to be more trusted because we're involved in church, in prayer, in reading scripture, et cetera, in the sacraments.

I think credentials, we're in a bit of control, but we can't rush them and we can't always change them if there's certain path dependencies built in. If I want to become a medical doctor, I can't do that tomorrow. I can't even go to medical school as a first step toward it tomorrow. I have to go back and do a bunch of remedial undergraduate pre-medical stuff if I want to. A post-baccalaureate pre-med thing. And then maybe I can go get that credential from medical school. I'm far off from that. Our students are in a different spot with that. They are, at least my undergraduate students, they're in pursuit of a specific credential that they'll share in common, and we'll provide them a platform for moving forward.

Opportunities are less in our control. Some people may say you make your own, and to some extent that's true, and I know that there's truth in that. But on the other hand, many of those come to us as gifts from God and from others, from God through others, in our lives.

Gifts, desires, credentials, opportunities, God's revealed will: what does the scripture have to say, not about this specific opportunity or how I'm going to spend my morning, or which thing I'm going to write, but about that big picture of how I should be in the world? How should I be as a scholar? Who has God called me to be?

The needs of the world: what do I see around me that's a gap that needs to be filled? And I know that tempts us a little bit to efficacy because it imagines myself as the solution to that gap. And I think we need to avoid some of that temptation, but it doesn't mean we need to not think about those needs.

And then I think we need to think as well about prior and higher callings. This is where it can get tricky. Prior and higher callings and community, which are related. Who has God put in our lives that can speak to our situation, our calling, our next steps? What's the advice we take? But the prior and higher callings part suggests that not all of callings ours are chosen. Not all of them are attained or achieved, to use social science language about individuals. Some of them are ascribed, they're given, we're born into families where we may have certain responsibilities. Not that those relationships and responsibilities can't be broken or can't change for other reasons, or that we couldn't abandon them. But those are things that exist without our choosing.

And the important thing about acknowledging that, I think, is it dignifies as calling or vocation a whole range of potential activities that aren't chosen by 22-year-olds after four years of paying for college. And I try to tell myself and my students both, that if we don't have an idea of calling or vocation that can comprehend the situation of an oldest child, in West Africa somewhere, whose parents have both died of Ebola, who has now inherited the responsibility to take care of other children in the family. If we can't dignify that as calling or vocation because we only think of it as something you sit around for four years thinking about on a college campus, we have a problem. If we can't dignify millennia of the human experience of inheriting responsibilities and living those out well as calling, we have a problem.

So I do think we need to deal with this question “to what extent calling is chosen, to what extent it's given?” We need to foreground that because if we don't, we end up filling that conversation with so much privilege. It just drips with privilege, as if we all get to just choose what we want. And if you can pay enough and hang out at Wheaton College or whatever other college you're at long enough and just put yourself in the right community with the right people for four years, well then you'll get it and you'll have a calling, but those other people won’t.

Elise: Thank you for saying that, particularly the last bit about privilege. And I hear something analogous between these issues of vocation and calling and imbuing a variety of callings with dignity. As I do, parts of our earlier conversation when we talked about the city as either the problem or the solution. That it's rough waters either way, and that we have to braid these complicated ideas together, make of them a productive paradox.

And it also seems to me like this model of vocation is one way to be a city, to be a people together, sacrificing, offering things up, never always finding the self-justifying solution, having that “right versus right” moment and yet being concerned for the other and finding ways to mutually enhance our lives together.

I'm about to undercut everything you just said about this though, and ask you, are you going to write a book on these issues? Are you working on a bigger project?

Noah: Well, right now I'm actually working on a biography of Jacques Ellul.

Elise: Oh, cool. Okay, great. Yeah.

Noah: And that's my main project and I think if I don't make it my main project for a while, it won't get done.

But I do have some outlines sitting around here somewhere for a book that would be on these themes of vocation that I just laid out, but specifically navigating the tension between the given aspect of vocation and the chosen aspect of vocation, both of them, like you said, just as cities with problems and solutions, that's fraught on both sides, it's fraught on both sides.

I shouldn't give the impression that only the chosen part of vocation is dripping with privilege. The given part is problematic too, because when we emphasize that too much, what we end up with is me telling somebody else what their given calling is, usually because, well, in our society, they're not a white man, right? So what has happened is that people who don't have power aren't on the right side of certain hierarchies in their society historically, are the ones who have more of the given and less of the chosen. So it's a matter of not neglecting the given aspects of our vocation without also falling into the trap of emphasizing them only when it's convenient and then “I like to put people in their boxes.”

Elise: Right. I wish we had another hour because I feel like there's a whole other conversation here about precisely this issue. I mean, we've been talking about it all along, these problems of power and privilege and our desire to tell other people what to do and how to live their lives and to structure their interior dispositions as well as their outward dispositions. That of course, manifests itself in the built environment as well, as we've been talking about.

But I've really enjoyed this conversation. I've learned a lot from it. It's made me very excited, and I want to thank you again for being here.

Noah: Well, thank you for having me, Elise. I really appreciate it.