I haven’t posted in a while: school and my web projects are keeping me busy, though I hope to be posting regularly soon. In the meantime, I came across a rather depressing surprise the other day. As you know, when you type a search term into Google, it automatically creates suggestions based on the most frequently searched terms:
I suppose I could go on some long tirade about the state of American culture and the state of marriage, but frankly, the image above speaks for itself.
1. Wage stagnation
2. The couples who should have babies aren’t. The couples who shouldn’t have babies are having a lot.
(Presumably because to maintain a middle class existence, both people have to work and thus don’t have the time or money for children.)
3. Money has become an abstract concept, with power behind the concept being held in the hands of the elite.
Derivatives, short sales, toxic assets, sovereign debt, bailouts: so much of the money in the developed world is held in mega-banks, investment funds, and 401k’s. Money, as a concept, has become largely abstract and electronic. As anyone who’s taken a high-level math class knows, when math becomes highly abstract, you can do some crazy things with it. That’s what banks, fund managers, and traders have done. They’ve created impossibly complex investments that are really nothing more than a house of cards. Governments have borrowed shocking amounts of money with the foolish expectation that the good times will never end. The result: a huge gap between the rich and poor, and a debt crisis that threatens to swallow a whole continent.
4. Our government is dysfunctional
81 % of Americans agree. Enough said.
5. Our kids’ reality centers around electronics
When kids spend 7.5 hours a day in front electronic devices, (presumably as a means of escapism) what kind of adults and citizens are we creating?
While these are all interesting articles, the real purpose of this post in not to bemoan the state of society. On the contrary, it calls to mind some questions I’ve had for a long time: If we seek to change our society or culture, do we work within the existing system, or do we try to start over? Is our society, economics, and culture so entrenched that we must re-imagine our society from the ground up, instead of trying to change what we already have?
More and more, I’m beginning to think that at some point, we’re just going to need to begin again….
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been starting my classes out with a poem taken from the Poetry 180 site. It’s been a good way to get students in the right mindset, and it requires that I start reading poetry on a regular basis.
It’s funny the way that writing reveals itself to you. Over the course of teaching and exploring a poem with five different classes over two day span, the poem slowly begins to reveal itself; the fifth time I discuss the poem with the class, it is an entirely different beast than when I started.
I’m constantly being re-reminded of the rewards of being is a state of patient expectation. The last few weeks I’ve been spending quite a bit of time hunting. Perched in a tree or sitting on top of a hill, I wait in silent hope. I may see moose, I may not, but in that state of intense listening, watching, and anticipation, even nature reveals itself in a rare way. Watching a mouse loudly busy himself near my feet, observing a raven circling the clouded sky, or studying the intricacy of the tundra beneath me: these are the ways nature reveals itself to those who sit in silence and expectation.
In a society that values getting as much done as we possible can, and where we intentionally set a break-neck pace for our day, it’s no wonder so many of us feel disconnected, discontent, and stressed. There is simply no room to practice silent expectation: waiting for a poem, the world, or God himself to be revealed to us in due time.
I had the most interesting experience this Sunday. Our church, which is a fairly conservative flavor of Lutheranism, had a congregational meeting. At issue was whether the church should change its constitution to allow women to serve as vice-president and president of the church council.
From the outside looking in, it would appear that our church is decades behind the times. In some ways, they’d be right. But what happened yesterday was testament to the power of community and culture, and the hard work of intentionally considering our community:
I walked into the sanctuary expecting the meeting to be a quick and easy vote to change the church constitution. Of course we would allow women on the council, I thought. We filed in, signed our names on the attendance sheet, and grabbed the proposal.
The pastor started the meeting with a prayer, making some vague reference to “contentious issues.” Then the council president gave a brief run-down of the proposal.
“We found that few people are interested in council positions,” he started, “We changed the wording in these two rules to allow for women to serve as council president. Any discussion?”
The church remained silent for a minute. I figured that this vote would be nothing more than procedural. But one of the older and highly respected members of the church raised his hand.
“It’s not that I don’t support this,” he started, “but I believe that women are the heart and the center of the family. Their role is so important. I don’t want their responsibilities on the church council to take them away from that important role.”
The congregation sat in silence for a few moments, considering what had just been said.
Another respected member of the church raised his hand. “I support this idea, but are we doing this for the right reasons? If we’re only allowing women to fulfill this role because the men don’t want to do it, aren’t we just ignoring the real problem?”
Again, there was silence as the congregation considered his words.
A woman spoke up, “Here’s the way I see it. By not allowing women to serve as president, we are essentially leaving half of our talent pool untapped. Why would we do that?”
The conversation continued in much the same way for another half an hour. Each member humbly offered his or her opinion. After each person spoke, the congregation reflected on their words in a few moments of silence.
From the outside looking in, people might be shocked that a group of 21st century Americas were actually having a conversation about whether women should be in leadership roles. But from the inside, that’s not what happened at all.
On Sunday, our community came together to have a discussion. In a very authentic and intentional way, we decided how to change our culture.
