Although this is something I was aware of, a recent chapter from the book The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand really brought to light how the West arrived where it did in terms of understanding the relationship between youth and the elderly.
The move to create and define the word “teenager” is actually fairly recent in Western history and connects directly to cultural and economic interests. One could argue that America wouldn’t have developed its cultural and economic footprint without the development of this term. Almost overnight (an immediate 400 percent increase) the framework for highschool was established, creating this definable middle space between youth and adult and distancing the West from the way we have viewed “youth” throughout history. The statistics are actually quite astounding. What followed soon after was the creation of post secondary education, something that developed in large part because of the economic interest and viability of a “youth culture”, shifting it from a 3 year gap to a 6 year gap.
Although this belongs in a larger more nuanced discussion (the seeds were largely already planted) this shift essentially elevated the future oriented thinking of progress that saw “youth” as the future (positive) and aging as the past (negative). And overtime the “youthful” age has simply been getting younger and younger in the West following suit with those cultural and economic interests. As the book suggests, selling youth culture is one of the most lucrative businesses out there.
A couple interesting outcomes from this: 1. If rock n’ roll was the first to become fully synonymous with youth culture (and all that it symbolizes), it is interesting to note its origins with black culture and black voices, and how quickly that became advertised as the white man’s genius.
2. If you ever had the thought that it seems like youth culture always seems to be driven by the interests of 13 and 14 year old girls, that’s because it is. This is the number one demographic targeted by those selling youth culture even if that was coopted and rebranded in a “man’s” world.
3. It’s also no mistake that youth culture was used to capture this dominating image of the free person as a movement towards self discovery and self identity. One can argue this is the soul of what makes youth culture what it is.
4. With those three things in mind, what’s also clear is that as we follow this development we also see the gradual shift away from some of the cultural norms that informed Americans development and towards a culture shaped by this high school-post secondary structure and its ability to give birth to this notion of the “individual” embodied by this cherished (and lucrative) youthful zeal. What got discarded was any necessary language for understanding the relationship between youth (however the culture defines it) and the aged, including the general demise of family systems and structures that tend to inform it. And to be clear, this appears as evident in the development of the old conservative models of the nuclear family as it is in the rest of modern western culture. And at the same time what got glorified were the same enlightenment values that planted the seeds for youth culture to become the bedrock of western society and our continued obsession with the future.
It’s a small snapshot of a multi-generational family that helps redefine and repurpose (or maybe better, erase) that gap between “youth” and adult, or young and aged. We often don’t realize that here in the west, due to our long and storied obsession with youth and youthfulness, that this obsession with the future that has been tightly interwoven into our systems (social, religious and political) in problematic ways. Ageism, and the unspoken challenge for many in reconciling their worth when these vey systems discard them, is a very big and very real problem. It just gets swept under the rug and not really talked about. Heck, I felt it the day I turned 40, that negative assertation and label, rearing its ugly head.
I do think that immigration can and does help to infuse different narratives into the dominant western motif, even if it can still get confused and muddled in the process. In fact, people often equate the presence of immigration as proof of the Western narratives worth and that the grand American experiment as the symbol of the Free World is in fact working. The would suggest that this is the reason why people come to America or Canada for example, and that it should then be expected that those coming to a Western society built on the backs of thsoe who made it need to assimilate to this same youthful and future laden obsession. The idea of imigration I dont think its anywhere near that simple or narrow. In truth, there are many reasons why one immigrates, many benefits that immigration brings to a given society on social and economic levels, and varied ways of co-existing. Perhaps more of note is how it is that we entertain this notion of co-existing in the first place, something that deserves a much larger and more embodied discussion in terms of what pluralism is, what pluralism looks to achieve, and how that fits with our view of the future, the function of a global society and the moral questions that flow from that. Unfortunately these questions get pushed to the side in favor of this youth-full and future oriented obsession, with the aged often bearing the consequence.
The author D.A. Stewart actually noticed my love and affection for my favorite author Lawhead and sent me an early copy of this book to read and review. I was honored to do so of course, but my honest thoughts also spill out into my genuine appreciation for the book itself. It will definitely hit the mark for fans of Lawhead, but what I appreciated most about it is the way the author distinguishes himself in a busy field and genre. Narrowing in on a key figure in legend and history, and a specific time in legend and history, Stewart weaves a story that stays simple in scope, concise in its focus and noted in its thematic concern. Usually these narratives juggle the larger world that surrounds it. Carson narrows in on the key figure, telling a story that brings together faith, struggle, ancient systems and adventure. Genuinely hard to put down.
Hope of the Gospel by George MacDonald
Part two of my noted effort to read some MacDonald in 2021. Beautiful, concise, aware and challenging. MacDonald has a way of pushing back against religious conventions while bringing all of the questions and concerns to light within the frame of scripture, Tradition and the Christian faith. The end result being a refocusing on the essential nature of the Christian Gospel itself.
The Giver by Lois Lowry
A classic that I fell in love with immediately. I loved the way Lowry offers a critique of modernism by weaving a dystopian narrative chalk full of progressive ideas and developed moral and ethical concerns with an old world setting open to the spiritual and the religious and filled with myth and metaphor. I can see this being a challenge for some modern readers, but it is something I think many of us in this present age are craving and longing to recover, that sense that there is more to this world than what mere rationalism can provide.
In this same way, Lowry has written a children’s story with grown up perspectives. It’s a marriage of the childlike questions and grown up cynicism. These kinds of stories always land for me in a special way, and in the Giver we see Lowry looking to explore an aspect of the human experience that has perhaps been neglected in the modern age.
Lowry has written a story about how it is that choices shape us, and it is within this that we are able to see this idea of ‘memory” emerging as one aspect of the stories central concern. For modernists, memories are not trustworthy. In the Giver they are a gift precisely because they hold the power to tell our stories in meaningful ways.
In Pursuit of Disobedient Women: A Memoir of Love, Rebellion, And Family, Far Away by Dionne Searcey
I did not think I was going to like this book when I picked up, but did so upon recommendation. Turns out this will likely be in contention for read of the year when things are said and done. I loved it, the way the author, telling her story of subplanting her family from America to Nigeria to report for the Times on the plight of Nigerian woman, intersects her story with the revelations that emerge from her time in Nigeria. It never gets bogged down in politics, instead providing something personal, entertaining, funny, meaningful and and inspiring. That it ends up so readable is as much a testament to her story and her willingness to live it and learn it as it is to her ability to write so succinctly and effortlessly about it.
Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
A year in the life of an independent bookseller in Scotland. He’s brash, cynical, funny, and, well, Scottish. But his particular experience, documented in a diary that goes day by day and month by month, provides a window into the honest plight, investment and experience of independent booksellers everywhere, with its very real challenges and joys in tow. The quaint and storied Scottish seaside setting is simply a bonus.
Honorable Mention: Faye, Faraway by Helen Fisher (a spiritual and personal drama about faith, doubt, struggle and hope, told from both a personal and familial perspective)
Film
The Classics: A Special Day (1977), Safety Last (1923)
Safety Last is an early silent era film that has long been overshadowed by more prominant voices. But it is no less influential in what it does and what it accomplishes. The deeply rooted humor is ripe with social commentary, particularly as the world it captures forges ahead into the modern era. This is irony at its best. Equally important in the way it captures the waning hours of Italian neo-realism’s long and storied influence is A Special Day, Set in the 30’s and incorporating some stunning historical footage, the film is an exploration of tensions that run rampant through the dramatzation of its period and the represenations of its characters on this very “special day”. There’s a poetry to the film’s bookends, but the real stuff is found in the gradually unfolding relationship that occupies the films body. Personal, universal, gender and political, particular and cultural divides are on full and equal display.
Horror/Thrillers: Session 9 (2009), Joint Security Area (2000), The Hitcher, Belzebuth (2017), Thelma (2017), Sator (2019)
I watched a number of thriller/horror films this month. I guess I’m in a mood. Two of the more memorable films came from the current Fear of God Podcast series, which is exploring what scares us as “listeners” (The Hitcher and Session 9), one of which veers more psychological the other towards a more direct moral quesiton and crisis. Perhaps the most disturbing and effecting watch comes from Shudder’s recently added Belzebuth, a film that had my jaw on the floor in the early going. Be aware, this is not for the faint of heart, but as a blending of spiritual themes, real psycholgoical drama, and religious imagery the film’s steady and even handed first three quarters gets blown wide open in the final act. Truly unnerving and frightening.
Perhaps in a slightly different vein (or most certainly) is 2000’s Joint Security Area. A culturally centred thriller that sets us on that symbolic and quite literal line that divides North and South Korea. As a story about family bonds, social conflict, and the power of our often arbitrarily defined borders proves as effective in evoking humor and tension as it does in delivering an emotional punch.
Still on a different level yet is the subdued, patient, high minded horror of Sator (a film that revels in tone and atmosphere as its driving force) and Thelma (a unsuspecting supernatural/psychological horror that delves into its symbolism and is characters). They are both less traditional and more experimental in their approach, but equally fascinating and effective works of art in their own right.
The Oscar Line-up: Judas and the Black Messiah (2021), Minari (2020), The Mauritarian (2021), The Father (2020)
These are old news for many elswhere, but here in Canada the Oscar favorites are finally and slowly getting released. That includes the spiritual and pastoral Minari, a film that is as entrenched in is sense of the particular American story as it is in exploring its essential humanity, the powerful and weighty Judas and the Black Messiah, a film that captures a similar point in history as The Trial of the Chicago 7 but with much greater resolve and effect, the Mauritatrian, a tight and taut poltical/court room thriller that spotlights Foster while delivering an entertaining and well paced narrative, and the emotionally gripping The Father, which not only gives us Hopkin’s career defining performance but also offers us the best depictment of dementia ever put to film. All worthy of your attention.
For The Children: Anina (2013), Raya and the Last Dragon. Psycho Goreman (2020), The City of Lost Children (1995)
So these might not all be your traditional children’s films (so veto accordingly), but from the compassionate edge of Anina’s focus on childhood struggle (including its simple but endearing style of old school animation) to the fresh and invigorating cultural adventure of Raya and the Last Dragon (Disney really needs to make more films like this), to the laugh out loud nature of Psycho Goreman’s tame horror filled galavant through a young minded adventure, to the creative, weird and quirky nature of The City of Lost Children’s imagination (featuring an early Ron Perlman central performance), they all fit the bill for me in their own way.
