Have you ever considered the difference between “things” and “stuff”?
This might seem like a funny notion to parse out, but plenty of very smart people have spent significant amounts of time and brain power doing just that – and the more you dig into the difference, the more interesting it gets.
A 2012 article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gets into this topic with some depth, noting that one of the main ways that “Stuff Ontologists” and “Thing Theorists” (yes, these exist!) conceptualize things versus stuff is by sorting out how far down you can reduce something. If you can get something down to one item, it’s a thing. If having one of it doesn’t make sense, it’s probably stuff. Example: I can have one sweater, but I can’t have one wool. So, another way to think of it is that “stuff” is what “things” are made of.
Okay, but so what? Does the difference between things and stuff have any bearing on our experience, or is it just a fun thing (or fun stuff) to argue about?
There’s a growing field of study called “material perception,” and its scientists and scholars say yes, it’s very relevant. Knowing what stuff our things are made of has always been an integral aspect of human cognition, survival, and understanding of how to interact well with what’s around us.
It’s a fairly recent branch of scientific inquiry. In 2001, Dr. Edward Adelson, a brain and visual scientist at MIT, wrote a groundbreaking paper on material perception. He explained what’s going on in this sensory and cognitive process:
Humans can infer material properties using all the senses. Wool has a certain look and a certain feel, and when wet it has a certain smell. To test whether a wall is solid wood or mere paneling, we can knock on it and listen to the sound. We may squeeze a pear to decide whether it is ripe, and then verify our judgment with the taste and texture when we bite into it.
Other studies have since confirmed the idea that our imagination and our previous learned experiences can be a big help to fill in the gaps when we can’t employ all of our senses. If I’m in the forest and I see a tree with green berries on it, my memory and my imagination might call to mind a time when I ate green berries before and they felt hard and tasted bitter. I don’t need to eat them again to fill in that input using all my senses this time around, and I save myself that unpleasant and possibly dangerous experience in the present.
And yet it’s our imagination and our assumptions that also have the potential to lead us astray. This is the enduring marvel of optical illusions, beautifully executed pieces of realistic art, or even the current trend of cakes and chocolates made to look like other non-cake objects, with mind-bogglingly convincing results.
I love me a good baking contest show of any flavour, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching “Is It Cake?” Skilled bakers compete against one another, replicating different real-life objects — a handbag, a lantern, or a burlap sack of flour, for example — using only cake, frosting, and other edible elements. Once each baker finishes their creation, it’s put in front of a panel of judges, and the judges have to pick out the cake from a lineup of real items that the cake was based on.
One of these reindeer figurines is, in fact, cake!
I can’t remember exactly which episode it was, but after the judges’ panel had been fooled a few times in a row by contestants, another identical-looking lineup was put in front of them. One of the judges, frustrated but laughing, cried out, “UGH! We can’t trust anything! ANY of this could be cake! NONE of this can be trusted! Now what do we do?!?” Since the constructed assumptions that they had in their minds during the previous rounds were proven to be unreliable, even with a brand new encounter featuring a different cake and set of objects, their attitude had shifted.
Of course, the show is all in fun, but there was something about that judge’s exclamation that lodged in my mind.
When I meet a person and start to learn about who they are, I use what I sense of them to discern what sort of person they are – what stuff they’re made of. Like material perception, this is a natural and necessary part of human interaction that we all do, activating our internal panel of judges to determine to what degree we trust this other person to actually be what they are presenting themselves to be. The assumptions that we carry to this assessment as our tools have been taught or learned, explicitly or implicitly. (There are aspects of these determinations and biases that can be unhealthy and lead to stereotyping and even bigotry, and those definitely need to be challenged, but that’s a discussion for a whole other post.)
As we move through life and accumulate relationships and interactions with others, one of the hardest and bitterest things is not when we recognize a “green berry” of a person right off the bat, but when we get fooled – when our senses and assumptions have been totally wrong, and we learn that the person is not made of the stuff we thought they were.
After this happens a few times with the same assumption being proven false, we might feel like that judge. None of this can be trusted! Now what do we do?
Up until about my 20s, in the mid-aughts or so, if I heard someone was a Christian, even if I knew nothing else about them, I felt immediate trust toward them. I was certain that we were made of the same stuff. Through my 30s and now in my 40s, I hit my “conjunctive faith” stage, embracing more complexity and openness in my faith. At the same time, large swaths of the broader Western church have moved in a different direction, leaning ever further into neo-conservatism, Christian nationalism, and even christofascism.
