Reimagining the Good Life with Amy Julia Becker

The World Is the Wrong Shape for Women with Leah Libresco Sargeant

• Amy Julia Becker, Leah Libresco Sargeant • Season 9 • Episode 5

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S9 E5 — There is a lot of conversation right now about the role of women and men in society. Whether we’re talking about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal or the viral essay "The Great Feminization" and all the commentary it sparked, it’s clear we’re in a cultural moment where we don’t quite know how to talk about men and women. Should we see men and women as interchangeable? What does equality look like when our bodies are not the same? Can we admit our neediness and maintain our dignity as women or as men? These are some of the questions I'm asking Leah Libresco Sargeant as we talk about her new book, The Dignity of Dependence.

00:00 The World is the Wrong Shape for Women
6:14 The Lie of Autonomy and How It Harms Everyone
21:09 Building a Just Society: Dismantling False Anthropology
22:52 Understanding Disability and Unemployment
25:43 Societal Examples of Dependent Communities
30:15 The Dignity of Dependence
32:51 Legacy of Care in Society
38:20 The Costs of Devaluing Vulnerability
41:14 Practices for Embracing Dependence

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

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WATCH this conversation on YouTube: Amy Julia Becker on YouTube

SUBSCRIBE to Amy Julia's Substack: amyjuliabecker.substack.com

JOIN the conversation on Instagram: @amyjuliabecker

LISTEN to more episodes: amyjuliabecker.com/shows/

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ABOUT OUR GUEST:

Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of several books, including The Dignity of Dependence. She runs the substack Other Feminisms, which focuses on how to advocate for women as women in a world that makes an idol of autonomy. She lives in Maryland and works in family policy in D.C.
Other Feminisms: https://www.otherfeminisms.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/leahlibresco

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Note: This transcript is autogenerated and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Amy Julia Becker (00:05)
Hi friends, I'm Amy Julia Becker and this is Reimagining the Good Life, a podcast about challenging the assumptions about what makes life good, proclaiming the inherent belovedness of every human being, and envisioning a

There is a lot of conversation right now about the role of women and men in society. Whether it's the Jeffrey Epstein scandal or the viral essay called The Great Feminization and the commentary that has come out in the response to that. Whether it's the aftermath of the Me Too movement, we are clearly in a cultural moment where we don't quite know how to talk about or what to do about men and women. So should we see men and women as interchangeable?

What does equality look like when our bodies are not the same? Can we admit our neediness and maintain our dignity as women or as men? These are some of the questions I'm asking my guest, Leah Labresco Sargent today. We are discussing her latest book and it is a book that I highly recommend, The Dignity of Dependence.

Leah Labresco-Sergeant, thank you for being here with me today. I am really delighted. As I told you, I heard about your new book, The Dignity of Dependence from a friend over the summer. And then I went on to receive a couple different additional advanced copies of it, which I think just indicated there were a lot of people who were kind of thinking about this book and knew that I would want to be engaged with.

the ideas that you are offering within it. I thought we might start with just the opening line of the book. It's the same as the title of your opening chapter and you write, the world is the wrong shape for

which is a very arresting sentence. But I thought maybe you could explain what you mean by those words as a way into the book as a whole and the ideas that you're really exploring here altogether. So can you explain the world is the wrong shape for which?

Leah Libresco Sargeant (02:02)
Absolutely. I feel like I'm really borrowing from my friend Sarah Hendren's wonderful work in What Can a Body Do? where she's curious about how the built world reflects our assumptions about who will inhabit or move through that world. Who is it hospitable to? Who is it implicitly hostile or surprised to see them there? And a lot of our built environment and our social and other infrastructure assumes male is the norm.

see this in a variety of cases. The airbag in your car assumes you'll be sitting as far back as a man is. When you're sitting too close, the airbag actually doesn't do as good a job of keeping you safe. The counters in your kitchen are at the height that would be most comfortable for a man to be chopping at, which is a little frustrating because you'd think the one benefit of a slightly sexist society is that your kitchen counters are woman-heighted. then beyond that, I think one of the ways you see this come up

is that we take the male pattern of fertility, of not being pregnant, as the default way that all people should interact with children and that women's fertility is viewed as this kind of way that women fall short of the male norm. It's a defect that we're expected to remedy to get back to normal. Where I think this plays out morally is that

people find it easiest to make the case for male and female equality or equal dignity equality under the law when they can say that men and women are essentially interchangeable. And I think it makes sense that people land there in a increasingly secular and pluralistic society. If you don't share that many moral intuitions or can't trust that you do with your interlocutor, you're going to look for something that's just a blunt, brute fact. If two things are interchangeable, then they're the same.

they're equal and anything else is bigotry. But there lots of places where women aren't interchangeable with men, and it feels like women are expected to cover up those gaps or feel that they're putting their own equality at risk by acknowledging them. And again, pregnancy and fertility is a huge part of what's viewed as women's individual problems to cover up, not the basic pattern of human life.

