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.
Resources
American Compass Essays
Our Educational Colonialism
What about the Rotten Culture of the Rich
Respect the People
Libertarianism for Me, Authoritarianism for Thee
Immigrants and the American Dream
Augusto Del Noce The Crisis of Modernity
Podcast with Carlo Lancellotti on Augusto Del Noce
Robert Nisbet: Quest for Community
God Filled My Emptiness
“we have nothing for what we have to absolved….”
Also see: Values in a Time of Upheaval and Without Roots co-authored with Marcello Pera
Hart Island burial place in NYC
John Paul II/ Karol Wojtyla: The Way to Christ On the importance of knowing oneself as a subject and not an object
Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America
By Arnade, Chris
Ep. 18: Chris Arnade: Dignity, Poverty, Faith, & Seeking Respect in Back Row America