Dramas: Wild Mountain Thyme (2020), A Hijacking (2012), The Half of It (2020), The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982),
I also, as per usual, watched a lot of dramas this month. The standouts for me- the unexpected Wild Mountain Thyme, a film that has been panned by critics (not sure why), seemed tailor made for my sensibilities. It’s an Irish romantic comedy at its core, and it infuses metaphor, romanaticism and a fairy tale like appraoch in order to tell what is a deeply poetic story. On the flip side of this is A Hijacking, a film that would make a perfect doduble billing with Captain Phillips, but which is underrepresnted in the shadow of that films much more visible presence. It’s success comes from its intentional focus on the negotions, which are white knuckle tense. The coming of age drama The Half of It also came out of nowhere for me. It’s a classic love story with a twist that weaves its way through the story in all kinds of intersting and unique ways. There are religious elements interewoven throughout, giving it the feel of a sort of Biblical epic as it navigates the notion of a divided self being made whole in community with the other. Lastly was the Italian fairytale The Night of the Shooting Stars, a film that uses realism to break through the reality of war and locate a people and their dreams hanging in the balance. It’s poetic, profound, and well realized in its ability to use the motif of a “children’s story” to tell a genuine adult tale.
Honorable Mention: Mostly Martha (Fun, humor, cooking, drama, a love story, wonderful chemistry, Italian culture set against German tendencies. I watched this with a smile on my face the whole time. All the right ingredients to create the perfect, savory rom-com with just a touch of that seasoned dramatic conern).
Podcasts/Youtube
Biblical World: Ugarit and the Bible with Mary Buck (Episode 4)
The Biblical World is a new addition to the On Script brand that uses its connection to the rich world of Christian studies to explore archealogy in relationship to scripture. These are experts in the field, and in this particular episode it explores the important findings of Ugarit and what they can tell us about the ancient and Biblical world.
The Sacred: Chris French on skepticism and the psychology of paranormal beliefs (Episode 98); On Being With Krista Tippett: Jill Tarter- It Takes a Cosmos to Make a Human (Episode 868)
Two episodes that inspired some further reflections from me in this space. The first one demonstrates the potential of helpful and fruitful dialogue across different perspectives, with the host of The Sacred dialoging with sociologist Chris French about some of the challenges of integrating science into the everday workings of life and belief in a meaningful way. The second is a really interesting discussion between On Being’s Krista Tippett and cosmological scientist Jill Tarter, the inspiration for the film Contact, on space exploration and the long future of humanity. My interest in this episode centered on how it is that she makes a case for our necessary interest in space exploration, something that I think represents certain challenges when pairing that with the more existential concern for the human story and human meaning.
Kingdom Roots with Scot McKnight: The Making of Biblical Womanhood (Conversations with Beth Allison Barr) Episode 183
Beth Allison Barr has been making the rounds in support of her new book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood, and this is a great place to get familiar with what she is all about (also see The Holy Post)
The Friendship Onion: Six O’Clock Twinkies (Episode 2)
Welcome to the fun hour with Merry and Pippen as they put their lasting and enduring friendship to good use.
Undeceptions with John Dickson: Guilty Conscience (Episode 65); Unbelievable: NT Wright and Douglas Murray- Identity, myth and miracles, How do we live in a post-Christian World (Episode 760)
Another two episodes that inspired further reflections in this space, this time on the subject of forgiveness and its essential place in the Christian narrative. Both episodes seem to ultimately land on forgiveness as crucial for the recovering of the Christian story in the modern, Post Christian world, with the Unbelievable waxing a bit more theological and poetic (with a historical minded attention to the larger picture), and Dickson’s podcast digging more into the more hardnosed philosophical and historical underpinnings. Taken together they provide some food for thought.
The Great Books: The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (Episode 101); The Book Review: Louis Menand on The Free World; Theology, Philosophy, and Religious Studies: Astonished by Love- Storytelling and the Sacramental Imagination with Alice McDermott; The Symbolic World: Paul Kingsnorth- Environmentalism, the Tower of Babel and the Disintegration of Culture (Episode 158)
Four podcast episodes inspired new reading ventures in the coming months. I’m already digging into Louis Menands intriguing book The Free World, which takes a look at the cultural formation and influence of America not by way of the traditional outward influence perspective on the world, but on the ways the international communities and cultures shaped American culture between the World War and the Cold War and made it what it was. On tap is the classic The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, a book ingrained in the religious and philosphical ethos of Western history, a line up of books by storyteller and practicing Catholic Alice McDermott, and Irish poet, Christian and environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth, a vivid voice in the ongoing and important movement towards reenchantment in the Western world.
The Symbolic World: Richard Rohlin- A Universal History (Episode 159)
Speaking of the movement towards reenchantment, this is a great snapshot of what this is all about. It’s an exciting time for Christianity in the West, and I’m thankful for the work the host and many others have been giving to undercovering the language of the ancient world long lost to the enlightenment’s fascination with rationalism and progress. Also paired with this is the youtube version here- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_N5s4n_lwB8&feature=youtu.be
Music
The Sheepdogs: Rock and Roll (Ain’t No Simple Thing)
Everyone’s favorite Canadian rock and rollers are finally back and proving to be every bit the grisled, workmanlike veterans we might forget they are. After all, if you are like me it might be easy to think they are still relatively fresh on the scene. Make no mistake, this album signifies that sweet spot between familiarity and growth that is the measure of the artist playing the long game, and it provides the perfect ease into those cherished summer days and nights. Actually, forget the ease, this will help you off that chair and into the necessary groove to make the most of it.
In case you’ve missed out, the link above will introduce you to the grand project that is Tulsa’s immensely interesting exploration of a piece of its history and culture. One that is rich with hip hop and the Black voice, but also set against the tragic nature of the 1921 Massacre and Black Wall Street. It’s worth a deep dive into the podcast if you’re interested, but the album and the upcoming documentary are also worthy of your attention.
Here’s the synopsis of the albums creation from the site:
The album was created in massive studio sessions over a five day period in March of 2020. Most of the album was created in the heart of Greenwood at the Greenwood Cultural Center – a significant community space which was flipped to house six recording studios for the weekend.
In addition, artists took over the former home of 1921 massacre mastermind and KKK leader Tate Brady and flipped that into recording studios as well. The former ‘Brady Mansion’ is now the Skyline Mansion – an event venue owned by former NFL first-round draft pick and Tulsa-native Felix Jones.
Future of Forestry- Remember
I’ve been a fan of FOF for a while, and I have to say, this new full length EP might be some of their (or his) best work yet. Rich with melody and attention to detail, much of this leans into FOF’s familiar penchant for creative imaginings and lends it an accessible and almost invitational presence. This is an album you aren’t simply meant to experience and appreciate, its one that I think you can also participate in.
Kacy and Clayton- Plastic Bouquet
I’ve had this album in my playlist for a little while now, and it has slowly been captivating my attention more and more. It’s not just the folky roots of its infectious tones, rather its the compelling story of its collobaration and composition that lends this such an interesting voice. It’s distinctly Canadian with the duo establishing their place as trail blazers, but brings in the story of New Zealand songwriter and storyteller Marlon William as a kind of cross-cultural experiment. The dedication to bringing out the lore and tradition of these largely indigenous based histories within the songs makes this an album one needs to absorb carefully and slowly. Thankfully the bluesy, folksy, country flavors make that easy to do.
Mat Kearney- January Flower
Kearney clearly invested some time in bringing his latest release January Flower to fruition. I haven’t felt this deeply connected to one of his records since City of Black and White, an album that remains close to my heart due to its release the year of my wedding. It provided the soundtrack for that journey, framing the excitement of crossing the Ontario border on our way to New York City. While his subsequent releases have all been good, I have found them more experimental than personal. This album feels personal, trading in the deviations into fresh pop constructions and instrumentation/production for a back to basics and more acoustically driven approach. Kearney appears to be telling an intimate and weathered relationship story that frames the albums lyrical journey, and this I think plays a role in the album’s welcome restraint.
Natalie Bergman- Mercy
I’m far from the only one getting on the Bergman train recently, and for good reason. Mercy represents a heartbreaking and quite profound spiritual journey through some personal life trauma. Which isn’t to say this album is dire. It’s far more reflective, using the platform of her story to foster personal reflection on God, life, faith, hope and struggle. This only proves to provide layers for the album’s artistic genius, which is bursting with carefully thought out melodies, instrumentation and structure. It might at first feel deceptively pared back and melancholic, but there is an urgency and energy to this album that is undeniable.
Honorable Mentions: Iron & Wine Archive Series Volume No. 5: Tallahassee Recordings (in case you missed it, this is the last in the archive series, albums digging into the salvaged tracks of Iron and Wine’s early years, with this one reaching the furthest into that lost repertoire); Jon Bryant- Back to Love (lyrical, Canadian, and the kind of smart pop the world needs right now); The Gray Havens- It’s Possible (check out the podcast episodes breaking down each song here- https://www.thegrayhavensmusic.com/, and then check out the album. You won’t regret it); The Black Keys- Delta Kream (might ultimately feel like a bit of the step back from their earlier works, but the band seems to be more than content in simply writings the songs they want to write, with Delta Kream sitting definitively within their comfort zone); In case you missed it in 2020, The Lone Bellow- Half Moon Light’s (Deluxe version is here).
Not only does it fit will with my previous post on Covid, published in this space, it has some major overlap with a book I’m reading right now called The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand, which, although I’ve only read a small portion of it thus far, has my full recommendation.
Menand argues in his book that while the tendency is often to try and understand American culture and philosophy by reading it from the inside out, that is, to understand America’s influence on the world through its influence on the world, we would do far better to see the current shape of America by looking at the influences that gave America its shape from abroad. For Menand, this comes from the crucial junction that frames the shift from the World War to the Cold War, subsequently conflating Nazism and Stalinism into a singlular definition of totatiltariansm while polarizing the two political sides.
As Menand points out, what holds this dicsussion together is the interest in liberty and free will. What we see though, as the article below also helps to bring to light, is an emerging ignorance of the subsequent conflation of both politics (or power) and philosophy (or Truth) in American culture. According to Menand’s book, elevating this notion of the free will justifiably leads to forms of individualism and an interest in relativism. These things are hard to reconcile when faced with social concern or social issues, and ultimately struggle to make sense of diversity and tend to get mired in the constant struggle to avoid decending into disorder. Thus we arrive at the neverending push and pull of the quesiton, what do we sacrifice in order to uphold the notions of liberty and free will, and subsequently what do we sacrifice to uphold the social or the collective good.
Both Menand and Shullenberger seem to recognize, more or less directly, that in absence of objective truth (the propping up of relativism) we simply arrive at the need for other forms of truth. Or as Shullenberger puts it in his dealing with Foucault, in the absence of a grand narrative here in the West, we quickly become driven simply to replace it with a different narrative. The problem is that these grand narratives that shape our drive to protect these polarized sides are at best inconsitent, often competing, and rarely articulated. In the modern West they are most often expressed through the language of individualism and relativism, the two essential components of the narratives grand ideal for liberty and free will, while the presence of diversity (and diversity of opinion) is a constant reminder liberty and free will are, as Foucault would recognize, mere allusions in a world built on socially constructed norms. And left to themselves they tend towards disorder.