Amy Julia Becker (04:16)
I found those opening examples you gave, mentioned a few of them here, but when I was reading about countertops and you have a couple of sections about whether it's like the WNBA and the height of the hoops. ⁓

or even just like women who are surgeons and using tools that are designed for larger hands than at least the average woman has medication doses, all these things. just started literally walking through my everyday built environment and being like, you've got to be kidding me. Yeah. Come on. And it was it was really great. And it's really great to point out those things. I also I will note that we'll put this in the show notes, but I have interviewed Sarah Hendren before about her book.

which you and I both appreciate very much because she's doing a similar ⁓ job of just looking at the world and saying, who are we welcoming and who are we enabling actually to move with relative freedom and ease in this world? ⁓ And she's looking more at disability than at gender, although...

it's interesting to see the ways in which our world can be what we might call disabling for women in all these different ways. so again, and I think it's really, really helpful to make that move from this kind of more concrete built environment to what you were just talking about when it comes to women's bodies and our fertility and the ways in which we are physiologically in the world. I've often felt as though the feminist project in the United States has been

an attempt to say that women can be just like men. And I feel like you gave some language around that that I didn't have before, especially with what you just were saying about there's a difference between interchangeability and equality. And what we want is equality. In fact, that's a desirable thing. ⁓ But that's actually not what is happening if we assume that that means interchangeability. And I feel like you've identified problems, you've noted many of them here already that are

kind of exclusive to women. But actually, the book is also saying this is not good for men either. It's not as though what we want to do is kind of pull men off of their pedestal so that women can go up there instead. Right. Like this is like a harmful situation for everyone. Can you explain what's problematic for men also in the view we have of the average man and the world being built for him?

Leah Libresco Sargeant (06:42)
I'd say there are two ideas threaded all throughout the book. The first is what we've been talking about, that women's equality doesn't depend on our interchangeability with men. But the second is that there's a different lie we're telling about all human persons that implicates men too. It's the lie of autonomy, the idea that the basic nature of what it means to be a human being is to be able to take care of yourself, to not need others, and to not have other people who depend on you.

that there's a real extent to which we keep looking at the whole shape of the human life, that whole thread of it, and saying, well, how much of this counts if you pause and think about it? Well, our society doesn't count the time in the womb as fully human. It's a time when you can be an illicit target of violence specifically because you depend on someone else. Now, after a baby is born, that's no longer true, but a baby post-birth isn't viable any more than the baby in the womb is.

just that the baby's intense need can be spread over people who aren't its mother. But the baby is still deeply dependent. Okay, well, the baby is dependent for a bit. You're kind of growing to autonomy through adolescence. Maybe in the age of adulting, you reach autonomy at, I don't know, 25. And then suddenly, here you are. You're a fully functioning person. You're living a full human life because you don't depend on anyone else. You're not married. You're a guy. So your wife doesn't exist and can't get pregnant.

Your parents are just young enough that you're not worried about assisted living for them, and no one can interrupt you in such a big way. And you're strong enough personally and not disabled at the moment that your body doesn't feel like it interrupts you. That we think of that as that's the norm for human life. And every now and then you slip below the norm. And I think when you think about that, you know, up to 35, 40, now your back is creaky. Now your parents need things from you. Now if you are married,

Your kids need things, they're interrupting you. And then eventually you yourself are old and you're back in diapers just like you were at the beginning. And once again, we start to talk about, this really a human life or is this a moment when it's licit to end this life because this person needs too much? But when you look at that whole timeline, how much of it is existing in the fully human part, like just little bits and pieces? It's like you're a swimmer who's drowning and you're just occasionally getting your mouth above water.

think that just fundamentally under – you can't have an articulation of what human life looks like that excludes so much of it as real life. This is where I think that lie of autonomy, it's impossible for women. It becomes obvious very early, basically from as soon as you can become pregnant. It's obvious that your body is not solely your own, that the needs of others can crash into your life and interrupt it, even if you're actively avoiding kids, don't want kids, the fact that you know

a possibility shapes your response to it. For men who don't have the experience of pregnancy, it's still not true that they're autonomous. It's still not true they're hopefully their own. They also were babies once. But I think the pressure for men is different. It's that they can live within this destructive lie for a bit longer than women, and it hurts them to do it. But it's not impossible for men. So they have more of a sense of, you know, I'm

I'm sort of failing as a human being because I need people, but I can cover this up. I can eventually succeed at this, and women know that's not true at a deeper level.

