Introduction
As many of you know, I have really enjoyed the books of Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In the true confessions department, I have not yet read every last one of his books, but I have read the big boys, Antifragile, Skin in the Game, and The Black Swan, and have enjoyed them a great deal.
A number of years ago, I had mentioned somewhere on this blog that any remarkable historical event, however unlikely, could easily be shown after the fact to have been inevitable by any competent historian. One hundred historians, safely ensconced after the fact, could easily demonstrate the inevitability of the Reformation or the collapse of the Soviet Union. But somehow all this inevitability is invisible to everybody before the fact. Anyway, after I wrote that, or something very much like it, some commenter asked if I had read The Black Swan, which I had previously purchased but—being a man of sin—had not read. I thought something like huh, took it down off my shelves and that was that. I was promptly edified.
What Antifragility Is
I bring all this up because of a central lesson in Antifragile, a lesson that has great relevance for evangelicals in our time. An oak tree that has withstood many storms is an oak that has roots that go deep because it has withstood many storms. It is stronger because of what it has gone through. But greater strength is not omnipotence. Antifragile does not mean invincible. A man cannot study the principles of antifragility in such a way as to become an immortal. But within the confines of this tempestuous life, being antifragile is far to be preferred to the main alternative, which is the condition of being fragile. Here is Taleb:
“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
Taleb
Fragile institutions freak out over the prospect of tumult. Sturdy institutions say huh. Antifragile institutions mutter oh boy, oh boy. Antifragile people are in a position to count it all joy when they meet various trials (Jas. 1:2). If you are fragile, if you have adopted the safety-first tenets of fragility, the scriptural exhortations that summon us to welcome adversity with steadfast faith and courage make no sense.
“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us”
Romans 5:3-5 (ESV)
There it is. Antifragility in a nutshell.
Big Eva
I believe that it was Carl Trueman who coined the phrase Big Eva. He was referring to the network of conferences and big name celebrities that dot the evangelical landscape so winsomely—TGC, T4G, and so on. But the assumptions and outlook of Big Eva extends beyond their A-list celebrities—all celebrity cultures have their B-listers also. And B-listers complaining about A-listers is part of the fragile show. To have someone who wins a Tony snarking about someone who won an Oscar is not exactly breaking free of that celebrity culture. It is not any kind of genuine alternative. A fragile subset complaining about a fragile set is not antifragile. Antifragility is as antifragility does.
We enjoyed having Chris Wiley here in Moscow this last week, and he was kind enough to remind us of just how fragile the celebrity culture of big evangelicalism actually is. And here is another takeaway point from Taleb. Fragile is not synonymous with small. Small things can certainly be fragile, but so can enormous things. The Soviet Union was fragile, but ten years before the collapse it looked like the monolith it was pretending to be.
In the same way, Big Eva is more than a widespread evangelical Reformed subculture. It is a widespread evangelical Reformed subculture with an HR department. The things that make huge corporations skittish (being aware of their own fragility) and drive them ever leftward are the same things that make our conference circuit skittish and driven ever leftward. It is not so much the bad decisions that come out of HR, although those contribute. It is the mere fact that you even have an HR department. In short, just as the big corporations of America are festooned with rainbows, so also Big Eva will at some future point be festooned with rainbows. And for the same reason—because they are fragile, and susceptible to the demands of the most intolerant (another Taleb point).
Nice and Fragile
The accelerant in this process is the cultural value that evangelicals place on being “nice,” which prevents us from adopting the posture and outlook of the antifragile, which sometimes comes off to the sensitive souls among us as being far too brusque.
And in this set up, we have the worst of both worlds. The niceness imperative dictates how we respond in public, how we behave at the press conference, say. But the virtue that is supposed to be telegraphed by that niceness—kindness, gentleness, and self-control—is almost entirely missing behind the scenes. When it comes to dealing with competitors, interlopers, and border raiders in various turf wars, the leadership of our movement can be just as nasty, and play just as dirty, as anyone. In other words, we own the long knives, we just don’t wave them at the press conference, and we don’t use them on our enemies, but rather on our former friends and erstwhile colleagues.
And so, we are nice to the point of being a type of refined sugar in public, but we leave room for some battery acid in private. We accepted the dictates of our secular culture, and found ourselves bowing and scraping before authoritative HR memos, and we assumed our appointed (but very temporary) station in the serried ranks of the fragile.
I said temporary. Why did I say temporary? Wasn’t I clear? We have mustered with the fragile.