These inconsisties in the grand narrative probably wouldn’t be as big of a problem if not for this subsequent marriage of philosophy and power in the Western myth. If philosophy allows us to think about the disorder of these grand narratives in terms of meaning and value and importance, the concern of politics is always uniformity and order. The problem then comes down to this tricky word “truth”. Or capital T truth. If politics equates to uniformity and order, then politics also equates to power, or the power stystems that can ensure uniformtity and order. It is when philosophy as “Truth” gets paired with politics as “power” (and power driven systems) that things get murky. This heightens the problem of this absence of a grand narrative that diversity imposes on notions of liberty and free will. What we end up with are two sides employing power in order to resist power, often in the aim of the kind of self interest liberty and free will allude to. Which is the necessary language of revolution on one hand, but also the language of so many destructive ideas (racism of course being one of them)
This marriage of politics (power) and philosophy (truth) needs a grand narraive (Truth) in order to work. The question then is what is Truth in the modern world. What is the Truth that guides and builds American culture and politics and how does it play into these allusions of liberty and free will that inform its interests. It is when we ask this question that we, in the West, tend to bring in that third entity, that ever so crafty god called “Knowledge”. This creates a trifecta from that disctint American muddledness which is the marriage of power and politics, with knowledge functioning as that secret and sought after tool through which to construct these positions of power, much in the same way that the mystery religions did. This gets even more complicated with science becomes knowledge, which becomes truth, which becomes power, all on the basis of ones (or one side’s) philosophical claim on capital T Truth.
The article from Shullenberger pushes this notion further.
“In Foucault’s words, “it was life more than the law that became the issue of political struggles, even if the latter were formulated through affirmations concerning rights.” Efforts to resist this power, he notes, have generally underlined the pervasiveness of biopolitical logic: “the forces that resisted relied for support on the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a living being.” To step outside of this framing, a political resistance must be willing to surrender life—yet amid the currently prevailing values, such a politics would be seen as sheer madness… [p]ower is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.
In other words, that common interest in liberty and free will can be narrowed down to “life” itself. And if the interest of politics (power) is life, then what we have is the inconsistant nature of our power systems attempting to enforce laws that protect life in ways that tend to collapse into madness precisely because power is life and life is power. Speaking of the all consuming presence of power that persists across the political divide, Shullenberger goes on to write regarding the implementation of the god of “knowledge” as the necessary weapon of choice.
If knowledge is viewed as an instrument of political domination, the reasoning goes, the credibility of those who pursue it will become unsustainable…. An epistemology that links knowledge instrumentally to power is likely to be appealing amid the decline of what Foucault’s contemporary Jean-François Lyotard called “grand narratives”: the legitimating stories that ennoble the pursuit of knowledge as a means of civilizational progress towards truth or the preservation of a common culture. This outlook is consistent with a certain mood of resignation that shades into cynicism. And this cynicism is appropriate to an academic sphere that is at once rhetorically subversive and institutionally conservative. If all subversive energies ultimately feed into domination, it is unsurprising that the humanities and social sciences have become a space where overt ideological fervor coexists comfortably with covert careerist hypercompetitiveness, bourgeois professionalism, and the reproduction of elites….
Foucault’s more original contributions lie in his anchoring of a philosophical account of the relationship between truth and power in a historical analysis of specific modern institutions. His wide-ranging impact, I have argued here, owes something to his insights into the ascendancy of the same professional class of credentialed experts amongst whom his theories have achieved the most traction. But the dimensions of his ideas that might offer a means of criticizing the guiding assumptions of that class have generally remained unexplored, lest they prove too potent.”
In other words, where the god of knoweldge is wielded as a weapon that we can use and that serves our purposes, elite knowledge based systems emerge as that which then holds power over the other, which is the allusion of liberty and free will. The thing that stands out for me in this equation is the notion that in the absence of a grand narrative we simply come up with new narratives to take the place of the old, or new gods to replace the old. And whatever god it is that we bring in to fill the gaps, when that god is paired with politics and philosophy, and likeise funneled into “science” by way of these knowledge based systems, we are dealing with the potential abuse of “power” as “Truth”. To play that backwards, Marry this power to politics on either side of the political spectrum, and then marry the politics to “Truth” and you have a very real and potentially dangerous conundrum that threatens to collapse all of our ideological infighting in on itself. This becomes particularly rife when allusions of liberty and free will confront the social reality of conformity and construct.
The article by Shullenberger on Foucault has a particular interest in how this applies to the ongoing battle against Covid, with a primary concern being the gridlock that emerges from this kind of ideological infighting. Yet one could easily parlay this outwards into any socio-political issue. As I wrote about in my previous post on Covid, the conundrum of inconsistencies when it comes to employing these grand narratives at will can be seen, for example, in discussions of climate change. The real question becomes less about what the problem is (climate crisis) but about why one should be concerned and how we address the concern. To connect that to the above article and the formulating argument of this post, if the ultimate concern for liberty and free will comes down to “life” itself, to what end does our battle to “save the planet” (which itself is an undefined notion) sacrfice life for the sake of climate concern? And in doing do, to what degree does this ideological concern begin to collapse back in on itself? This is why the far more important quesitons are the why and the what, and as the above discussion as pointed out, what frames our grand narrative becomes crucial to understanding what it is we are then elevating as capital “T” Truth through the employing of our power based systems. Is nature itself our god? In that case we must ask what life we are willing to sacrifice to allow nature to take itse due course. Is humanity our god? In that case human exceptionalism must ask what we are willing to sacrifice to allow humans to compete and survive within nature. Is progress our god? In that case we must ask what we are willing to sacrifice to allow progress to happen. That the “we” here remains undefined is precisely what awakens us to the existence of those necessary power systems. And here it would also be prudent to readdress a central problem I brought up in my previous post as well, which is this notion that in the push and pull of these modern, power based systems (all employed in a similar concern for life), we have not true and acting defintion of what life is. And the absence of this definition is only getting more and more blurry as technology progresses and space exploration pushes further. Ironically, life out there becomes more valuable while life here on earth becomes less and less definable.
In my mind, the problem is that the assumed age of the new gods that American culture continues to proclaim and project (with according to Menand is itself a bit of a conundrum full of allusions and inconsistancies, particularly when it gets detached from history) has simply traded in the old with a confusing new pantheon. Nature? Humanity? Progress? Technology? Depending on where your allegiance alligns withiin this pantheon- and chances are most of us appeal to all of these gods when we need them to prop up our power systems- you will come away with very different and largely inconsistent interests and perspectives. Which is why the notion of a grand narrative built around liberty and free will remains a convoluted and often allusionary exercise, one that most people simply don’t want to aknowledge or think about. Why? Not only because we need a narrative in order to live a meaningful existence, but because we need a narrative to hold the power over the other. To feed this back into the question of Covid then, its not so much a question of whether there is a problem, its rather a question of why (or what motivates us) and what (how we address the problem). Peel back the layers and we find this common interest of “life” being played through competing visions of liberty and free will. The irony being that both sides are employing power and power based systems to protect the interest of life. What this should reveal though is how much of this happens wihout much understanding of that grand narrative or its absence. We are unable to define what precisely life is, and thus unable to define what it is we are sacrificing on either side of the equation, and what precisely we are sacrificing for. That this would leave so many in a state of unease (again, on either side) should not be surprising. That underneath our power driven, socially constructed attempts to maintain control over that less than defined narrative (employing the god of knowledge and reason as fighting our battles and being on our side over and against the other) we can perceive inequality, corruption, the loss of life, and disorder should be even less suprising. This is after all the very bedrock of our allusions towards liberty and free will. When power comes from everywhere, when life is power and power is life, we are left enslaved to its will and driven by its pursuit. In the name of liberty and freedom of course, but with little ability to define precisely what this means, what this is and why it matters. The very idea that power requires the sacrifice of life in order to be upheld, and that it does so without a grand narrative on either side able to inform this sacrifice, should give us pause. In its place should come the kind of humility that Shullenberger suggests we can glean from Foucault. We all have our gods after all, despite our ability to convince ourselves that liberty and free will can operate without them, and those gods exist in service of (and in service to) the power based systems we are trying to protect.
For what its worth, even though I’m not a fan of either McDowell’s, the recent Unbelievable conference tackled precisely this question. How do we live in this world of contradictory narratives with a better story in mind. Wright and Holland and Murray are of particular interest there, all of which are represented at least partially in these two episodes:
Some news this week. I finally got vaccinated (for Covid 19).
While this certainly doesn’t feel revolutionary- I’m far from the only one getting vaccinated, and as the vaccine rollout continues to ramp up in my hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba it should become more and more common of a story- there were some realities that flowed from this experience for me personally that I think have been worth some further reflection.
First off, while I haven’t struggled with the idea of getting vaccinated, as someone with an anxiety disorder I have struggled with much of the conversation surrounding the vaccinations. If my anxiety has already been quite high over the reality of Covid, reading all of the divisive opinions surrounding the vaccines and its potential dangers had managed to cast the whole ordeal in a degree of uncertainty. I didn’t realize how much so until the evening before my appointment. I had a panic attack. I know that I had a panic attack because I must have spent a good 3-4 hours that night obsessively reading through all these differing opinions, my hand hovering over the “cancel appointment” button a couple of times in that process.
One note about my anxiety struggles. Years ago I recognized that I have Orthorexia. Orthorexia is, simply put, a form of OCD that revolves around healthy eating, including the compulsive obsession with researching and reading medical information and the overwhelming fear not necessarily of germs (I’m not a germaphobe) but of potential toxins and unknowns present in the environment and the things I use and consume. This is why I had to make a very hard and fast rule for myself a while back not to read and research things that can trigger these obsessions, becuase once I go down this endless pit of information it is very difficult for me to pull myself out. At the peak of my struggle I had binders and rooms filled with articles and information which often created the extenuating problem of having all of this information now floating around in my head 24-7 with nowhere to go, wreaking havoc on my mental health and well being.
Factor that then into this evening of obsessive reading and I could immediately feel all of those old anxieties rushing back to the surface.
Fast forward: I forced myself to go, I got the jab, came home and wrote a post on my facebook wall in a bout of sleeplessness about how the anxieties of the night before had now transmorphed (is that a word? I feel like it is) into a whole different kind of anxiety given that the vaccine was actually now inside my body for better or for worse. The point of my post was simply to say that while many online seemed to be overly joyous and happy about getting the jab (and rightly so), my experience was a bit more complicated. Turns out I’m not alone. I don’t think I have had more comments or responses than I have had to that post, with many informing me that I put into words something they were afraid to say out loud, many now looking at or in the middle of getting the jab but with similar reservations and anxieties in tow. There is just enough unknowns surrounding the vaccine and its rollout to leave a clear window open for speculation, and that speculation has been enough to leave many well meaning individuals genuinely uneasy.
So where has this been driving my thoughts this week? In a couple directions. First, I found myself wondering about the nature of this speculation. What is it about the vaccine that is making so many either anxious or joyous? While many have been tending to dismiss others concerns over the vaccine with ready-made accuastions of anti-science and anti-vaxxer motivations, what surfaced for me in my own thinking and in hearing the genuine concerns of others is that the conversation is actually much more complex than this. Yes, for some there is a preconcieved agenda that arrives ripe with misinformation and rampant conspiracy theories. We should be wary of this and all do our due diligence. But one of the things I have appreciated about some of the voices I have heard questioning the vaccine rollout is their desire and their willingness to table certain questions others are ignoring or not deeming necessary to ask. Of pertinance to my own struggle and reflection is the question of the vaccine’s genetic makeup and its relationship to the larger field of medical advancement and progress. I’m reminded of an interview with Director James Gray where he discusses his powerful and poignant film Ad Astra. In this interview he discusses the themes of the film and suggests that we as a modern society, living in an age of such rapid progression and change, stand in real danger of arriving at the future without the ability to answer the most necessary moral questions that can help us make sense of the future, and perhaps with little awareness or ability to even ask the necessary questions to begin with. To be sure, using RNA genetic code to develop a new kind of vaccine is far from the the only development of its kind in the field. The vaccine is a small slice of a very large pie that is very likely the future of much technological advancement, and it is evidence of work that has been going on for a while and that is very much present in many areas of medicine and science today. That a vaccine though can bring the word “genetic” to the forefront of the popular consciousness does shed some light on an interesting aspect of the larger conversation regarding a development that is much further along than even the most educated would care to admit or tend to address. This general unawareness of the conversation bears weight for the moral questions that necessarily follow such a vision of progress and the future.
For example, how precisely do we define “life”. Many might be suprised to realize that there is no real consensus on what that defintion is, and that this has real world implications for the different fields interested in the sciences and technologies that will be the driving force of future development (see Carl Zimmer’s book Life’s Edge). Similarly, consider the recent conversation with Jill Tarter on the On Being podcast, the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the film Contact and the founder (or one of the founders) of SETI, which is engaged in the ongoing search for civilizational intelligence (Episode 868). What comes to light through her and others research within the SETI program, which, although is more concerned for the long future of humanity than the here and now, is asking similar quesitons about what progress actually means, is the similarly evasive question of what it means to be human, or to borrow her word an “earthling”. She makes the case that it is through imaginging other life out there (and in imagining its possible discovery) that this can then turn a mirror back on us, showing us how it is that we, in our current form, are all the same. We are all what we would define as “earthlings”. What that means though and why it holds importance both in the long history of evolution and the imagining of a long future remains largely undefined in her view. Or at best highly simplified and assumed.
Even less defined for her is why, in the necessary pursuit of space exploration and given the demonstrated finiteness of our earth, the current climate changes we observe in this present age and which have being tradtionally susbcribed to humanities ongoing abuses of the earth we call home, matter. This requires her to make certain leaps in logic regarding an unspecified allegiance to a form of human exceptionalism, elevating “us” as that which must survive and the earth as the current habitat that we surived within. And yet if the notion of “earthling” is not approrpriately defined and afforded its particular meaning, or if it can’t be in rational terms, why precisely is it that we should we be concerned about humanties particular and possibly threatened long term survival? Why does it matter precisely if changes in our climate lead to the same kind of changes we can observedly track through the whole of evolutionary history? And why does it matter if, as the evidence seems to suggest, technological advancements are effectively blurring the definitions of life and earthing altogether? If, as she says, life out there can reveal that life which looks differently than humanity has no greater or lesser value than humanities expressed uniqueness (or potential lack of), then why does it matter that our current state of life persists at all? If nature is apt to do what nature will do, and the natural order of things is found in the predictable cycle of life that brings about its ongoing change and diversity, then a changing climate in which some species flourish and others simply go away is simply the narrative that always was and always will be. We either claim to right to circumvent this for out own gain, or we relegate our species to the natural order. That seems logical enough, but it’s not a conviction many will feel comfortable going wholesale in on.
Unless, that is, we somehow elevate human made progress to some kind of godlike perspective. That is to say, we humans are here and we have the capability to think and be aware and discover what is “out there” and how this world works, and therefore we can claim superiority over the natural order. In this view, having a long view of the future where we can ensure our survival must become the sacred call. Why? Because the god of progress tells us it must be so, and this is in our nature to do so. That, to use Tarter’s own words, is simply the responsibile thing to do as a species. But here’s the problem. That perhaps makes some sense to those who are actually priviliged enough to make a difference in this world on that level (speaking of the ongoing survival of the human species). But when you dial that back down into the everydayness of the human experience, those who’s lives cannot possibly make a meaningful difference in such a long term view of humanities future, and those who look upon the suffering of others as in indication that this long form view is suspect at best, this begins to make far less sense and is certainly a much harder sell. To make matters even worse, this segment of humanity, which in effect can be described as the “majority” of humans that pouplates this earth, is actually effectively impeding progress through their existence. If not for that pesky thing called morality chances are the incredibly advanced technology that exists behind the scenes would be not only that much more advanced but it would already be employed and we would likely already be well on our way towards space colonization and even human made immortality. If not for morality things like cancer and viruses would percievably already be cured and eradicated. To make this even more complicated, the consequence of hanging on to some sense of morality (of the sort that deems the very real “Thanos” moral dilemma as an actual moral dilemma) is that we must then contend with immorality, which breeds inequality and the kind of overconsumption that threatens the lives of all and allows viruses like Covid to emerge.
This is the question at the heart of Ad Astra. When we arrive at said future, and when, as Tarter suggests it inevitably throws up that mirror, what will we see? Will we see life? Will see some form of humanity? And if the means by which we arrive at said future is currently replacing both nature and humanities own advancements with artificially bred evolution (read James Suzman’s book Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, or Yual Noah Harari’s book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century), what meaning do those definitions ultimately have or hold to begin with?
This is a lot to glean from a vaccine that essentially reflects a turning point in current vaccine technology given it is the first of this kind of RNA bred technology to be employed through a vaccine on this large of a scale- for an indepth but accessible analysis on what RNA technology is this is a helpful interview/article from Harvard: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/multimedia-article/were-better-off-with-mrna-vaccines/
And yet what the uncertainty that some have demonstrates or reveals is that we, as a collective humanity, aren’t conversing enough about the implications of such a future in terms of the bigger picture (of biotechnology, transhumanism, genetic research, ect). As was suggested, this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to genetics and development, technology and the sciences that is currently well underway. Those with concerns demonstrate a helpful reminder that these are questions we would do well to keep asking lest we lose site of the questions altogether, which stands to be a real danger for an already predictable future. And to push this further, those asking these questions from a relgious perspective are the ones who tend to ingore these questions the most, the sad reality being that they have a lot to contribute to discussions of morality, life and what it means to be human.
The 2019 film Death Will Come and Shall Have Your Eyes by Director Jose Luis Torres Leiva and based on a book by James Sallis, a film I watched this week and which gains its title from a Cesare Pavese quote, the early 20th century Italian writer and poet, underscores this point. In it we are offered a picture of two women, life partners where one is facing an undefined terminal diagnosis and the other is left trying to be a presence in her life as she comes to terms with her inevitable and quickly approaching death. Refusing any further treatment, the one with the diagnosis begins the long journey of reconciling herself to the idea of death. And yet, as she does this the reality of her life begins to underscore the fallacy and lies of some the core assumptions that have been used and relied on to give her life meaning while she was in the throes of living. The common “generational” refrain, this idea that we live on through emerging generations, is a nice adage but gets exposed quite quickly once we try and reapply this to the worth of an individual and aged life in any meaningful fashion.
This idea that we live a life of worth until we are no longer worth something is a fallacy that has massive and largely ignored implications for our ability to define what life actually is. It has contributed to the very real problem of ageism, and focuses our attention on the future at the general expense of both the present and history here in the West. If we doubt this at all, all we have to do is look at Covid and reations many using the fact that it only affects the aged as a reason for why Covid is not the problem the governments are tell us it is.
As the film unfolds and we watch her journey towards death progress, we hear her tell two seperate stories, the first of which involves an older woman and a youthful child. In this first story we see the unspoken angst and uncertainty that comes from trying to funnel all our hopes and dreams into this fundamental assertation and idolizing of youth, only to realize how utterly isolated and meaningless this leaves life in its inevitable trajectory towards death itself. Equally so in the second story about a younger man who has a brief encounter with an older, married man. The younger man is not married and does not have children (and is not interested in having children), something which permeates this brief moment of impassioned desire as a kind of existential question that both intrigues and haunts the aging man. At the heart of this second parable is a similar question of meaning and what it means to define a life. This is why we remain obsessed with youth and youthfulness and remain uneasy with aging, whether we want to admit it or not. These two stories reposition a narrative about “generational” worth towards the problem of inherit meaninglessness in death. It is a way of allowing an irrational claim (eternal youth) to somehow and in someway give us purpose in a world that seems both undefined in its obscurity while being equally defined by progress and technological advancement. We take the meaning we can’t find in ourselves and we project it onto and into the future by way of this eternal youthfulness.
In this same sense, one of the oft criticisms of belief in a god that I have heard tends to come from the ridiculing of its tendency to try and find solace in a fairy tale, or its fairy tale illusions of heaven and immortality designed and manifested in its old world setting to hide us from death and afford us a false sense of comfort while making sense of the unknown and the uncertain. The irony is though, the entire human endeavor has always been seeking immortality, just now in a different form. It is equally as false in this view to claim that we gain meaning from our children as it is to say we gain meaning from god, and yet we spin this narrative all the time for the purpose of allowing ourselves to make some sense of this world and our lives. In fact, I know the false nature of this story well given our own diagnosis of infertility. When one can’t have kids, or when one never gains a partner with whom to have kids, the cruel nature of a life that deems our worth in this vision of eternal youthfulness comes rushing back to the surface very, very quickly. And yes, this is how life works in the view of modern progress. One has to look no further than the current Covid crisis for proof of this. I remember stating when all of this began and articles released touting the beatiful, unified nature of the worlds collective push to create a vaccine that we would end up in a place where the affluent countries eventually reaped the rewards of the vaccine while the less than affluent were left to struggle (and even more pointedly, where the rich gained the most reward of all). And guess what’s happening now? This crisis is a small picture of what will inevitably happen in the future on a much larger scale when even more powerful technologies emerge with the ability to accentuate this kind of inequality. If we don’t believe this to be true then we are remaining blind to how technological advancement actually works and how it will continue to work. True progress and advancement as defined in technological and scientific terms demands and fosters inequality to function at the level we need it to. It’s not an out there claim to say that we wouldn’t have the vaccines if not for this basic truth.
But, and here’s the shocking thing, most of us mostly know this to be true, even if we are ignorant of it, and we deal with it by continuing to hinge our undefined definitions of life and humanity on necessarily irrational claims and narratives that allow us to ignore it and bury it. This is what allows us to remain ignorant and to live in this world as it is. To use immortality as an example, what makes us able to glorify death as if it is some great, virtuous notion while also living in a world that now deems a life span of 80-100 years as the effective norm and measure of an appropriate length of life? Why do we shift in this direction when the rest of human history would imagine this same narrative vision applied to then then common 30-40 year span? And further, why would we think that we would effectively stop with 80-100 years when so much of our attention as a species is given to eradicating disease and prolonging life? What do we think happens when we find a cure to cancer? When we crack the puzzle of aging (which is still a great mystery)? Most actual studies that take the science at face value would suggest that we meaure the value of a life based on the presence of struggle, pain versus quality of life rather than its length. In short, death has meaning because it positions us on one end of this pendulum. When the pain and suffering can no longer be tolerated and when relief fromt his pain in death is better understood as a reward, and fruther when that cycle is measured according to the potential 80-100 year life span, we consider it a tragedy when someone dies “before their time.”
That this is completely contextualized to our present experience of pain and suffering or quality of life is ignored by many a modern philospher and critic of religion trying to wax poetic about death’s virtues without a god to afford it some sense of meaning. That death as a virtue can be spoken of in ways that idoloize its function can only truly be spoken of from a position of either privilege or necessity. We continue to fight against death because death in fact matters. it is, in effect a problem that we are intuitely aware of. To say otherwise is to look for ways of finding meaning where there otherwise would be none, and ways of narrating life and death according to the “natural” cycle of life itself positions itself entirely in service to that necessary future where human progress and advancement and survival is both our god and our given human purpose (not that many of us asked for that). What makes this convolutted is that this is a future without an actual vision to hang our hats on lest we imagine some version of a potential utopia. And yet that utopia and our endeavor to create it and bring it to life necessarily collapses our mutually led efforts to try and suggest that this present struggle that we call life has meaning within its visible struggle and in its inevitable death. This confuses progress as our god and humans as the gods who bring it about, and again, this only works from a position of position or necessity. Privilge breeds inequality and necessity breeds false and irrational narratives. In truth, all we really have without a god is our association to nature, and this is, in fact, the story of all of biological life, not the necessary cycle that gives it meaning but the striving to adapt in order to survive it. That we arbitrarily then want to apply this in some terms of meaningful specieism might be the most irrationally bred human narrative of all, because as a human species we do so by projecting this notion of human exceptionalism. That’s the way progress then is allowed to become a god. Otherwise let nature have its way with us as it will, right? If we disappear from this ecosystem then what it the big deal. In scientific terms after all all, evolution is not a linear and progressive narrative. Far from it. In truth though we don’t actually believe this. We need a narrative in order to live, some kind of linear story to know where we’ve come from, where we are and where we are headed. Which is a part of the conundrum that we face when it comes to the creation of Covid vaccines and the development of genetically enhanced or targeted sciences. We create these advancements with little ability to actually understand the narrative and the questions that flow from these narratives.
Which is all to say, for as much as we like to paint those hesitant about blindly embracing the vaccines as crazy and foolish and anti-science, we might do well to heed some of their example by holding some of these necessary questions to the fire. These are the questions that haunted Cesare Pavese as he eventually succumbed to suicide. These are the questions that guide myself and many others in this world, towards notions of God and faith that actually challenge some of these narratives. These are important questions for any of us today, as important as that perennial question, “are we alone in the universe.” What is life and what does it mean to be human feel as vital to our existence as a vaccine that can help eradicate a virus stealing so much of that human life. And one clear and important aspect of this that is important to recognize is that the meaning of an individual, the meaning of the collective, and even further the meaning of the whole of the created universe and world are interwined, easily corruptable, but equally important and shared concerns. It’s as true to locate ones concern for the vaccines affect on an individual life over and against concern for the collective as a negative and narrow sighted as it is recognize the equal challenges that arise in pursuing that narrative of progress while ignoring the common concern and need to define individual meaning. I think we create more division than not when we neglect the multi-layered nature of these inherant questions.
Some things I’ve been thinking about anyways.
“Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.”
For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
Matthew 6:14-15
Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.
Ephesians 4:3
A few months ago I found myself spending some time on the subject/topic of forgiveness. I was stuck on this relationship between our forgiving of others and God’s forgiveness of us. The topic had reemerged for me in attempting to figure out whether I had in fact forgiven some people for an event that happened over 8 years ago but clearly still impacts my life today. And how, if I desired to forgive, I can know that I have forgiven, especially in a case that, at least from the perspective of that which I have control over, is likely not about any kind of actual reconciliation.
The topic reemerged for me this week, first with a podcast/youtube debate between historian Douglas Murray and Theologian N.T. Wright. What struck me is something Murry said, as someone looking at the Church from the outside, regarding the Church’s witness. Reflecting on how it is we find a guiding moral system this side of a post-Christian (or post God) world, Murray called the Church to task for foresaking its witness and essentially assimilating to modern, cultural norms. If Christianity is to have any weight in a post-Christian society it must look different than simply what the world is already offering. Here, speaking as someone who does not believe in the idea of God (or at the very least is agnostic on the idea), he brings up the notion of “forgiveness” as the one idea that he believes sets it apart. The most striking and scandelous and unique aspect of Christianity from a historical-critical perspective is this notion of forgiving ones enemies. A forgiveness that is not offered for the sake of the self, but rather for the sake of the other.
The second thing I came across was a recent podcast from John Dickson called “Guilty Conscience” (Episode 65 of Undeceptions). This podcast explored the idea of forgivness from the perspective of a post Christian culture that no longer has a narrative for forgivness, wondering equally about the implications of living in such a world.
A Competing Narrative of Guilt: From our Ancestors to the God of our Ancestors
Looking to Nietzsche (among others) and the move to excise the idea of God from society as part of his “geneology of morality”, Dickson reflects on how the notion of guilt has thus been relegated to the space of this now outmoded religious identity, which Nietzsche understood grew from the cultic activity of ancestor worship, the idea that in the growing “human” awareness of our ancestors (and our relationship to them) we suddenly inhereted a means of measuring our successes and failures against something external to us, establishing a standard to which we must then measure up. From this comes guilt and responsibility, the result of living together and being connected to an other. This then grew into the idea of a “god” in which we locate our means of dealing with guilt and responsiblity.
It is by allowing ourselves to move past these expectations of having to “measure up” to either ancestors or god, and by stepping into a new and better “godless” future, that we can find true freedom from the problem of guilt. The problem is, the more society has progressed away from the old narratives and towards the modern technological age of the enlightenment values, the more aware we seem to become of the vastness of the world’s problems. And awareness naturally leads to guilt, guilt that we largely can’t do much about. Sociologically and pyschologically speaking we bear more guilt today than at any other time in human history, and for any number of issues and problems precisely because of this increased awareness and the increasing absence of a narrative in which to make sense of and deal with this increased awareness. And the more that technology progresses and pushes us towards globalization, the more guilt we seem to naturally inherit due to our growing awareness of the state of things not only in our backyard, but on the other side of the world.
A New Narrative of Forgivness
What religion did is allow us to make sense of guilt through our relationship to God, and thus it is in relationship to God that we can make sense of our relationship to the created world. What the Judeo-Christian narrative did, speaking from a historical-critical perspective and in line with both the interviewees on Dickson’s show and in line with Douglas Murray’s own confessionals, is take this relationship and formulate it around this notion of “forgiveness” as the crucial piece of the puzzle through which all the other narratives can make sense. This narrative of forgiveness becomes the means by which a relationship to both God and Creation is reconciled, an aspect of the Judeo-Christian tradition that begins to move society at large from the Honor-Shame systems that once governed the ancient world and towards a new vision of inherent human digniity. For Murray, and for Dickson, we cannot understand this shift without this unique story of forgivness invading both the larger secularized world and the world’s religious systems. Without a narrative of forgivness the ancients were left relating the weight of their guilt in the created world to their contstant manipulating of their relationship to the gods whom can bless or curse, prosper or destroy depending on appeasement of these gods.
Bearing Guilt Without a Narrative of Forgivness: The Two Sides of the Same Extreme
Back to the quesiton for a second though of how we deal with guilt without a realized narrative of forgivness in which to make proper sense of it. This is a very simplified summary of modern society, but there is real truth to this idea that without god we have been left to look to ourselves for the answer. And thus, as Dickson goes on to point out, we tend to create two sides of a working extreme to make this work, something we can see evidenced around the globe in different societal and social functions. One symblized by the Mother Theresa’s (the moral ideals) and the other symbolized by the Hitlers (the embodiment of immorality). What this allows us to do then is to take up space in the middle. We don’t have to be Mother Theresa, because for as long as we aren’t Hitler we then have a way to take our guilt and put it onto another, sometimes symbolically, and far more often literally. Because there is always that someone else whom we can blame. Further, the problem of course is that for this approach to work and for it to be maintained it necessitates the fact that there always needs to be a Hitler, and thus we have moved from the old honor-shame systems that used to govern the ancient world, through a temporary age of human dignity to the modern age of victimhood. As Dickson underscores, the way to ensure that one is not Hitler is to adopt ourselves as the “victim”, and we do this by heightening and idolizing the particular form of justice that blankets Western society, one that gives us the allusion of weighted scales somehow helping to keep the proper order. Peel back the curtain though and this order is far from evident. The scales can never truly be balanced, and without a narrative of forgiveness we are given to the constant need to judge others, the need to publicize grievances, the need to create heroes and villains, the good and the bad, and to lable others so that we can say what we are not. The irony being that we do this by increasingly repressing more and more of the guilt we carry and rewriting more and more of the narratives that surround us in ways that ensure we are represented as being on the side of the good and the right and the just, using this to justify all sorts of things in the name of true justice. Yes, we do find moral good emerging from this, but with everyone essentially writing their own narratives we are left with little means to actually address the problem of guilt and no narrative through which to define and express actual forgivness, precisely because there is no real sense of what reconciliation even means nor a real desire to pursue it. Justice is simply the bad ones getting their just due, which mean necessary punishment. Any fledgling semblance of forgiveness is whittled down to something that is owed to us as opposed to something we offer to another, and the justice system we depend upon then tends to do this on our behalf.
Forgiveness as an Identity Shaping Exercise: Maintaining the Middle Spaces
For Jews and Christians this is a far cry from the kind of forgiveness we find being experessed in religious thought. If in the ancient world this language of sin or wrong-doing (from which we get this notion of guilt or conscience) is connected at least partially (if, as some scholars are uncovering, it is also a later development) to this notion of a monetary debt, the idea that there is a debt that must be payed and thus can being forgiven, there is a deep sense in which forgiveness then is attached to the very real notion of responsibility to this debt. Further, in the ancient world and within these religious systems which give us the older narratives of guilt and forgiveness the modern world has largely deconstructed and left behind, forgiveness is ultimatley imagined in Jesus, which for Christians is the fullest expression of the religious revelation that governs ancient understandings of the word, to be an outward looking endeavor. It is forgiving a debt that is legitimately owed to another, not simply demanding payment and erasing the guilt As Dickson puts it, forgiveness is both the recognizing of objective forms of guilt (that which we know we did wrong) and the doing away with subjective shame (worry over what we think we did wrong and how that then shapes us as good or bad people). Forgiveness is, in fact, an identity shaping exercise that we are able to afford another. It is enacting mercy in place of guilt, but in a way that contends and concerns itself directly with our living in and having responsiblity for this world, not merely in terms of our individual lives but on the level of the collective. This is one place where the modern justice system remains woefully inadequate. It imagines the balancing of these scales in purely individualistic terms, placing the power of justice in ones identity as the guilty or the innocent as opposed to being able to say anything else about actual human dignity in the process, leaving us to mine our own dignity in contrast to the individual being judged in one way or another. Forgiveness, even outside of the religious language that holds it captive, has a religious but also psychological and social component, and it must play out, if it is to have any form or definition in our present world, in both individual and societal/social contexts. This is how forgivenss gains its identity shaping force. Because of its outward focused nature that takes shape within a community, it actually circumvents justice while also retaining that necessary recognition of what is being forgiven.
And despite the absence of a common narrative and our seeming need to do away with the old narratives, we all still intuiively know what guilt and responsibility is. We instinctually bear the weight of violence and destructive forces in this world whether we know it or not. As the podcast episode put it, we know that stealing an apple is bad. It’s simply that, in this lack of a common narrative we have learned how to consistently repress this sense of guilt by applying narratives of our own making that turn the stealing of that apple into a matter of degree. As long as we didnt steal as many apples as that guy over there we can then convince ourselves we are not the guilty or the bad ones. And we do so to ensure the upholding and consistent manufacturing of these middle spaces that neither require much from us but which can also then declare us to be moral and good and just in relationship to either extreme. This is what allows us to both repress and live with the increasing weight of guilt that comes with that historical and social development of ever increasing awareness of the world around us, the same awareness that once turned our gaze outwards to god after having to contend with our relationship to our ancestors. Only now there is no God to turn to.
The Religious Narrative Problem: The Modern Narrative of Debt, Imputation and Moral Righeousness.
There is another aspect to this as well, which turns the light back on to the failure of religion to retain its narrative within the ever growing challenges of the modern world, which is really what Douglas Murray’s critique of the current state of the Church was all about. In the modern world guilt is often described in the public ethos as a negative, and there is a tendency then to apply guilt directly to the construct of “religion” itself. In this viewpoint, to do away with religion is to do away with that unnecesary weight of imposed guilt, freeing us then to live in true peace with one another without false allusions to that great big authority figure who lives in the sky making us feel like we are either not good enough or driving us to do good for the purpose of securing those inherent blessings. For many this is what religion is (wish fulfillment and fear), and to do away with this is to allow people to simply do good for the sake of doing good. A godless society makes us into more honest people and frees us to apply morality to one simple rule- as long as we don’t do harm to another we are good. The problem though is that this hasn’t resulted in a more moral society, nor has it resulted in peace. It has created the allusion of a more moral society, yes, much of which you can get from modern discourses of reconstituted history rewritten according to the modern narrative of a necessary godless future. But as Murray points out, this is an allusion at best, and something he can admit even as he can’t likewise embrace the concept of god at the same time. We simply haven’t found a true narrative to replace the old one with, and the ones that have come closest to doing so depend on a high degree of irrationality, inconsistency and willfull ignorance just to be function and allow us to “live” together. This is why Murray finds himself wrestling so astutely with the narrative of forgiveness that he finds in Jesus. It has no counterpart or true answer in the modern narrative, which is best understood as a series of “narratives” with no true moral concern or direction.
To return then to Murray’s assertation that religion has long lost sight of this narrative of forgivness within its own witness, this is particularly true here in the West where Christianity in particular has attached itself to the modern rational enlightenment narrative that leaves it not only indistinguishable from anything else, but a shell of what its witness actually once was. It defines its own narrative by the forms of justice that permeate Western (and largely American bred) systems, relegating sin (in the guise of guilt) as a debt we, as a fallen and depraved humanity, must then pay to God as the actualized form of a judge sitting within and demanding allegiance to this god ordained justice system. Our offense has been directed towards God, and thus guilt, like the same ancient systems Christianity both informed and deconstructed, is perpetuated towards an eternal other in the form of blessings and curses. Within the Christian narrative’s development in this highly westernized form, we are left necessarily guilty (total depravity) and in need of the imputation of innocence, or the righteousness that Christ affords us by paying the debt we owe to God and incurring our liberation as individuals on our behalf. The real problem is, approaching forgiveness in this way tends to detach us from the world that we actually live in and to which forgiveness must then apply. It universalizes guilt under the watchful eye of God, but it does so by enforcing these extremes of good and evil so that we can represent ourselves as being on Gods side over and against the evils over there. By making us all Hitler, and in Christ then making us all Mother Theresa, it calls us as the “good” ones, however one sees this imputation of righteousness being employed (defined in this view as moral goodness), to find our measure in contrast to the bad. It empowers us to become the judges under the guise that we are declaring the true justice of God Himself, entertaining scales that can never truly be balanced in this kind of debt-forgiveness moral paradigm. In short, it fails to address the problems and limitations of these modern forms of justice, which lack any real and constitutional forms of forgiveness and reform, and worse yet doesn’t offer anything that these modern forms of justice aren’t already doing in and of themselves. We then live, as Christians, in constant anticipation and demand with the rest of society of God’s work in this world being defined through the constant weighting and reweighting of these sclaes, which then largely ignores and fails to sweep the larger human story up into a greater narrative of forgivness, one that Jesus ultimately embodies in the death and resurrection. And I know those who hold deeply to this view of imputation and moral righteousness will push back on this as an incomplete descriptive of what is going on in the debt-forgiveness paradigm, speaking of total depravity as the means by which we allow God to be the true judge of all and in which we can then rest in that forgiveness, and in the best forms of that then free ourseleves to forgive others precisely because the ultimate justice and forgiveness belongs to God and God alone. God will determine the proper weighting of those scales for those who either have this imputed righteousness or those who don’t. I’ve been down that road many, many times trying to make sense of it, and it only ever comes back to me in convluted and non-sensicle terms. No matter how we parse out that formula, we still have the same weighted scales, the same forms of justice that depend on the impossible balancing of rights and wrongs, and the same narrative of good and bad extremes that tends to allow us to be both judge and jury on Gods behalf.
The Relgious Narrative Reimagined: Cain and Abel, Debt and Forgivness, the Righteous and the Unrighteous.
I’ve written about this elsewhere, so I won’t belabor the point here, but it’s a question that has been perculating with me for a while. What if we saw the narrative, and more importantly the definitions differently. What if instead of seeing this debt we owe to God in the Adam and Eve narrative, which is where it is often pulled from, we instead see the Cain and Abel as the embodiment of the problem that the Garden narrative images, which is articulated in that passage as one of a perpetual “unforgiveness” that leads inevitably to a world where the the scales can never in fact be truly weighted in such a vew of justice. As the Garden narrative results in the curse or judgment of a people left divided against itself (male and female, female and birth pains) against God (the garden and the wilderness) and against creation (people in toil and hardship with the land), we then get the patterned image and story of Cain and Abel, the embodiment of “Adam” (rendered the whole of humanity) as the priestly image occupying the space in the temple within the wilderness, mirror images of humanity once again divided against another, and more importantly contrasting the divided kingdoms or nations that their names symbolize within this temple text.
At this point they are filling the earth in the manner of the positive call or vocation given to humanity in the Garden, but rather than with true diversity they are filling it with increasing hostility towards one another following this forced migration from the garden. It is here where Cain kills Abel and begins that cycle of an “eye for an eye” form of justice that ultimately fills the world with wickedness and later becomes the basis for the modern justice system. The debt that must be payed. In this world we are left seeing the scales tipped towards a demand for justice in a way that can never be satisfied, because one payment begets another and begets another, which is what the Cain and Abel story outlines. There is no true forgiveness to be found in this narrative. It’s a never ending cycle that ultimately finds its hope in the emergence of a “righteous” one, the same priestly role that Adam represents carried through Noah, Abraham, Melchizadek (where the offices of priest and king find their unified nature), Moses and David. And ultimatley Jesus, the one who comes in the light of this “type” and breaks the cycle in a way the others could only point us towards.
And here’s the important thing. The typology of the ‘righteous” one has nothing to do with moral righteousness. There is no sense in this view of the narrative of a debt that must be payed to God because of our moral failure. The wilderness is not our “just” sentence, it is, rather, depicted in line with the very human vocation that moral failure redirects and corrupts. The debt-forgiveness language that emerges later in monetary terms (and subsequently blood related terms) is speaking of the debts that hold us in the grip of this perpetual and unavoidable narrative of justice, the same narrative of justice that holds the modern, godless narrative in its grip. That which needs to be forgiven is not something we have done to God, but rather what needs to ge forgiven is that which has been done to one another. That is where forgiveness inevitably must flow. And how does it do this? By way of Jesus, who by stepping into our current state and taking all the wrongdoings (the sins) that cannot be balanced and satisfied and which holds us in constant division, on himself and declaring the full forgiveness of sins in its place by way of the death and resurrection. If the effect of this debt driven cycle is ultimately death, then Jesus effectively says, in a world where guilt will have its way the cycle ultimately stops with him, allowing us to find and declare reconciliation not only to God, but to one another, which becomes the source of life.
Life through reconciliation to God by bringing the wilderness and the garden together as the place in which God and humans dwell together (Jesus as the new temple), reconciliation to Creation (by establishing a vision of true reconciliation in the hope of the new creation where God and humanity dwell together), and Humanity (in contrast to the tower of babel story where, as Douglas Murray so aptly put it, the modern narrative leads to necessary sameness, we are then free to live into our given and created diversity through the power of true forgiveness, a power that heals the divide).
Let me restate- this view of the narrative has far less to do with our depravity and far more to do with the ways in which a true narrative of forgiveness is able to shape identities according to the goodness of God’s creation. In God we find freedom precisely because in God the cycles of unforgiveness that perpetuate this debt payment system do not have a home. This is a corrupted image of God’s good creation and God’s good order, one that has held us in bondage and which inevitably leaves us in debt to it. Not to God, but to Sin itself. This is why what Jesus does is so powerful. The righteousness one becomes the one who is faithful to the promise (the root meaning of the righteousness of Christ) to put an end to the cycle, to live into and embody a narrative of life that can restore us to a new and greater order of being. This becomes the very witness that lies at the heart of the Christian message, that we would then be witnesses to this. To what? To a different narrative of justice than the world affords us. One based on true forgiveness that is not directed towards ourselves (the guilt which sin demands a payment for), but rather that forgives our enemies precisely because the cycle stops with Jesus. In Jesus the full forgiveness of sins is declared. We are faithful to Jesus not when we are forgiven, but when we forgive others. And we become free to forgive others because the sentence of guilty placed on us by the modern narrative, one that says that we are guilty and one that then pushes us to deal with this guilt by finding somewhere else to put it, is given a different verdict. Jesus says, lay that burden on me and I will take it, and in its place stop the cycle by forgiving your enemy in the way of Jesus.
What Jesus’ Death and Resurrection Accomplishes: The Actualizing of the Ascencion and Jesus’ Rise to the Throne
Now, one last word here. I know that plenty will point me back towards the picture of the eventual return of Jesus and Jesus’ eventual judgment of this world according to its good and bad deeds (or according to the faith that affords us Christ’s righteousness rather than the ones who remain without this imputed righteousness). But I maintain that this ultimately comes down to which narrative we are reading when we encounter Jesus on the cross and the death and resurrection. And perhaps most notably, given it was recently ascension day, the narrative we are reading when we read of Jesus’ ascension. If the author of Hebrews is right and we find Jesus coming in the light of Adam and in the order of Melchizadek, the typology of the righteous one through whom both priest and king, and eventually prophet come together, then Jesus’ death and resurrection actually accomplish something. As Wright points out in the debate with Murray, if Jesus in fact conquered and defeated evil (the Powers of Sin and Death), then that which judges us to be something other than the image of God has effectively been destroyed. We have a reason to trust in the work forgivness does in affording us a right imaging, a right and new identity rather than the one the old narrative of modern justice employs and enslaves us to. And if the death and resurrection accomplished something, then the assension is no mere image of Jesus retreating from this earth as if to leave us now to our own devices. The assension is in fact Jesus taking the throne and declaring a different narrative to be told and lived in the here and now. Jesus as the great high priest and king who rules by way of a different form of justice. This is the narrative that has been lost to modernism, and it has been lost precisely because of that tricky word “forgivness” that accompanies God’s justice. That an enemy would be forgiven and that a debt to us would be left unpaid is a scandelous idea and one that the modern world and systems could never accept. And, although the modern world would never likely admit this, they could never accept it precisely because it collapses these lines between good and bad. It leaves us vulvneralbe to being the guilty precisely because it hands us the responsibility to forgive. It pushes us straight into the cycle of unforgivness and asks us to do the dangerous work of reconciliation. We do so though because Christ has the authority to forgive as the faithful one who is both God and Human.
Jesus says that in the breaking of this cycle He is making what is wrong right, not by burying the guilt or excusing it, but rather by taking the real stakes of justice (his death) and using that to give forgiveness its true context. It acknowledges the wrong precisely by giving us an image of the right. It says, this is what leaves us bearing the guilt, and this is how we can then declare forgiveness of this guilt, by reconciling with others. And it is in forgiveness of the other that we can then know the true character of God and the true identity of ourselves. In Christ we can relegate both the debts owed to us and the debts we owe to others to the cross, finding freedom in the promise of the resurrection. This then is what frees us from Dickson’s descriptive of both objective and subjective guilt, or true and false guilt. It attends for our reality while giving us a way to declare a different one in our midst.
Douglas Murray and N.T. Wright Debate (Unbelievable Podcast)
In James Suzman’s book Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, he spends a good amount of time attempting to locate the question, why is it that modern humans hold the relationship to work that we do? As the book develops, he fleshes out what this relationship is, what it developed from, and what it has to say about where we are today.
The Central Human Vocation: To Create
One aspect of Suzman’s theoretical approach, which maintains that assumptions that humans have developed a “problematic” relationship with work, which has been continually gnawing at me is the relationship between our need to work and the seeming relationship between this larger notion of life itself and this need to “create”.
A number of months ago I was struck by how much of the larger Biblical narrative sseems to function as one grand hyperlink back to the Genesis (and Exodus) story, and in particular the first 6 chapters of Genesis in its grand unfolding of the God-Creation-Human relationship, I’ve been spending much of my time since then simply reading and rereading these passages in Genesis. There’s something special about imagining the way the ancients likely would have done the same thing in their own oral context.
And as I’ve been rereading this text in line with the later emergence of the Tabernacle and the Temple as the imaginging of this meeting place of Heaven and Earth, this reenactment of the Genesis story within the disorder that follows the fall, this depicting of God’s dwelling within the created order (and further, within the disorder) as people occupy this space in the temple as God’s image bearers (which in Genesis evokes the whole of the created order in a cosmological sense), this notion of the central human vocation keeps coming up again and again. Just as God creates, speaking creation into existence as a creative and imaginative work, so are we, made in the image and likeness of the creator, called to “create”. This is the emphasis behind the call to be fruitful and to fill the earth. Life begets more life, and creation begets more “creating”. This then becomes the vocation we are called to enter into on the 7th day, the Sabbath day, in which we take up the very human vocation of true “dominion” within the created order (Genesis 1:28), a word that carries with it this sense of occupying both space (the temple) and time (the sabbath). In this we create in relationship to both God (the temple as God’s dwelling) and Land (Creation).
The Loss of the Human Vocation
Perhaps most noted in this call to “create” is this striking notion that in the story of the fall (Genesis 3), the call to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth (1:28) is now imagined within this forced migration into the wilderness, something that leads to this quickly expanding vision of people and cultures and cities which echo the very human vocation found in Genesis 1 and 2. Only this filling of the earth, as we read in Genesis 6:5, has led to wickedness, defined not as the evils of “creation” but as the trading of God’s image for (literally in the action of God and humans procreating) making god’s in our own image. As it says in Genesis 1:31, where God “saw” everything that he had made and declared it “good”, Genesis 6 finds God looking at all that humanity has made (created) in its own image and is grieved (sorrowed). At the heart of this observed wickedness is the intent of this “creative” work of God to bring about unity in diversity by being image bearers of God, the essential assertion of the curious phrase of 1:26 where it says “let us make humankind in ‘our’ image, after ‘our’ likeness.” This notion of unity in diversity is being traded for the curse of humanity’s sin, which sees humanity being divided against that which it is supposed to be in union with (creation, one another, and the image of God). This emerges from the lie of the serpent which sees humanity desiring to become “like” God and thus exchange the image of God for a God made in their own likeness- the imaging of themselves.
It should come as no surprise then that this notion of creating, or “work” plays throughout chapters 3-6, with the narrative now positing this creative work as a reconciliatory work, a work that will emerge through the similar call to Noah and eventually Abraham to evoke the central vocation of Genesis 1 and 2, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. There is a duality here in that Abraham’s call to once again pick up this most basic human vocation and create (make nations) and this notion that the larger Biblical narrative evokes of the nations once again returning and being reconciled to God and Land.
Entropy: The Ordered Law of God and Nature and the problem of Disordered Creation
Suzman outlines the essential “laws” of life, that by which our creative work is patterned by, as “entropy”. To read the law of entropy in line with the Genesis text is to uncover the order and disorder of the creation-flood pattern. The flood is at its heart a decreation story, repeating the text of Genesis 1 and 2 and reestablishing it as the “promise” of new creation.
Just as the law of entropy reveals that “unlike almost everything else in the universe, which seemed to tend towards increasing disorder, life insolently gathered matter together and then organized it very precisely into astonishingly complex structures that gathered free energy and reproduced…” Suzman suggests that “life needed to contribute to the overall entropy in the universe”, and he concludes that it did this by “seeking out and capturing free energy, using it do work which generated heat, and thus added to the total entropy in the universe”. Suzman confesses that although “precisely where this energy came from is uncertain… the fact that abiogenesis- the process by which life first appeared- involved work is perhaps the least mysterious part of it.” As the Genesis narrative suggests, we are created to create, and we create within the ordered laws of entropy as this energy making exercise.
Of interest to the Genesis is narrative is this further idea that Suzman points out, which is that some scientists today “are more inclined to think that life may have been inevitable and that entropy, the trickster god, was not just a destroyer but may well have also been the creator of life.” In other words, order comes necessarily from disorder, just as light comes from dark, life from death, healing from hurt, new creation from decreation. Along with this then, in the establishing of order from disorder, we can observe that “the long history of life on earth has been described in terms of life’s ability to capture energy from new sources… over time, its ability to evolve meant evolving to capture and draw energy from new sources and thus surviving in different conditions.”
What I found so curious about this phrasing is this same sense that we find in the Genesis narrative of the call to create in Genesis 1 and 2 repeating itself within humanities forced migration into the “wilderness”. Different conditions with the same vocation. The real question then becomes, to what end or to what purpose do we create?
Order From Disorder: To What End Do We Create?
This is where the Genesis narrative submits that we are tasked to create in the image of God, in the image of the creator, or what Suzman calls and grants, the thing that gave life and order its initial and necessary push therefore established the necessary pattern by which it must then create. If this is true, than Suzman’s theory that humankind essentially repatterned this patterned “image” in its own making when it shifted the narrative from a picture of abundance (trust in our relationship to God and Land) to scarcity (distrust in our relationshi to God and Land) holds a good deal of weight. Rather than patterning our creative, energy producting work after trust in God, we patterned it after our own anxieties, thus giving this notion of scarcity its power over us, forever enslaving us to this idea that we must make more and more because in a world shaped by our own image our wants will never truly be satisfied. The desire for God’s heart for humanity has been exchanged for the human desire for “want”, which takes the abundance of creation and exchanges it for the illusion of abundance, one that perpetuates anxiety and disorder.
This is what we find in the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11), which interestingly flows straight from the story of the flood, a shared and universal narrative that all of humankind at the time (in a generalized sense) would have understood and known as a very real experience representing very real ecological and economic uncertainty. If humankind can no longer depend on our relationship to God and Land, then “let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens”, a phrase that evokes this picture of the mountaintop on which Noah (representing “humankind”) emerges. Let us elevate ourelves above nature and take the place of the gods. This passage once again evokes an image of the temple, with the picture of “God coming down” and imagining the place in which heaven and earth meet. Note how Genesis 11 likewise culminates in a forced migration followed by the call and task of Abram to then get on with the job of “creating”.
This then is the central conflict of the story, to create in the image of God, and the call to image God to the world stands in conflict with this drive to create a world in our own image. It should come as no surprise then that this precisely the same narrative that emerges in the enlightenment and in the story of the modernized West, a vision for humanity that emerges from economic uncertainty and which forces us to contend with precisely the same questions (and not suprisingly turns the old architecture that was designed with a symetry of vertical and horizontal symbolism, turning our gaze upwards towards the divine while drawing our gaze downwards to the space we occupy on the ground, to the emergence of the skyscraper, buildings that disconnect us from the land and turn our gaze upwards as the imaging of our own creation… the promise of free markets to reach the heavens). The desire we see in this modern narrative is to create a world in our own image, a work that happens in line with this overarching narrative of scarcity as our primary motivation precisely because of the inequality and uncertiainty it perpetuates.
A Story of Competing Narratives: Sex and Death, Life and Meaning
What’s interesting is that Suzman also notes that “Evolutionary biologists have to see life as a story of sex and death. This is what drives us. They are hesistant though to apply this to human work and activity in the same way.” Why? Because this simple biological narrative feels out of place with the laws of entropy that inform the most basic tenants of our human vocation.