Amy Julia Becker (10:09)
Yeah, I appreciate that so much because I feel like it would be easy to argue only one of those points, but actually naming both is important as far as the deep truth. And we're gonna get to kind of what does it mean to be human and some of the things that you've already hinted at ⁓ in this conversation. But there's a deep truth about dependence as an aspect of our humanity that is, ⁓ if it is true, which I very much believe it is, is

for both men and women important to acknowledge and to actually structure our communal relationships and our individual sense of self around that deep truth. And yet the way in which that deep truth is going to play itself out, again, because men and women are not interchangeable, even if they are equal, ⁓ is different and perhaps has really profound ⁓ implications for women in a world that has been largely designed for, as what you say, ⁓

at what men are imagined to be. ⁓

Leah Libresco Sargeant (11:11)
Again,

I like that crossover between disability theory and feminist theory and what I would just call anthropology. What does it mean to be a human person? You have that language of passing, of someone maybe who's autistic but can sit on their impulse to stim in public and they're uncomfortable, but people don't know they're covering it up. Then you have folks who have disabilities, they can't cover up in public. Someone with Down syndrome, even when

they're not doing anything to draw attention to themselves is physically marked by their difference, that passing is already off the table. I think men kind fall into a category where when we don't tell the truth about human beings, men can pass for longer. But just like anyone else, the act of passing, the act of pretending to be a kind of human being that not only you are not but that doesn't exist, takes a toll. It's a question of what compromises you're making to fit into this mold.

Amy Julia Becker (12:05)
I want to of hone in on the, you write about a feminism that fears acknowledging difference. And so this whole, again, back to this idea of interchangeability and equality, because I think it might be worth asking where that fear comes from. Like, is that fear grounded in anything that is important to recognize? And also then to say, and I think we've done a little bit of this already, ⁓ what's gained when we acknowledge the difference. But where's that fear come from? And is there something

there that actually matters and needs to be addressed in this conversation and this line of thinking.

Leah Libresco Sargeant (12:37)
fear is rooted in truth. Many of the attempts to help women hide their womanhood, cover it up, treat themselves like defective men but then try and fix that ⁓ are offered in good faith as help to women. I think you can see that with the WNBA example you mentioned that's in the book where there's a lot of discussion and arguments that get really heated really fast at the college level of should the three-point line

be closer for women than it is for men? Should the three-point line be equitable? It's equally hard to score a three-point shot for men and for women. Or should it be equal so that it's harder for women because they're shorter? There are women on both sides of the question, but there's a lot of pressure to make it equal, not equitable. The reason is once you paint two lines on the floor, everyone can see it all the time. The women feel like if people can see we shoot from a different line, they won't take us seriously.

There are other ways the game is different for them that just aren't as visible, so they're not as controversial. The women play with a slightly smaller ball that's more proportional to their hands, but you don't line the balls up next to each other and have people react. I think it's that sense of we can have things that acknowledge our difference as long as no one can see them, as long as they're not next to each other because there will be people who go, hang on, if these things aren't the same, why should I treat what you're doing as basketball?

Why is this real basketball if it's not played exactly the same way? And what's interesting is, you in one of those profound asymmetries, right, the asymmetry of reproduction, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court Justice, before she was on the court, she thought the whole argument for abortion access hinged on equal protection under the law, not under privacy, which she thought was a weird approach. And her framing was if there's this stark difference between men and women,

it just won't be possible to treat women the same. If men and women can as easily be not parents as each other, men can walk away, women can seek abortions, that's the entry price for being treated equally. You have to be able to do the same things the same way. Now, obviously there it's not the same way. A man walks away from a baby, abandons his responsibility, but nothing about him leaving requires the destruction of the baby. For a woman, it does.

Amy Julia Becker (14:58)
Yeah.

Leah Libresco Sargeant (14:58)
where she and I agree, I think it's obvious where we disagree, I think she's descriptively correct. I think the existence of a profound asymmetry between men and women is always an invitation for people to consider, if women are different, I can treat them differently and I can treat them worse. That's true. I just think there's no just way to reckon with that that isn't kind of pushing back and going, that's not the ground of my dignity.

Amy Julia Becker (15:26)
Yeah, I think one of the things that I was thinking about, because I resonated so much with your argument, and I want so much to be able, as you said, to recognize these very real differences, but also to do that without returning to a patriarchal, gendered social hierarchy in which, because women have smaller bodies on average, they belong in X, Y, and Z spaces. Obviously, we can...

I think take for granted some of the awareness around how those ideas might have played out in the past and left women without access to jobs.

Leah Libresco Sargeant (16:05)
Bank accounts, right?

Amy Julia Becker (16:07)
Yeah, all of that. how like, I guess what I'm wondering is, I feel like there's a there's a different false anthropology that would that we were operating under in a kind of pre feminist era when women's place was in the kitchen and the home, right. And then, you know, post feminist false anthropology might be saying, OK, now women are exactly the same as men. And therefore, you don't even have to think about the fact that your body like

can hold a child, for example. So what is, yeah, like, how do we avoid, how do we kind of follow your line of argument without ⁓ returning to that patriarchal gendered society?