The respect that had been built from decades of mutual work and experience allowed each member to talk honestly and openly. Everyone was shown respect for their opinion and words – not because it was the right thing to do, but because they had earned that respect from years of service to the community and by their evident spirituality.
Furthermore, we talked thoughtfully about how this change would affect our community and culture. Popular and homogenized culture demands that people change according to the will of the masses, but a true community examines the value and merit of changes that will affect its culture, even if their choices put them out of the mainstream.
That’s why I respect the Amish so much. They have spent centuries, as a culture, determining how new fashions, new technology, and new beliefs would affect their culture. And overall, they’ve decided the culture of the populous is not a healthy culture. Instead, they have kept the family and the community at the forefront of their values.
In the end, we did decide that women should be allowed to be council president by a vote of 42-2. It was undoubtedly the right decision even if it was a few decades late. But more importantly, we had the conversation. That’s were the hard work of community begins.
On my Facebook page, there is a small box that proudly proclaims how popular I am. “You have 182 friends,” it states. According to Facebook, my social life is represented in 182 tiny thumbnails pictures of my “friends” and my interests in life are tidily summed up on my “Info” page.
Every morning I wake up and scan my “News Feed” where an algorithm feeds me the latest news from my 182 friends. It determines what information I should see. I scan the page in 30 seconds, quickly perusing the latest news and minutia from my 182 friends’ lives. Feeling content that I have kept up on my social connections, I grab my lunch and head out the door.
In the evenings, I occasionally load images or messages to my Facebook page. Isolated from others, I carefully curate my latest photos, deeply thinking before I assign captions and “tags.” I consider how to phrase my status update, knowing that 182 friends may see my picture or my status. This thought gives me feelings of grandeur.
My entire social life has become incredibly efficient. In a matter of minutes, I have kept up with my 182 friends. This, according to many, is the “new” way of connecting socially.
With 600 million people “connected” to one another is this way, we have to wonder whether we will eventually forget how to truly connect with each other and our community. As an MIT professor has recently said, “there is a difference between the ‘performance of self’ and ‘self.’”
I would argue that true community requires a level of both privacy and intimacy that is not possible with “social” media. I think deep down, we recognize this. When I look at my “news feed” I do not see the following status updates:
These are the sort of intimate details that we only share with those who are closest to us. They’re not the sort of things we share with 182 near-strangers. And so our social media is actually filled with pointless statements:
At the end of the day, we think we’ve had meaningful interactions, but all we’ve really done is publicly postured our lives; all we’ve done is played the role of ourselves; all we’ve done is talked about things that don’t matter. And we’ve done it in an extremely “efficient” way. We have reduced the work of community to a few words and mouse clicks.
True community is both more public and private than this. It is messy and inefficient. In true community, we learn that living peacefully means listening more than talking. It means keeping things to ourselves. It means only allowing the handful of people into our lives who we trust.
At the same time, true community is far more public than “social media.” We cannot curate an image of ourselves when we spend time with each other. Building a house, backpacking through the wilderness, or worshipping beside one another necessitates a certain level of authenticity. We get to see each other’s true selves. This means that true community requires a certain level of vulnerability and tolerance. We find that we must show our true selves — vices and all — to our family, our friends, and our immediate community. In that sense we are vulnerable and trusting in their mutual trust of us, despite our failings. It is these interactions that create the sinews and ligaments of community. And it is these interactions that can never be recreated on a social network.
“But there are an enormous number of people — and I am one of them — whose native religion is Christianity. We were born to it; we began to learn it before we became conscious; it is, whatever we think of it, and intimate belonging of our being; it informs our consciousness, our language, our dreams. We can turn away from it or against it, but that will only bind us tightly to a reduced version of it. A better possibility is that this, our native religion, should survive and renew itself so that it may become as largely and truly instructive as we need it to be. On such a survival and renewal of the Christian religion may depend the survival of the Creation that is its subject.”
- Wendell Berry from “Christianity and the Survival of Creation”
Lately, I’ve been reading an essay by Wendell Berry called “Sex, Economy, Freedom, Community.” Written in 1993, it’s no less relevant today than it was nearly twenty years ago. In the essay, there are a number of things that have caught my attention. And while I have spent the last five days trying to come up with some brilliant way to respond, it’s just not happening. That said, Berry proposes two different ideas that have really got me thinking.
Totalitarian Economies
The first is a small phrase where he talks about the power of “totalitarian economics.” In an era of “too big to fail” and massive bailouts of massive corporations, one must question whether our society (and our politics) is now ruled by a totalitarian economy. If we take the definition of totalitarian as power that “recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible” then I would argue that our national/global economy often exercises totalitarian demands. And, if we agree that this is to some degree true, than we must confront the differences between the totalitarianism of one man or one political party, and the totalitarianism of our daily bread…
The Third Interest
The second thought that has been intriguing me is this: Berry argues that in all modern discourse, there is usually talk only about the “private” and the “public.” When the Patriot Act passed, for instance, the debate centered over public safety and private freedoms. When a state chooses to bulldoze a neighborhood to put in a freeway, the debate centers over private property and the public good. Berry argues that there is a third concern that almost never makes it into public discourse: the needs, rights, and freedoms of the community. Let me give you an excerpt:
“‘Public’ and ‘community’ then, are different — perhaps radically different — concepts that under certain circumstances are compatible but that, in the present economic and technological monoculture, tend to be at odds. A community, when it is alive and well, is centered on the household — the family place and economy — and the household is centered on marriage. A public, when it is working in the best way — that is, as a political body intent on justice — is centered on the individual. Community and public alike, then, are founded on respect — the one on respect for the family, the other on respect for the individual. Both forms of respect are deeply traditional, and they are not fundamentally incompatible. But they are different, and that difference, once it is instituted in general assumptions, can be the source of much damage and much danger.”
