Chris Arnade

Dignity, Poverty, Faith, & Seeking Respect in Back Row America

In this episode, I speak with Chris Arnade about his book "Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America". We discuss themes from his book including poverty, addiction, racism, and the value of home and place, the role of faith, and the role of McDonalds as a respite and community center.

In this episode I speak with Chris Arnade about his book Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. We discuss themes from his book including poverty, addiction, racism, and the value of home and place, the role of faith, and the role of McDonalds as a respite and community center. Arnade spent several years in the Bronx and throughout America listening and talking to people in communities that are stigmatized, often very poor, and have been generally neglected and left behind.

We talk about the education gap and the problem of “front row” worldview in which the elite and highly educated become the arbiters of success. They neglect what Arnade calls “non-credentialed forms of meaning” and impose a reductionist framework that denies dignity to those who don’t have or want “front row” values. We discuss how a materialist, utility maximizing vision of success and the economy undermines education, work, family and community.

In the second half of the conversation we discuss faith, redemption, and atonement, and how the front row’s empiricist, cold, secular rationalism scientific doesn’t do justice to the complexities of human life, suffering, and the desire for meaning, dignity, and respect. Arnade argues that “atheism is an intellectual luxury that is wrong” and that “front row” scientism lacks epistemic humility, and has a false view of science and certainty. Arnade shows that each person, no matter our state, is a subject, and not simply an object to be manipulated or problem to be solved. And that many of our deepest problems cannot be solved by technical means alone, but are philosophical and cultural problems—not of the poor—but of the elite.

Biography

Chris Arnade is a photographer and writer. He is the author of Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America (link below) and writes essay on society, poverty, and politics. He has a Ph.D. in physics from John Hopkins University. For 20 years he worked on Wall Street before leaving to pursue photography and writing full time.

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