Leah Libresco Sargeant (16:52)
make two pitches on this, depending on whether I'm speaking in a broad secular context or to a Christian audience. I think for the broad secular context, my pitch is really, look, let's pause for a second about what we're going to do with this fact and just stick with me on, is this factual? Are women and men different in big ways? Are there asymmetries? I always stick with the word asymmetry, not hierarchy. But are there profound asymmetries that we in justice need to respond to? Because if there are,

the question really is, okay, how do we respond to an injustice? But I think that points to the fact that that fake leaf of pushing interchangeability, trying to fit within it, won't work. It will shortchange a lot of people. It puts a different injustice on women. I say, you can't make just policy if you start with a false premise about the human person. So let's start with what's true and then try and build out

from there to say how to respond in justice to this truth. Now for Christians, just think part of our challenge and part of our gift here is asymmetry is not a shock to us. The idea that people can be weak and dignified is not a shock to us, or it shouldn't be. Here's where I think that sense of, well, the ideal is autonomy. You've got these embarrassing parts of life where you're not autonomous and women.

kind of embarrassed for more of their lives, but men are more perfect in this way. It's not that there aren't Christian sex that fall into that, but you can't have that kind of view of the sexes without also doing violence to your image of either sex, any human person's relationship with God. Because aside from all those ways, we are bodily dependent on others. We are wholly dependent on God. We're dependent on him for creation, for conservation and existence, and most of all for redemption. And so when you start to say,

good parts of human life are when you don't need people and you're more and better as a human being when that's true, men do that more, maybe they're better. You're doing immense violence to men and women's relationship with God because if we resent our dependence on each other, we're catechizing ourselves to hide from God's love, to think God's love is unpersoning us. There my pitch is just like, look, you've got to figure out how to treat women justly because when you're telling yourself the story again and again,

You can't respond to Christ's gifts with gratitude.

Amy Julia Becker (19:15)
It's interesting. mean, I love the way you're talking about all of that. And one of the things this is backing up a little bit, but, know, I think about obviously if it comes to something like the WNBA line, right, you've got these ⁓ you don't want to kind of demonstrate the difference between men and women because the assumption essentially there is like men are better because they can shoot from farther away and still, you know, get the same number of three pointers.

But I'm thinking about the ways in which boys and girls in school are like right now, our schools are really structured to reward the average girl in terms of her attention span, maturity at certain ages, et cetera. ⁓ And I think one of the things schools should be actually wrestling with is how do we actually educate boys in a way that allows them to be boys? And again, not in some like boys will be boys and they get to just like misbehave all the time. But still, there some questions.

I guess my point is it goes both ways in terms of our needs as human beings. And of course, those can become much more individual. We don't want to talk only about male and female, you know, at whatever age. ⁓ But I do think there's, again, that sense of like as humans, we are dependent creatures ⁓ at our core. And obviously, yes, from a Christian perspective, that is not only true in our relationship to God and to one another.

but actually something that we can therefore have a life of humility and gratitude within. ⁓ I want to move to ⁓ something you mentioned there too. This is a quote from the book that you on some level just brought up. So you said, building a just society requires a moral revolution. When we've used a false anthropology as the foundation of our culture, dismantling that lie is costly.

So I wanted to kind of break that down in terms of, okay, so how would we like construct a true anthropology? And again, anthropology is just meaning like what it means to be human. Like what does it really mean to be human? What are the lies around that, which we've touched on a bit, but how do we dismantle the lie? that, so it's both like, what is the truth, but also if we've been living a lie, how do we begin to dismantle that?

Leah Libresco Sargeant (21:26)
of tackle that last question at two scales, kind of the individual and interpersonal and the political and policy level. think making space, building up the belief to be able to do policy starts with interpersonal witness. It starts by revealing more of your own weakness to other people. Because I think sometimes you could hear me give a little bit of the spiel for a book and go like, yeah, people depend on each other. I should offer to help people more. And sure, you have my blessing, right?

But when you're offering to help and putting yourself in the position of the strong person magnanimously helping others, you're actually not giving a countercultural witness that weakness is normal. It's by asking for help that you reassure a friend, wow, Leah asked me to come over and hang out with her kids when she was feeling exhausted. So she thinks that's allowed. That's wild. She thinks she could ask a friend to do that instead of hiring a sitter.

I didn't know you were allowed to solve these problems with favors instead of money. It's by making those requests. I think for Christians particularly, asking people to pray for you is one of the easiest ways that even you're like, I don't know, do I have anything I need right now, Leah? Yes, you need prayers. Making those requests is a way of opening the channel to say, our friendship is founded on sharing needs and answering them. I'm starting so that you know it's okay to share needs with me.

the interpersonal level. On the policy level, think the big challenge is and this is why I say you've got to tear a lot of stuff down and rebuild it up in a different shape. A lot of our public policy assumes weakness and dependency is maybe something you're morally culpable for, but definitely a weird aberrational thing, not something we expect to be part of everyone's life in different proportions. So you kind of want to look at our entire social safety net to say,

is the setup with the assumption that people will claim unemployment some of the time? That's a normal part of a career that you'll be laid off at some point, not a sudden shock. ⁓ How do you think about programs like SSI and SSDI that respond to disability not as, an unusual tragedy has befallen you in particular versus, yeah, we know in the aggregate a bunch of people drift into this category. We're here to welcome them and to say, yeah, this is part of the range of what a human life looks like.