I confess that now when I hear that someone is a Christian, even though I still consider myself a follower of Christ as well, that instant trust just isn’t there anymore.
I’ve lost enough relationships with Christian friends and had enough damaging interactions with Christian acquaintances that learning someone is a Christian is no longer enough for me to assume that we’re made of the same stuff. If I have a lineup of Christians in front of me, I can’t squint at them from a distance to try to determine if they see our faith as a call to radical love and welcome, or if their expression of love is just a thin, cleverly tinted layer of theological fondant hiding a desire for power, control, and exclusion.
What I want to avoid here is getting bogged down in the icky triteness of dismissing someone else as “not a real Christian.” I get frustrated when that thought-terminating cliché gets wielded as a blunt instrument in conversations, particularly in social media arguments. And yet, it’s just as unhelpful to say, “Well, we’re all different, and the christofascists have their place in the diversity of the faith just as much as anyone else.”
But the more open question remains: none of this can be trusted; now what do we do?
I wish I could end with some sort of positive guidance, but it’s not simple – and the answer will likely be very different in different situations and contexts. That’s the challenge of mature discernment at work. I know that for me, it’s still going to take more than knowing someone is a Christian to trust that I know what stuff they’re really made of.
But beyond that, I hope, God helping us, that we will strive to be the kind of people who earn and extend trust, who walk the talk of our faith, and who bear the ripe, beautiful fruit of the Spirit. That’s the good stuff.
Unripe raspberries photo by María Emilia Orueta.
6 Responses
So interesting how you wove all this together. Thank-you.
A fine piece of work … the right stuff, to make a fine thing …
I was particularly alert when reading of your journey from trust to non-trust … I think it’s an experience so many have had … I’m older than you are, I’m 81 … but share that journey, from a comfortable trust in someone’s self-affirmation, “I’m a Christian” to the more skeptical, “Yeah, but what kind of a Christian?”
I’m also weary of the word, “real,” as in real Christian … truth be told, the kind of Christianity I abhor is very much a part of the story … and perhaps even the majority of the story – with blood and soil being the dominant feature.
With you, I still believe there are standards by which the various strands of self-affirmed Christianity are measured … but all that aside, to live as well as we can by the light we have. To raise our voices in objection, and more importantly, in affirmation.
The affirmations are profndly important, but so are the objections … to merely speak of love and not challenge what we perceive to be counterfeit is a job unfinished, though such objections be fraught with danger and always the possibility of spiritual vanity.
Thanks for sharing this essay … keep up the good work.
Ah, I resonate with all of this, Tom! There’s a lot of exploration to be done and difficult truths to come to terms with when we grapple with “real” Christian history, isn’t there. Even when the dominant features aren’t what they should have been, that doesn’t make it any less true that they have indeed been the dominant features.
I love your exhortation to live as well as we can by the light we have. In a way it kind of reminds me of the encouragement that “when we know better, we then do better”. There’s a growth and a clarity that can get brighter when we walk intentionally into that light that we have. That’s the stuff that keeps me coming back and back even when I get disillusioned by people or the weight of history.
This is so good, Kathryn. I remember hearing how back in the early church days people would draw a fish symbol in the sand with their toe to show someone else that they followed Jesus, and that was an instant connection. But it just doesn’t feel that simple. And you hinted at this, too: just as it’s possible to be “fooled” into thinking we can trust someone when we can’t, it’s possible to be fooled the other way, to assume at first glance that someone CAN’T be trusted. So often it is our own baggage and biases talking. So I agree completely that we need nuance and discernment. It’s not a straightforward issue! I appreciate how you’ve reflected on it here.
(And I love watching those videos of cakes that look like things. People really are talented!)
Such a good point – the retreat into an automatic reaction of not-trusting isn’t a healthy answer either! Finding that balance between vulnerability/protection, or even optimism/pessimism if you will, really is a constant adjustment. It can be tiring mental and emotional work, and we’ll get it wrong sometimes – but I’m still convinced that it’s important and good work to do.
Fascinating discussion. When I meet someone who claims to be a Christian, I like to give them the benefit of the faith until they prove otherwise, and I hope they do the same for me. I can’t help but think of Paul’s words, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” and wonder how they fit this discussion. If someone says they’re a Christian, I want to believe them, I hope that this will prove true into the future, I bear and endure the things that seem to speak against their confession. As per your opening angle, there is likely bad “stuff” mixed in with the good “stuff” that still results in an overall good “thing” (a follower of Christ). I know I have bad “stuff” in what I hope is an overall good “faith.”