a carefree society part 4*

"The effectiveness of the mass media, however, as the key agent of psychological totalitarianism is not based on political or religious ideology. Rather it rests upon a base that I have described elsewhere as the myth of technological utopianism. Unlike religious myths in which meaning was spiritual—nature or the gods —this myth is thoroughly materialistic. Technological utopianism substitutes the perfect health and happiness of the human body for the spiritual well-being of the human soul. This meaning is ineffective because it is based on individualistic consumerism. For meaning to be effective it must be shared meaning that binds people together in common responsibilities and reciprocal moral relationships. Consumerism is a shared belief but it leaves one psychologically isolated, for it is based upon freedom without responsibility. The attempt to create meaning in consumerism, to spiritualize consumerism, fails because its utopian promise of perfect happiness and health cannot be achieved in this world, and therefore happiness and health remain transitory, as anxiety, suffering, and death constantly remind us."

~Richard Stivers, from Ethical Individualism and Moral Collectivism in America

Along with the contemporary fragmentation of our selves (Stivers' description for what a Biblical scholar might see as the sundering of community in the Fall---resulting in distrust of other people and fear of manipulation), our "collection of idols" has become equally fragmented, and as such, far more insidious and difficult to specifically identify. Perhaps it is not too far a stretch to say that our Molech is consumerism, and that which we fear is simply isolation as punishment for non-conformity to public opinion. The lie that real freedom is "freedom from responsibility" directly undermines the promise of a restored, redeemed community which results from taking responsibility and laying down one's life in purposeful sacrifice---the essence of true Freedom is a Choice, yes, but more specifically, it is the ability to choose that which is Good (permanently) versus that which is pleasing or pacifying (transiently). It is this dream of mutuality through sacrificial exercise of moral agency, in purposeful community, not mindless collectivism, that the words in Isaiah hold out: "inherit the land and possess my holy mountain."

*an excerpt from an entry on Anchor States

a carefree society part 3

what would Jesus say to a nation of professional servants?

The traditional summation of Christ's reversal of the given order has been defined by Christians as the imperative to be a servant- not a lord. The highest vision of Christian purpose is to reverse the order, to fulfill a mission of service. We serve Christ by following His example in washing the feet of His disciples. We are Christians, people who have it backwards, as we serve rather than rule- act as servants rather than rulers.

...

As Christians we could celebrate the institutionalization of the good servant. Ours is finally a society of caring, helping, curing servanthood. We laud the value of professional servanthood and pay for it generously.

In our society of servants, it is interesting to consider what Christ might see with all His tendency toward getting things backwards? .. Would He even reject a society of good servants?

The answer is, probably not, unless He saw good servants becoming lords. Probably not, unless He saw help becoming control, care becoming commericalized, and cure becoming immobilizing. On the other hand, if He found servants involved in commercialized, immobilizing systems of control, He would certainly insist that we still have it backwards- that our servanthood had become lordship.

The question, then, is whether we are a nation of good servants or the lords of commericalized, immobilizing systems of service that actually control.

...

I wonder whether the human reality is always to make servanthood into lordship. It may be that there is no way to define service so that we will not get it backwards and make it a system of control. With all our Christian devotion to the idea of service, could service be an inadequate ideal- a value so easily corrupted that we should question its usefulness?

At the Last Supper, Christ was telling the disciples those things of greatest importance. It was His final opportunity to communicate the central values of the faith. In St. John's report of Christ's concluding instruction, Christ said, "No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what the master is doing. I call you friends for all that I have heard from my Father, I have made known to you."

Finally, Christ said you are not servants. You know. You are friends.

Perhaps beyond the revolution of Christian service is the final revolution, the possibility of being friends. Friends are people who know, care, respect, struggle, love justice, and have a commitment to each other through time.

Friends are people who understand that it is not servants- the professors, the lawyers, doctors, and teachers- who make God's world. Rather, friends are people who understand that it is through their mutual action that they become Christians.

Christ's mandate to be friends is a revolutionary idea in our serving society. Here we are, a nation of professionalized servers, following Christ's mandate to serve. And here He is, at the final moment, getting it backwards once again. The final message is not to serve. Rather, He directs us to be friends.

Why friends rather than servants? Perhaps it is because He knew that servants could always become lords but that friends could not. Servants are people who know the mysteries that can control those to whom they give "help." Friends are people who know each other. They are free to give and receive help.

In our time, professionalized servants are people who are limited by the unknowing friendlessness of their help.

Friends, on the other hand, are people liberated by the possibilites of knowing how to help each other.

~ excerpt from The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits by John McKnight
(the only chapter that actually deals with Christianity and Jesus directly)

a carefree society part 2

why GDP per capita is a poor measure of quality of life and standard of living

just a few examples:
*a professional counsellor who talks to you about your problems counts in GDP while a good friend who will listen and be supportive and encouraging does not
*paid work hours are in GDP but volunteering is not
*driving a car to work requires gas that counts in GDP but walking to work and getting exercise in the process does not
*fast food sold counts in GDP but food eaten from home grown gardens does not

Has it ever occured to you that perhaps the more GDP/capita increases, the more poor our life is? The more we switch the professional services for counselling and troubles, the less we are able to rely on friends, the more isolated we become and the more dependent we become on professionals to solve our problems. The more we pay toxic containment companies to clean up the pollution we've made, the less we are preventing damage to the earth. The list continues...

I have a harrowing image of what society might become like: individuals sitting in sterile, whitewashed cell-size rooms, pushing grey buttons for the delivery of all the products and services that could give them happiness. And that is life.

But wait, hasn't that already happened? Think of the internet.*

individual cells in a city.
connected by the gentle blaze of the lcd screen.
thinking, dreaming, yearning for some magical unity
only to find themselves alone.
a web of simulated connections
a web of simulated community
individual cells. imprisoned. in the city.**

*I guess you can't buy happiness at the supermarket, but I believe it can be purchased on the internet
** I am thinking of this quote by V.S. Naipaul in The Mimic Men: "How right our Aryan ancestors were to create gods. We seek sex, and are left with two private bodies on a stained bed. The larger erotic dream, the god, has eluded us. It is so whenever, moving out of ourselves, we look for extensions of ourselves. It is with cities as it is with sex. We seek the physical city and find only a conglomeration of private cells. In the city as nowhere else we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains; it is the god of the city we pursue, in vain. "

simulated compassion

Movies such are Hotel Rwanda are designed to make us feel compassion. It humanizes the people involved in the genocide, shows harrowing scenes of their emotional turmoil and as a result, brings their suffering to a closer and more personal distance. Instead of just 30 second news clip, the genocide in Rwanda becomes an immersive 2 hour experience.

Yet sometimes I wonder if the increase of such movies have made us less compassionate. (I am speaking of movies that are designed to make us cry and weep over tragedy as opposed to those that tend towards glamourizing death and violence. i.e. think Hotel Rwanda, Schindler's List, vs. Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill)

Movies take months to years to come out, whereas everyday we are bombarded with real news and tragedies concerning real people that we do not feel compassion towards. As Hotel Rwanda pointed out, we say "how awful" and go on eating dinner.

On one hand, this can definitely be attributed to our own need for comfort-- it's easier to detach ourselves from horrible things happening around the world because we can ignore the nagging inside to do something about it. (Such action is often costly and too often inconvenient). By detaching ourselves, and not viewing the people who are suffering as actually human, we can continue living our comfortable lives.

But in addition to this, I think we have the unspoken expectation that anything truly tragic must appear the way it does in movies to produce an emotional response. Absent in real life situations where compassion would be appropriate responses, are the signifiers that mark movie scenes where we are to cry-- closeups of tears, sorrowful music, meaningful and well scripted lines.

In contrast, when we hear basic news broadcasted or hear about a friend's suffering, it does not appear as tragic as it does in movies. But we consumers of movies and simulations are not used to doing the mental legwork ourselves-- we are not used to imagining ourselves in another person's shoes, because we have relied so much on simulated signifiers in movies to make us cry or to make us feel.

Even one of the most beautiful emotions that we are capable of experiencing, compassion, has become simulated and rendered unreal. Our heart wrenches at the movies, tears gush out and then we walk away, perhaps silent for a few minutes, but then in almost all cases, doing nothing different except perhaps talk about how good the movie was. They make us feel compassion but afterwards, it's over. Holocaust. Genocide. It's over. And yet we've become accustomed to all the signifiers that mark sadness and times where we are supposed to feel compassion. And, we perhaps end up even more desensitized to the real people out there and nearby for whom we should have compassion, because we've become accustomed to only have compassion on Hollywood glamourized tragedy.

Gateway book review

interesting books read (or partially read) during Gateway

on poverty and development
****The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits by John McKnight ~ if you haven't noticed, several of my entries are based on an alteration of this title. basically, the book offers a fairly poignant argument for the destruction of community by the emergence of the professional service industry. it has an almost foucault-ian (is that word?) critique of "needs" and "wants" that the service industry produces. definitely a worth-while read! it is written by a Christian but the entire book except for the last chapter, is based on secular research and written for a secular audience.
***Renewing the City: Reflections of Community Development and Urban Renewal by Robert Lupton ~ offers a similar vision of what actually builds community. this book basically proposes a way of renewing the inner, impoverished city: for middle income families to move in (not to gentrify) and become part of the inner city communities. it offers both scriptural and anecdotal support for this vision.

on prayer and spiritual discipline
****With Open Hands by Henri Nouwen ~ at first glance, this book appears a bit like those new age self-help/feelgoodaboutyourself, but if you give it a few more pages, it is full of insightful comments and thoughts about prayer and knowing god. the language is simple, almost child-like, but very thoughtful and profound.
***The Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster ~ a lot of people have been reading this book this summer-- divided into sections on various spiritual disciplines (i.e. prayer, service, solitude, fasting). the book explores activities that can be pursued not necessarily to get anything out of God, but to lay ourselves open to what God wants to do with us.

on gender
***Men and Women in the Church: Building Consensus on Christian Leadership by Sarah Sumner ~ i haven't read too much on complementarian/egalitarian perspectives of gender, but this book was a really helpful start for me to think through the issues. it supports neither a complementarian (men and women are created equally, but are designed to take different roles within the church and marriage) nor egalitarian view (men and women are created equally and for the same roles within the church and marriage), but leans more on the egalitarian end. it does some thorough investigation of troublesome and difficult passages in the Bible and also illustrates some of the damaging effects of twisted notions of gender on women and men in the church.

a carefree society part 1.5

another example

perhaps a more poignant example of how professional services have tried to replace community is the grief counsellor.

generally speaking, when someone suffers a death of a close family member or friend, neighbours, families and friends would gather together to comfort and provide for the mourner. nowadays, the grief counsellor is called in. instead of being surrounded by friends and family, one can pay someone to talk about his sadness.

the implicit message is: we're not capable of helping someone out. we lack the expertise to care for someone who has suffered a close death. instead of caring, let's call in the expert and let him take care of it, when in fact, it would probably be more beneficial for the mourner to be surrounded and cared for by close friends, family and neighbours.

a carefree society part 1

"People in rural communities used to take care of each other. If someone's barn burned down, the entire community would turn out for a barn raising. Everyone would work at an assigned job: some doing the site preparation, some doing the heavy constructions, others cooking and watching the children. Before long, a new barn would stand where the old one had burned down.

The most important feature of the barn raising was that everyone would chip in something, so that no one would have to suffer a large and uncompensated loss...."*

Today, insurance companies have taken the place of barn raising. Instead of contributing labour or materials when someone's barn burns down, we pay an insurance premium to some sterile corporation. Instead of asking our neighbours for help when we suffer an unexpected loss, we file an insurance claim and receive money.

In one case, we depend on the market system, on the insurance company contracts. In the other case, we are called to depend on each other, on community and we ourselves are called to care for our neighbours.

Insurance companies have made us more carefree, but they have also deprived us of opportunities to care.


*Getting a Grip on your Money by William Wood (not that great a book actually--- I have issues with it-- it is very practical about how to manage your money but fails to address the Biblical tensions and concepts that should underly our spending and saving)
** recommended reading: The Careless Society: Community and its Counterfeits by John McKnight