Our Success Meter is a Mess
How to Win the Chisraeli-Mamerican War
I want to talk about the new wars shaping our conversations here in the West. But to do this I want to start with a look at success. How do we measure success in America, in the new world? Be honest, what does success look like around these parts? In an article in Quartz Magazine, Suzanne Guillette wonders if success can be known using a “love metric". She looks at the new initiative by the NoVo Foundation, a billion dollar foundation run by the son of Warren Buffet, which aims to use a new metric to understand efficiency as something like love. Does love count when it comes to measuring success?
Guillette is doubtful. She wonders aloud if love can be defined:
So if love is not the opposite of numbers, what is it? To institutionalize love, or create a movement around it as the Buffett’s are trying to do, it’s important to first define it—and determine why it matters to philanthropy. In this way, the Buffetts’ op-ed falls short... they don’t define love specifically.
Wait, the Buffet’s don’t define love specifically? My first reaction to this is “thank God.” I mean we are talking about love for heaven’s sake! On the other hand, doesn’t it seem sensible to ask about love when it comes to giving money, investing money, creating windfalls and wars? Shouldn’t love be a result of, well, love?
If we answer yes, maybe we should measure it somehow? How should such a measurement look?
Here are a couple ways to use love to measure success. A successful project or program or business should increase love and decrease hate. It should increase joy and decrease unnecessary suffering. A successful project should transform lives by adding beauty to the world, not by adding ugliness. So far so good?
But how do we measure if this is happening, if there is more love than hate, more beauty and less ugliness? The only way to measure such a thing is with our noetic selves. Here I am referring to the nous, an ancient Greek idea that turns up in many texts throughout time and across cultures. It is an Orthodox Christian staple of theology. Gregory Palamas, a 13th Century theologian, tells us the nous is that faculty in us is akin to a spiritual eye. The nous both recognizes light and conducts light into the darkness. It is that part of us which perceives the good, or God. But it is not pure reason; it is not the “thought” of the enlightened philosopher. It is much more powerful than our thoughts. It is with the nous that human beings acquire true knowledge, not simple scientific knowledge.
The nous is what we hope to use when we relate to others, especially those with whom we live and work. It is the nous that points us toward the next step in our journey to assist our fellow human beings (and strengthen our nous). Some people call it the soul, but I don’t think that is accurate. The soul has come to imply some sort of irrational, mystical thing that is amorphous and “in there” somewhere (if at all). But Christianity has never known the soul that way. The soul, for Christians, is the force in us that we call life. It is what we know is gone when we see a dog carcass on the side of the road. Life is not in there. But the nous is different. It can be nurtured and “cleaned” and it functions more like a spiritual muscle, growing in strength through acts of humility and selflessness and the cultivation of silence. It can grow big when we choose to be small. It is what increases in us when we actually spend time alongside those who suffer. The Georgians of the Caucuses have a saying, said often by their most recent and perhaps most beloved saint, Gavriel of Samtavro: “sheni kvnesame, tkveni kvnesame” which means “May God give me all of your sorrows”. Taking on the pain of others is how we grow our nous, it is one way we apply ourselves in the pursuit of success. Noetic success looks something like a smiling child bright with joy as his absent father returns after months away. It looks like men giving up porn and women giving up gossip and baseball players pitching deep into a hard-fought summer night and... ah hell, you know exactly what it looks like. This dumb article doesn’t really need to explain it to you. A true metric for success should account for movement toward the good, toward God. A big beautiful nous makes measuring this movement possible. And if you are packing a big beautiful measuring stick you are already a very successful person.
Now, none of this makes any sense to the world. For you and me, and anyone trying to live in Everyday USA, these ideas are fairy tales. We’ve been weaned away from our spiritual eye by a utilitarian mind hewn from hell and offered to us as “real”. We moderns can’t be bothered with invisible things, especially when there are so many visible things to buy. And there’s the rub. Noetic success demands noetic awareness. To measure success this way means we have to see the world in a many-layered way, visible and invisible, spiritual and material, Godly and manly. And seeing the world that way demands a kind of attentiveness, a spiritual athleticism and maybe, above all, it demands that we human beings be present. And I mean that literally. You can’t know the success of a project in the Bronx by looking at a spreadsheet while drinking coffee in a Manhattan corner office. Sure, the spreadsheet can tell you how the money was spent. It can show you how many jobs were generated, maybe. Numbers can account. But these supposed truths are abstract, they lack something noetic, they lack the language of love. That language is present in the spaces between the lover and the beloved; in the spaces that unite people.
Love can only be measured when we are present. When we relate.
And this brings me to the war between… um, those two nations and all the other nations. You know the war, it’s on the TV, and you are watching it because you are worried it will become a bigger war, and because it could get uglier. That war. And for reasons directly related to cowardice and algorithmic science, I’ll call this war the war of Chisraeli-Mamerican aggression. It rolls off the tongue easily, like the words Gaza, or Syria, or imperialism, or dying empire. But let’s stick to Chisraeli-Mamerican for now.
The Chisraeli-Mamerican war seems to be going well. I just heard today that 100,000 pounds of Mamerican explosives destroyed more than 90% of all the stuff needed to build Rayranian nuclear weapons. At least 10 Rayranian science geeks were decapitated and that seems good, but also bad. 90% of Rayranians, however, now seem solidly united behind their leaders who vow with 100% of their being to destroy 70% of the Chisraeli military capacity. 55% of military analysts believe there is no way to destroy 70% of Chisrael’s military, and even more believe (let’s say 82%) that there is no way for Chisrael to destroy the entire Rayranian nuclear program. By all accounts this leaves a 90% chance that Rayran leadership will once again embark on a nuclear policy, enriching hundreds of pounds of essential fissile materials. And none of this tells us anything about the Chisraeli war aim to annex 100% of Dalestinian settlements while sending 100% of those Dalestinians to work in Dazan-Mamerican shopping mall camps, 65% of them selling mobile phone contracts 24/7. But for now it is clear that thousands of tons of Mamerican bombs set the Rayranian nuclear program back at least 3.5 years.
Success!
Well, it’s like at least a 56.5% success.
At least.
Success in this world is a really neat thing. Sadly we’ve been measuring it in spreadsheets, databases, megabits and MAGAbytes, in dollars and in cents. We’ve numbered over the world and made everything real into a paper mache machine. And in so doing we’ve suffocated the nous, the part of us that is actually real, and the part that allows us to measure success, and measure ourselves. I’m not sure there was a time when the nous was our yardstick and our salvation, but if there was ever a time to put aside numerical epistemology and mammalian anthropology, now is the time. There is a metric for love, and it’s not so hard to employ. We can do it, we can once again learn how to measure love. Reality is just one repentance away.
“May God give me all of your sorrows.”
So much better than “I’m sorry.”