With that in particular, one of the things that goes wrong is it's treated as like, well, if you are disabled, probably you're doing it as a scam, I guess. Or probably that means you should be poor because it takes non-disabledness to climb out of poverty. You see these incredibly restrictive asset limits. This is me with my wank hat on. But if you're on disability without a long work history, you might be capped at having only $1,000 in assets in your bank account.

if you get married, it doesn't double. You only get a little bit more. So people have to sell a car. A woman who was on disability who got hit by a car and got a settlement to cover her medical bills had to check with lawyers about how she could receive the settlement because if she got it as a lump sum, she could lose her health insurance by getting kicked off immediately. This is just built as though, wow, it's weird there are, I guess, a couple people on disability ever and they probably did it on purpose, not

When you just look at what's the shape of the human family, there are a number of people with profound disabilities at different points of life. When you look at aging, you can't treat each moment that your parents become older as like, wow, a novel problem that's happening just to me because we all screwed up versus every community should have places where people can age or make it easy to maybe stay in your neighborhood.

but downsize easily so that you can live somewhere with no stairs that's comfortable for you without giving up your whole community. But we treat each of those as though, wow, you were the first person this has happened to. Guess you'll have to couple something together. And then of course, beyond that, I think particularly at the beginning and end of life, we can't have a society that treats weakness as part of being human and say that weakness makes you a licit target for killing.

Amy Julia Becker (25:36)
Yeah, and I think I guess one question I have is do you have any examples of kind of societies where this has been more fully realized or is it kind of a work of the imagination? And by that, I don't mean fantasizing, like literally playing it out in our heads, but either way, like, what does it look like? You gave a couple of examples there of just like communities where people could age in place and not. And I think some of it is also not

there's not shame in being unemployed, having disabilities, in ⁓ getting old, in being a baby. mean, obviously babies don't personally feel shame, but that sense of even, you know, kind of the whole idea of like an unplanned pregnancy being a shameful thing, as opposed to like a human thing. that these happen. ⁓ So I'm, what I am asking is just for a little more of kind of playing out what is that. ⁓

look like in a social sense.

Leah Libresco Sargeant (26:39)
a lot of it looks like unsiloing people. You don't just have, well, this is the retirement community. This is the neighborhood where parents live with their kids. This is the place where people with disabilities go. But these are all meant to be part of an integrated community in part because leave aside the needs of the people who seem the neediest, the people with disabilities, the people who are aging. I, as a young-ish woman with kids, need to be around older people.

that I can plan how I want to live my life now to be prepared to age well. Entering each of these stages as a surprise is hard for all of us. I'm going ⁓ to point to one example with a caveat. ⁓ The L'Arche communities where people live in community with folks with disability are really marked, I want to say this right at the start, by the fact that their founder, Jean Vanier, did engage in sexual abuse not with the members of the community

were disabled, but with women in the community. What I really admire is the community has managed to keep going. He did something both good and wicked and kind of did them alongside each other. Many people entered the community with love for the good and have kept it going. They viewed part of their duty of, we have this beautiful thing. We don't want to endanger it, not as a reason to cover that up, but as a reason to have a full investigation and say, we want to be really clear about what went wrong, why and how.

that you can trust us when we say we don't want to ever see that repeat. But that's not a people clock in, they clock out. It's how do we live as a human family alongside each other? In my own neighborhood, there's St. Joe's House, which does respite care for kids with significant disabilities who would have trouble being integrated in school. What I love is it's not just that they're in the backyard being cared for in my neighborhood nearby.

Amy Julia Becker (28:10)
Hmm.

Leah Libresco Sargeant (28:33)
tightly integrated into our parish. There's a monthly bake sale where the kids, to whatever extent their particular needs and disabilities permit, are the ones running the bake sale, helping take the money, hand things over, so that everyone sees them every month. You get to know them. They're part of our community. They're not someone we donate to, and that's the end of our relationship. There's dementia villages somewhere in Europe, I should look up where, where you kind of have this

Amy Julia Becker (29:01)
I've seen that.

Leah Libresco Sargeant (29:02)
you have this almost like a ⁓ point of contact between them and the neighborhood because they can't wander through the whole neighborhood safely, but you'll have a ⁓ pub where the doors are locked on one side so that you have to get checked through because they can't leave safely. But the idea is this is meant to be a pub or a barbershop that everyone in the village can come to and they meet in the middle because the whole village isn't safe for them, but you don't actually want the safe part to be fully siloed off.

Amy Julia Becker (29:32)
I think that's such a great example of just, again, like a built environment that acknowledges a couple different types of need. Like the need for safety, which actually is something that I think is, you know, like that's real and that's good, but it can lead to this kind of perverse exclusion or separation that can actually be addressed if we have a different attitude, again, towards both the built environment and towards going to the pub and knowing that there are gonna be people there.

from a community where lots of people are experiencing dementia. I think all of this does come back to that question and we've touched on it, but maybe to say it a little more directly of what it means to be human. And ⁓ I think also back to the title of your book, like the dignity of dependence. So can you speak to what does it mean to be human, also assuming dependence is gonna be some part of that? Like where does that idea of dignity come in?

Leah Libresco Sargeant (30:27)
I think it comes out of thinking the whole of human life is human. It is part of our human life. When we just look even at the very beginning, the beginnings of all of our life, the only universal human experience we can count on is being a baby. The fundamental question is, is it bad to be a baby? Is this a bad thing we get over? Because I work in public policy, so I'm working on family benefits. I push a baby bonus that comes to people to support them right when a baby is born. always say this is the only

of the social safety net I can guarantee you get as a person. Because you get it when you're a baby. I cannot guarantee you've lived to collect social security. This is the universal benefit. And I think we think of infancy, especially because we don't remember it, as something we leave behind. Not as something that's our – again, as Christians, it's our tutorial in being loved without regard for what we can do to return that love. ⁓ Being loved absolutely.

know, the love that each of us receives as a baby to be able to get here at all is the pattern for how God loves us. ⁓ And babies are not ashamed of it and we grow into shame. So I think to think about what it means to live a dignified human life, means being someone who is capable of being loved and being loved without regard for our merit. It doesn't mean we shouldn't develop the talents we're given or think about what are my strengths given to me for. ⁓ It doesn't mean we kind of give up on doing things for others.

what is the one base place we can always rest? That we are loved by God, that we are loved without regard for what we can do, and we are always capable of returning that love without fear. We just have to choose to do it.

Amy Julia Becker (32:10)
I think that's really beautiful, the idea that ⁓ we're getting a tutorial from the moment we are born into both what it means to be human and then as we grow up. And I think one of the things you're pointing to is the significance of like intergenerational life experience, whether that's in a church context or a school or a neighborhood ⁓ or another faith community or civic organization. ⁓

And I'm also thinking about the ways what you just described ⁓ extend if we can receive them in that kind of vertical relationship with God into like our horizontal relationships. one of the you write towards the end of the book about the ways in which we can mark civilizations based on the bones that are buried. And you give two different examples of a poem in which

you can tell where the brothels were in ancient Rome because of the ⁓ infant bones that are there, which is essentially the discarded babies. But then you also give a picture of, I'm gonna quote you, the respectfully buried bodies of adults with severe disabilities are the archeological trace of civilization. And I thought that it was such a stark contrast between a society that had cared for a disabled human for long enough

for them to have an adult body and then a society that did not care for the, know, presumably non-disabled infants in their midst who just were not, you know, expedient to their purposes.

Leah Libresco Sargeant (33:45)
I think it's so important to note some of those societies that we've uncovered in archaeological digs where you see someone who, based on their skeletal deformities, could not walk but grew to adulthood. They were so much poorer than we were. These are subsistence societies. These aren't places where there's a comfortable amount of access to share. People made real sacrifices to keep other people alive. I think it's so important to remember that moment by moment, day by day, decision by decision,

we are also leaving a story in our archaeological record. And I think these days, what you see is an absence. You see people who are missing. You say, wow, there aren't as many skeletons of people with spinal bifidia as I should be seeing based on the prevalence. There aren't as many skeletons of people with Down syndrome as I should be seeing. And that's already true. We've already left that as our legacy.

our great-great-grandchildren, our many millennia grandchildren, that when they look back, they'll see what we've done to date. ⁓ The question is, can we choose differently? Can we think about what we see and what we admire in other societies, poorer societies than ours, and say, know what? The legacy we want to leave, the record of who we care about, has to be more expansive than this.

Amy Julia Becker (35:04)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think this follows up on that. I was just going to ask you about both the costs and the consequences of a world in which the disabled and vulnerable are counted as belonging to all of us. ⁓ Because you do a good job, I think, of saying, like, no, this really does play itself out ⁓ with both costs, like, what we might see as both negative and positive. ⁓ I'm not sure those are quite the right terms, but costs and consequences.

Leah Libresco Sargeant (35:33)
I think part of what you see is it never only endangers the disabled to disvalue them. I want people to care for the sake of these people individually, but I think it's important to note you can't write people off by virtue of their weakness or their need without putting a lot of other people you already did think of fully human at risk. I think we're seeing this really come up when it comes to the end of life. That the people who seek medical aid and dying or euthanasia

in some states in the US are asked, why are you seeking this? The most common answer is not because of pain. The expansions of the law are usually framed around, it's very hard to die. We owe it to people to spare them the pain. But the most commonly cited answers are, I don't want to burden people. I'm afraid I'm asking too much of my loved ones. It will be too expensive to care for me. Well, where did people learn that?

they learned that from watching how we treated other people with disabilities who were younger than they were. How we told them, obviously you should terminate, this is too much to ask of you. Or I think the saddest thing, people who think about this and go like, well, I could embrace my child's need, but I'll pre-decease them. And I don't know if I can entrust them to anyone else afterwards. can't believe looking around at our society that they'll be safe and cared for.

So I'd rather have an abortion now because I'm so frightened of failing my child when I'm not there to protect them. And again, just like those concerns about sexism, that distrust is based in something real, right? But then we get to the end of our lives having kind of screwed a disability for a great deal of it and say, well, what have I learned about how we treat people who are vulnerable or what we expect the vulnerable to do to spare others the need to care for them?

you see, I think at this point in Canada, it's 5 % of all deaths are through euthanasia and it's rising. Moment by moment, it's not in the big decisions, it's the little decisions of how you respond to, what does this person need? How do I respond to it? That forms people for that decision at the end of life. Am I worth loving when I need things from people and we both understand I'm past the point of recompensing people for my care?

Amy Julia Becker (37:48)
Yeah, I really appreciate your point that we are all, our attitude in this can endanger or ⁓ enhance all of our lives. And I feel like ever since our daughter Penny was born, most of the thinking and writing I've done around these things has really been, I certainly, as you just said, I care about justice for the disabled, but I'm much more aware of the ⁓ consequences and costs that

people like me who at least for the moment are able-bodied and ⁓ able to use my mind in ways that an intellectually disabled person might not be, that I'm the one at risk here for the attitudes that I have held for much of my life that have to do with a distorted understanding of the human as an autonomous individual who is supposed to only be self-sufficient. And after that, ⁓ there's not much meaning left. I don't...

any longer believe any of that, I functionally did for a long time. ⁓

Leah Libresco Sargeant (38:45)
everyone

does. Even people engaged in disability work, it's the water we're all swimming in. You can come to awareness, prune it out in lots of places, and still be surprised by where these assumptions crop up in your own life. While I was working on this book, I had one really hard month in November where I was pregnant. I was the most nauseated I've ever been with a pregnancy. Then I got a staph infection in my leg and couldn't walk for a few days.

I would say to people, like, was going to do all this stuff, but I barely existed in November. And then I heard myself say that, like, no, no, no, I can't say that. I existed. This was my human life. And God was with me through all of it. There was no moment of it where I wasn't capable of receiving his love. And I know that because I continued to exist, which only happens because he loves me. There's no moment of it that was insufficient for his grace or insufficient for me to

know, try and be a saint to return his love simply by accepting it and saying, you. I cannot say I didn't exist in November. I didn't do stuff in November. I didn't get my kids to school on my bike. I didn't get some of the writing I wanted to get done. I slept a lot. All of that was still existing, but it came out of my mouth while I was working on the book.

Amy Julia Becker (40:00)
There's another quotation of yours. It's only in relationship and friendship with the profoundly dependent that we are able to fully know ourselves and our own history of need. I think there's some truth there, ⁓ not only about the relationships we have with people who would be identified kind of visibly or publicly as profoundly dependent, but also what you were just saying with our own profound dependence that we might try to.

pretend is not there, especially for some period of time in our lives. ⁓ And when we have these experiences, like what you just described of more profound dependence, the instinct to say, this isn't really me. This isn't really what life is, as opposed to like, no, this is fully me. This is part of my very full humanity. And how does that, like, can that shape and form the way that I interact with other people? ⁓

from here on out. And I guess maybe that's where I'd like to just ask you one more question as we come to a close. ⁓ For listeners who are saying yes, like I am with you in this and I would like to live in a more kind of full way as a dependent but dignified human, ⁓ this anthropology that we're talking about, are there like, I don't know, steps or practices, ways of being that allow us to move towards greater dependence and

towards a place of dignifying the dependence that we find within ourselves and with others.

Leah Libresco Sargeant (41:27)
think a lot of it is looking at wherever you are and saying, how am I making my own needs private and how can I make them more visible and part of what anchors me to my friends? And then saying that explicitly to them. You don't have to buy them the book. It helps me if you do that. But you don't have to do that. But I think you do have to do some of the work the book does in making this explicit. So it's not just, could you bring me food instead of me door dashing because I'm sick and I want to see someone? And then you add that next sentence of, and I've realized

want to tell my friends more when I'm sick rather than wait till I'm better and then see you again. ⁓ Because it takes kind of that little jump for someone to go, is that an option? Right? ⁓ Think about kind of how strong that current of shame of privacy is and then think, okay, it's not enough just to ask for help, that's a good place to start. I need to kind tell people, I realize I don't like that when I'm having a hard time, my life gets small. And when I

feel like I only can give, my life gets bigger. I don't like that. So I want us to kind of see, can we have the kind of friendship where we talk to each other, see each other more when things are bad? And I'm asking you to that with me now. ⁓ So I think it's that kind of shift. And then thinking a little bit through those different domains of need and going like, in my life, where I am right now, do I see kids? Do I see people who are much older than myself? Do I see people who are disabled? For me, that's mostly at church, right?

but thinking about where are the places where the whole human family comes together. And if that's not happening in my life right now, it's hard for me to actually be called to give the things I may be called to give. So I'm asking for help more than thinking, how am I exposing myself to other people's needs so that it's possible for someone to ask me?

Amy Julia Becker (43:11)
Yeah, remember, ⁓ and listeners may have heard me say this before, but being asked once ⁓ to speak at Yale Divinity School, I was talking about not being on this achievement tells me my identity ⁓ treadmill, but instead receiving identity as the beloved ones of God. And there was a student who said, I completely agree, and yet I'm absolutely on the achievement treadmill. What should I do?

And it was so interesting because what came to me at that time, which I think resonates with what you were just saying, is both like receiving our own belovedness and there are practices I think we can ⁓ turn to kind of in an interior way to recognize God's love for us. But then also like being in regular proximity and relationship with people who seem more vulnerable or needy than I do.

So that can be a baby, it can be an old person, it can be a person with disability, it can be someone who's just like outside of the social status world for whatever reason. And yet it can, I think, return us to our humanity when we actually have those encounters and relationships. And I guess the hope would be that that then also structures our public life, like in terms of actual public policy that would say,

as you were saying before, we assume that there will be seasons of life in which you are not operating at 110 % efficiency all day long in a productive worker mentality. And we actually provide for that and want that because it means we're honoring our common humanity that way.

Leah Libresco Sargeant (44:50)
Absolutely. I think one of the other things is it's so valuable to have part of your life every week where you are loved without regard for your merit. Because again, that's part of knowing how you are loved by God. God wants the best for us, but he gives us things before we respond to them. I think there are ways in which, again, we don't retain our experience of being loved as a baby, but that's how we start. Then when you're around other mothers and children, you go, I was loved this way. When you're around kids in particular,

it's a tremendous relief to me that my kids don't really care that I publish books and they don't care that I sit down with congressional staff sometimes to talk about policy. ⁓ What they care is, am I available to be sat on? Getting a little bit away from, okay, well, how does our society value me and how can I spend time around people who don't value me in exactly that set of hierarchical, what did you bring to the table ways? This has meant a lot to me in kind of

big moments of my life, there is a bit where we had gone through a miscarriage. I was so sad and lonely. To some extent, even though I was grateful for the love of friends, it was all about, what will you do? What's going to happen now? A friend of mine's daughter who does have a significant congenital disability just sat on me all through mass. She just wasn't thinking about me a lot.

invited me into a kind of self-forgetfulness that was a real gift, which is now, what will I do? What's my doctor going to say? How is this messing up different careers? I'm like, well, today, the fact that I exist is enough for Agnes. She doesn't have any questions about what I'm going to do tomorrow. She just wants me to be here right now. And no matter what does happen with my doctor, with my job, I can in fact be here right now. And that's completely sufficient for what is asked of me at the

Amy Julia Becker (46:44)
Thank you for that story. think that's really beautiful because it's so simple. I hope to just end with that image of Agnes in your lap and you even just those words of like having an experience of some self forgetfulness that allows you to be ⁓ human in the midst of both lament and expectation and hope. So thank you for that and thank you for your book. And ⁓ yeah, we'd really appreciate it.

Leah Libresco Sargeant (47:09)
Thank you so much for having me on.

Amy Julia Becker (47:15)
Thanks as always for listening to this episode of Reimagining the Good Life. If you want to follow along with Leah Labresco-Sergeant, please do check the show notes because there are ways to be in touch with her through her sub stack or social media. I'm also really excited about upcoming interviews with Justin Early. I'm talking with him about his latest book, The Body Teaches the Soul. I'm going to talk with Kevin Chandler on his book, The Hospitality of Need, which again kind of dovetails with today's conversation in some beautiful ways.

and also with Justin Gibbene, who has written a great book about the public witness of the men and women of the civil rights era. His book is called Don't Let Nobody Turn You Around. So stay tuned for those great conversations. To that end, we would love for other people to know about these conversations and we need your help in getting the word out there. So

If you are a devoted listener or even a new listener to this podcast and you're willing to just share this conversation with other people, send text, send a message in some capacity to let them know that it's out there, it makes a world of difference. You also can rate and review the podcast. It not only tells me that you're out there and you're listening, but it also tells the algorithm to share it with.

And if you have suggestions for me about people I should be talking to, please send them my way. We've got a link at the end of the show notes. It says, send us a text. You can email me at amyjuliabeckerwriter at gmail.com. As we come to the end, I also want to thank Jake Hansen for editing the podcast and Amber Beery, my assistant. Amber does everything other than talk to make sure that this podcast happens. So I cannot thank her enough for all of her work and

Finally, thank you for being here. I hope this conversation helps you to challenge assumptions, proclaim belovedness, and envision a world of belonging where everyone matters. Let's reimagine the good life together.



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Amy Julia Becker

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