The Shepherd's Strange Arithmetic
By any sound accounting, the shepherd of Christ’s parable is a fool. He leaves ninety-nine sheep. Exposed to the weather and the wolves, bound to wander, the shepherd leaves them all in pursuit of one stray. When the Lord tells the story, however, he presents shepherd’s choice as the obvious one:
Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. (Luke 15:4-7)
Luke Burgis spent years trying is decipher this arithmetic. His wrestling with it produced his new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, and it is the subject of my conversation with him on the latest episode of Acton Line.
Burgis is best known for Wanting, his very successful popularization of René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. The theory gives a counterintuitive account of our own desires which are not generated from within but caught from without. From the conscious and more often unconscious imitation of models. In The One and the Ninety-Nine that insight is extended from what we want to who we are. If desire is contagious, so is identity. The parable becomes the hermeneutical key to the digital age. Imitation is not so much a flaw in human nature as its grammar. Anxieties personal, intellectual, and cultural now spread at the speed of light through digital crowds which now fit in pockets.
Frictionless digital spaces—feeds, group chats, quote-tweets—make it easier to both flee into isolation or dissolve into the crowd. The acute challenge is found in remaining ourselves while remaining connected to others.
Against both temptations Burgis sets what he calls, borrowing from family systems theory, the “solid self.” A self capable of remaining grounded and calm in anxious environments. This is the only sort of person capable of deep and meaningful relationships, because only such a person has a self to give rather than a self perpetually shaped by external pressure.
How is such a self forged? By cultivating one-on-one relationships within our families, churches, and institutions rather than encountering one another only as members of groups. Burgis speaks movingly of his own family’s experience of caregiving, and we range from there into education and artificial intelligence. The remedy is recovering our capacity to encounter transcendence: the true, the good, the beautiful, and, Lord willing, the Lord himself.
Which brings us back to the shepherd. His arithmetic is only strange if a sheep is just a fraction of a flock. One out of ninety-nine. It is perfectly sound if each one is irreplaceable. The parable is not bad accounting but an illustration of God’s economy, one in which the person is never simply one of the many.
Listen to the whole conversation: