Follow-up to “Alma’s doctrine of desire”

Response to Tyler’s comment

This post is a follow-up to Tyler’s comment from the post, “Alma’s doctrine of desire”:

Neil L. Anderson’s BYU Education Week devotional this past Tuesday took up this same topic: https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/neil-l-andersen/educating-our-righteous-desires/#

The primary contention comes down to your point: “that our desires are, at least to some degree, under the purview of our agency, that we can choose and be held accountable for our desires.”

Yet, the possibility of educating our desires seems…counter cultural? It feels like our age of authenticity, to the extent that it frames our own desires as the hypergood, might chide Alma for putting off his desire to be an angel as a self-imposed clipping of his own wings instead of letting himself soar. Don’t curb your potential, man, chase those wings!

Yet, as you point out, Alma sees aligning his desires with God’s as the path to joy. Part of this seems to be the idea that you can learn to desire different, “better” things. But that brings with it the notion that your own (initial) desires might not be best. On the one hand, that feels really simple to grasp—I know you desire the cookie, but you can learn to embrace the carrot stick—and on the other hand, that line of reasoning feels complex, in as much as it relates to the way we tend to view our identities as significantly shaped by our desires: “l’m just not a people person.”

I guess what I’m saying is, can you say more about the wrestle between desire, choice, and identity:

“Judgment after this life is not so much an evaluation of whether we have measured up as it is, to use Alma’s word, a “restoration” back to who we were and wanted to be. Our desires communicate who we have chosen as our mediators, and the nature of our rivalry with them, and those choices define our identity.”

I realize that there’s a version of expanding on this that extends into the pressing social issues of the moment, but I don’t think that’s the only context or subtext here. I think it’s also a broader question of whether and how my desires make me “me,” and what it means for “me” if my desires can be educated. In Anderson’s words: “We can, through patience and time, become more than we are.”

If we can learn to want different things, and those new wants, in turn, make us new creatures, how does that complicate (if at all) the popular adage, “you are kenough”?

As I understand your comment, you are making two points (or at least, the modern world makes these points) related to the role of desire in forming our identity. The first is that our desires are a manifestation of our authentic self, and thus to correct or change our desires would be an attempt to correct or change who we actually are, an attempt that is either bound to fail or that threatens our authentic self. The second is that the solution to a sense of disconnect between our authentic self and the person we want to be is not constant striving to become “more than we are now,” in Anderson’s words, but an acceptance of one’s limits, of embracing being “kenough.”

In response, I want to come back to Girard’s theory of mimetic desire (I should admit that my understanding of Girard comes almost entirely from Luke Burgis’s Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.) One of the core insights of Girard’s theory is that the idea of an “authentic” self is a fantasy. The idea of authenticity implies that we are who we are regardless of other people or outside forces. According to that idea, in Girard’s views, there are no “authentic” desires because all desires emerge in response to those around us, whether or not we acknowledge or recognize it. We see this in the tension we place on modern identities to be both authentic and unique simultaneously. The former implies that we are who we are regardless of others; the latter, in comparison to others. In this is a tension that can never be resolved. In a recent professional meeting, new colleagues were asked to introduce themselves by sharing “something quirky that brings them joy.” The operative word is “quirky”—if I had stood up and said something banal, like “What brings me joy is ice cream and puppies!”, it would suggest that I was not fully unique, and thus not fully authentic. We are driven to come up with increasingly specific or niche desires in a quest to remain fully ourselves…but that drive is motivated by how we see, and imagine that we are seen, others around us. How authentic is that?

Thus, we might argue that defining our authentic self according to our desires makes our identity more unstable, not less, because those desires are prone to shift as we fixate on a different set of rivals. One of my twin girls, wanting to be known as more than just “one of the twins,” went through a mini-identity crisis a few years back when she tried to construct her identity—from the way she dressed to the way she spoke of herself—around one passion (art) and then another (reading). This would work for several months, but each time, she would eventually find that people only saw her in light of that particular passion. Once that happened, she would radically reject that interest, to the point of throwing away her artworks and books. It’s not that she lost a real interest in those passions (it was very awkward for her when she wanted to reacquire the books she had given away), but building her sense of self around them left her identity too vulnerable to her self-consciousness. One of the things that eased her anxiety was coming to see that she was more than those passions, that she could enjoy them without feeling like they constituted who she was.

This, I think, leads your second point, about the relative advantages of seeking contentment in accepting who we are by accepting our desires as they are. I would question whether it is even possible to actually just say, “I’m kenough” and have it at that. Let’s take the Barbie movie, where all the Barbies have a distinct identity, and all the Kens are…just Kens. Girard argues that mimetic rivalry is stronger, not weaker, when rivals are more alike because it is less clear what the hierarchy of values, or who should be respected. The root of Ken’s angst is not that Barbie is ambivalent about him (he seems clueless about what it would mean to be with her too) but that he is forced into constant rivalry with the other Kens because he is indistinguishable from them. The whole “I’m just Ken” song is about how he wishes that he was distinctive, how he believes that he should be distinctive, but that he nonetheless must resign himself to accepting his non-identity as his identity.

But telling yourself that you’re “kenough” is like telling yourself to stop being sad. Like happiness or cosmic meaning, contentment cannot be willed into existence. That’s why the ending to Ken’s journey is so abrupt and unsatisfying. He is by far the most frustrated, fascinating character in the film—and in the end, he is not given any sort of resolution, just a baggy sweatshirt, a shrug, and a hollow tautology. By not addressing the source of mimetic desire at the heart of his angst, Ken’s storyline has nowhere to go, so the film just pulls the plug and moves on.

You can’t stop being a human being who desires; the only solution is to learn to direct your desires towards a more positive mimetic mediator, a figure who will not draw you into a spiral of corrosive envy.¹ In Alma’s case, joy is found in God and his justice—not even desiring to be an angel can bring him contentment. Directing his desire towards God prevents him from envying the missionary success of his fellow travellers, and allows him to respect the agency of those he wishes to convert (the “perhaps” in Alma 29:9, acknowledging that his desire to preach cannot cancel out someone’s choice to receive, is a much more honest and reliable self-awareness than “Ken is me!”). He does not force himself to stop hoping or wishing; he just anchors those desires in a foundation outside himself, the only type of foundation that can be permanent.

1. For what it’s worth, this is one limitation I have with the devotional you linked to, which I hadn’t heard of until you mentioned it. Elder Anderson says the solution to educating our desires is exercising our agency and depending on God’s grace. While I’m not one to dismiss agency and grace, I think that guidance is too undefined to be of much use. To go back to your cookie/carrot example, you can’t just make yourself like the taste of carrots more than cookies. You can, however, direct your desires towards a mediating figure—someone with better health, a more attractive phsyique, Bugs Bunny—who will direct your desires away from wanting cookies all the time to wanting carrots. Whether that change in desire is good for your mental or spiritual health is a different matter.