More to come…
As previously noted, I am a high school teacher. As a high school teacher, I am part of a large bureaucratic structure called the “educational system.” Previous to being a teacher, I was a youth worker and thus a part of a large bureaucratic structure called the “church.” In both places, I’ve had the chance to be a part of gatherings, retreats, and conferences. And in both places, the environment of these conferences is largely the same: good food and luxurious accommodations; charismatic speakers; discussion on innovation and change; fog machines, lights, and loud music.
We are always promised something life-changing. We leave believing in that promise. But somewhere along the way, we lose our energy and our passion. The life-changing innovation is not working and the world is largely the same. Eventually, we end up questioning whether it wasn’t all smoke and mirrors. We become, at worst, cynical and discouraged.
Contrast this with a few disciples and seekers on a hillside. There are no luxurious accommodations. There are no lights. There are no fog machines or big-screens.
The venue is free. Here, you will only find soft human voices and shared bread.
I’m always trying to figure out how to change the world (it’s on my to-do list). And what I’m realizing is that I’m not seeing a lot of “world-changing” happening in hotel ballrooms or in stuffy conference halls. I think things change when people sit together and talk softly. No agenda. No lanyards. No gimmicks. Just open space, shared bread, and authentic words.
Show me a conference like this. I’ll be the first to sign up.
What do we celebrate?
It seems like a good question to me. By determining what we celebrate as a culture, and how we celebrate as a culture, we can gain an accurate picture of what we hold dear.
For some reason I am obsessed by this video (and not just because it is vaguely pornographic.) This song reached the #1 spot on the charts this summer in the fastest time since the 1960’s. It was the summer anthem of 2010. I admit that it’s catchy. The lyrics and the images both celebrate youth, beauty and sexuality, and while I’m not opposed to celebrating any of these things, it’s the way in which they are celebrated that greatly troubles me.
We often celebrate a beauty that is not real, a youth that is not real, a sexuality that is not real. It is contrived, but not for the sake of imitating the real. On the contrary, the contrived is preferred to the real. Give us airbrushed bodies instead of ones that wrinkle and sag, we say. Give us pornographic fantasies instead of sex. Give us bodies taut with chemicals and surgery instead of real youth. Why do we prefer the unreal instead of the real? I think it is because of what we celebrate.
If we celebrate only youth, beauty, and sex, we are only celebrating those things that are fleeting. They fade and pass; they cannot remain. By celebrating what cannot last, we are always disappointed. That is why the imitation of the real is so much better, we think. Skin may lose the glow of youth, but plastic does not. Sex may not always reach the heights of passion, but the fantasies of our pornographies always do. In this way we try desperately and foolishly to celebrate the eternity of fleeting things.
Why do we not, instead, celebrate the eternal? Why do we not celebrate the stories, and the words that, over the ages, have given countless weary souls respite? Why do we not celebrate the spirit, that eternal part of us that will someday unite with God? Why do we not celebrate eternal cycles of birth, love, and death?
Instead, we celebrate the transitory . We celebrate that which decays, and fantasize of wrapping and preserving these things in plastic and cotton candy…
I’ve been working my way through the Old Testament recently, and I have just finished reading the book of Joshua. I have to say, it has been a challenging book for a number of reasons.
First, the book of Joshua is about Israelite’s military campaign against all the people in Caanan. God commands Joshua to kill everyone in the land (including women and children) so that their religion will not tempt the Israelites to stray from following the Lord.
It’s really, really hard to reconcile a God who essential commands genocide with the God of the New Testament. And I know I’m not the only one to have this problem. To me, it raises a larger question:
How does morality work within a social/historical context?
Here’s what I mean: within the historical period in which Joshua is set, all of the cultures in the region had their own gods. Each culture’s conquest were presumed to be a testament to that god’s power. These cultures were constantly warring against each other, and were often brutal. In fact, there is a brief story about a Cannanite king who cuts off the thumbs and big toes of all the other kings he conquers, and makes them crawl underneath his table to find their food.
The Israelites are no different. They brutally conquer others, and are conquered. They enslave others and are enslaved.
I don’t know, but I continue to wrestle with this…
About Erik Johnson:
I'm a high school English teacher in Anchorage, Alaska. My wife and I are the proud parents of three young Alaskans: Elias, River and Aurora. This website is dedicated to exploring faith, economics, sustainability, and Alaska living.
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