In the Genesis narrative, it is energy (life source, the river of life) given by the spirit (the breath of God) that obligates us to then create by using this surplus energy for the purpose of filling the earth with the image of God. In science, this notion is expressed very much in the same fashion, even if it doesn’t or can’t locate it within a clear expression of the image of God. It still recognizes a necessary imaging that flows from the excess energy we inherit from the creative process that precedes us. We are compelled by the source of life itself to use the energy we have been given to create. The question is not so much that we must create, but it is to what end do we create? Why does life require this of itself? This is where things tend to collapse back into the limiting narrative of sex and death as the purely biological answer. In the Genesis narrative, to be fruitful and multiply carries a different and I would argue a more life giving vision, one that hinges on this notion of creating, filling, and making. This is why the story of Jesus holds so much power in the Christian vision, as it is through the narrative of sex and death (remember how the lead up to the flood narrative involves a corrupted and evolutionary depiction of sex in the beginning of chapter 6, something that one can see when they view it in line with the ancient understanding of sex’s relationship to the divine) that Christ then reorders and reforms the God-Creation-Human relationship through the image of the virgin birth and away from the predominant practice of human sacrifice that permated the ancient world and towards the sacrficial giving of the Creator as the means by which we move from death to life. And what’s crucial to understand is that for this narrative to carry us forward into something other than the evolutionary biologist’s reliance on sex and death, it must first transform our vision of “all” of life. It must first reorder us into right relationship with God and Land. To be created means to be given the vocation to create and thus bring about life, and in the Christian story this emerges as something meaningful in and of itself. From creation comes life, and life is declared to be meaningful, we do not need to create meaning for ourselves.
This difference between created and given meaning is crucial, because for biologists, the most they can say is that life exists for sex and death, to procreate and then to die, because this is what we observe within the pattern of life itself. To suggest anything beyond this is to project something onto the pattern. A given meaning. The problem when we apply this to the human experience is that life appears, and feels and seems and intuitively appears to mean something more than sex and death. This is why we work so hard in the symbolic “wilderness” to alleviate suffering. This is why the patterned narrative changed from one of trust in the present to peretual anxiety over the future, because without the kind of given meaning that comes from our relationship to God and Land we are left attempting to create it for ourselves, which leaves us in that perpetuated state of anxiety over the future and the battle over what we percieve to be scarce resources. Meaning gets translated to survival.
If existing only for sex and death, life would not appear to require such concerns. As Suzman suggests, “Humans have always found analogies for their behavior in the natural world”, going on to suggest that “It is clear that the version of Darwinism caricatured by economists, politicians, and others in support of free markets does not have much in common with the way biologists now tend to think of relationships between organisms in the natural world. It is also clear… that while success or failure in the energy quest will always shape the evolutionary trajectory of any species, many hard-to-explain animal traits and behaviors may well have been shaped by the seasonal over-abundance of energy rather than the battle for scarce resources, and that in this may lie a clue as to why we, the most energy profligate of all species, work so hard.” In other words (my own interpretation of his analysis in the light of God), life gains its meaming as we create in relationship with God and Land, not in contention with it. Not in standing above and in control of it. This is how life itself is patterned after the image of God.
The Curious Question of Immortality: The Creative Work as the Eternal Vocation
One of the most oft criticisms I hear regarding the notion of faith (particularly when it comes to the Christian faith which has become notorious for its tendency to view this earth and this life as something we escape so as to go to heaven, a wrong depiction of the Christian vision) is that its need to emphasize a life beyond death, eternal life, is a sign of humanities invention of relgion, something many humanists and naturalists see as increasingly toxic to our ability to live into this world in the here and now. Religion in this sense developed from our anxiety over death and the unknown of the future. A product of increased human awareness of occupying time and space. What Suzman’s book uncovers for me is that this is in fact a puzzling criticism, if primarily because life itself seems to suggest this anxiety they credit to religion actually emerges from the realm of our shift away from religion, our own corrupting of the patterns that entropy holds in play. And the more anxious we become, the more evidence we in fact have of humanities increased striving for forms of immortality. The trajectory of our anxiety laden creative work has always been towards the prolonging of life, the eradication of sickness, the haulting and reversing of the ever evasive mystery of aging, finding ways for human life to persist in the future becuase of uncertainty within the present. This romanticized idealism of that biological narrative of sex and death is simply not rational when set against the sheer amount of energy we give to protecting and making this present life meaningful within its long, struggling and inevitable decent towards the grave. That we now see a life of 80 plus years rather than the much more limited lifespans we faced before as the mark of the fruitful and meaningful life is perhaps the best evidence that this imaginging of eternity is not foreign to humanities understanding of life itself. What makes us believe that we would simply stop at 80 years as the necessary standard of a meaninful life if life’s trajectory reflects a continued upward movement towards prolonging life? Philosophically speaking, what allows to romanticize nihilistic visions of a limited life formed around death is in fact sickness and struggle, and, if we are to place it within the fundamental laws of entropy, the experience we have of that essental vocation to create and to make. It is only when the energy that entropy measures and affords us can no longer be used in the decay of our bodies that we are then motivated to romanticize sex and death as ideals in and of themselves.
What we essentially do as a humanity living within a narrative of scarcity is we apply meaning to the positive side of entropy (creativity) in highly irraitonal ways so that we can justify living in a narrative of scarcity and struggle. Scarcity is thus explained and justified as the outflow of our natural biological drive or need to simply have sex and die, and we explain this by similtaneously attending to the fact that life is more than sex and death by lobbying on to this narrative things this narrative can’t presuppose by itself without some form or idea of a god, whatever this notion of god might be.
We all build our lives on some form of a narrative that understands that we are working towards some greater purpose, that there is greater meaning to what we do. And this meaning is attached to the pursuit of less suffering, less illness, less struggle, increased survival and the prolonging of life (that this happens at the expense of other life, including within our own species, simply uncovers the central problem of scarcity). The irony is, this push has nothing to do with the idea of God itself. This irrationality is actually born from the absence of God, the need to locate the meaning that life without God presumes in ourselves and our own creations, our own ability to solve the problems of economic and ecological uncertianty. That we need to work towards this kind of reconciliation is not a mystery. That can be explained through the study of empathy’s social benefit and contribution to our continued survival as a species. To what end we contribute meaning to this process is where we become less than rational, and we see these irrational tendencies written all over our attemts to justify the modern, human story of scarcity, which is an illusion of our own making that perpetuates it or turns it into a reality as it compells us to abuse both land and one another in response. After all, if we were simply meant to have sex and die, far better for nature to let this have its way without this nasty notion of “awareness” that life must hold greater meaning and thus drive us to do what we do. Lest why expend all this energy on meaningless endeavors that actually set us in contest with creation itself? If the creative vocation has a true eternal purpose, then this changes the narrative and gives it a meaning that we couldn’t otherwise afford it on our own. That it also calls us to reorient ourselves in relationship to God and Land in ways that sacrifice our reliance on our own individual freedoms is where the resistance settles in. And yet it is when we do so that we allow given meaning to emerge as our motivating force rather than leaving us to chase forever after it as a product of our own creation.
The Human Vocatioin and Motherhood: More Than Mere Gendered Complimentarianism
If I may push this idea a little further yet, given that it is mother’s day I think there is something profound in this idea of seeing a mother’s unique role in the “creative”, life giving, meaning making process. It is here, in fact, that we find the power of the human vocation given its most clearest expression as a meaning making exercise. In an ancient world that understood the role of sex and death in very particular ways, this notion of the “we” that permeates the descriptive of the “creator” in the Genesis text, a text that stands in dialogue with this ancient world and its ancient practices, perhaps finds its greatest expression in the declared diversity of the human form the “we” creates in its image. The “us” that emerges as an equal expression of the image of God. This is far more than mere complimentarianism where “man” bears the image of God and “wo-man” then bears the image of god in “man”. What’s profound to me about the Genesis narrative is how it flips this kind of hiearchal and highly patriarchal thinking and imaging on its head. We can no more set the “we” of God over and against itself than we can set the “we”of humanity over and against itself. This picture of man and woman becoming one and thus giving way to the creative work of “multiplying” and diversifying the world (the creative process that we see the Tower of Babel commenting on in its subsequent lack of diversity) is actually best understood from the perspective of the wilderness, as it is from this place of forced migration where we can see this most basic tenants of the human vocation gaining force as the reclaiming of the ordered pattern of Creation itself. To imagine that the only way for the “wo-man” to understand the character of God is by looking at the “man” form which she emerges is not only to misunderstand the word from which we get “adam” (which means the whole of humankind), it is to perpetuate the division that see expressed in the curse of Genesis 3. It is to perpetuate the wrong ordering of creation, or the disorder the flood narrative is looking to deconsruct. By setting male and female within a gender ordered hiearchal imagining we are left to do likewise with the we of God Himself. And thus we end up with a false narrative that misplaces and redirects the meaning making exercise of the central human vocation, the call to create and to be image bearers, towards ourselves as one who assumes the role of God over creation, and the role of God over “wo-man” kind.
As a mother gives birth, they are giving birth to what is best seen and understood as a diversified whole. They are in effect making something new, the result of bringing together that which is divided in an altogether new creation which bears the image of God as this child then grows to fill the earth with its own creations. This is far more, and I would say even altogether different than perpetuating a divided picture of differentiating male and female genders offering a necessarily complimentary picture of the entire image of God. What we find in the Genesis narrative is a picture of a single humankind representing the same work that science observes in the basic division of the cell, this picture of division leading to wholeness and newness leading then to diversity. It is by locating this diversity as a unified and singular picture of the image of God that we can then discover the meaning of the shared human vocation, not as separated gender roles, but as a humanity no longer peretually divided against itself and able to live into the central human vocation as an expression of this ongoing creative work. It’s worth pointing out that this is also what makes the idea of adoption so crucial to the understanding of the family of God. What elevating gender does, beyond leaving us with limiting and problematic depictions of God’s own nature, is it elevates sex as the primary creative force, when God’s act of creation in Genesis is actually pulling it from this sex soaked obsession and applying it to the whole of creation. This is what it means for God to in fact dwell with the created order. Just as the ancient text offered a different vision to the ancients who used gender to divide, so should it offer a different vision to the biological understandings we have today.
This is, I think, why that perspective from the wilderness is so valuable and powerful, because we are locating this vocation from the vantage point of this perpetuated division, the same division that we see in the Cain and Abel story and which plays itself out into the national and global contextst of this growing division between nations and kingdoms and cultures, the very result of this forced migration that needs reconciling.
Here then is what I think mother’s day can teach all of us. It is from within the mother’s creative and life giving work that we are able to impart meaning to the creation. The child finds in the pattern of life’s division the vision of a whole, which it can then breathe out into the world through its own creative making process. And it is through this act of given “meaning” being imparted freely to this child from the postion of an other that the creative process becomes about something far more than sex and gender. It is by making this creative process about sex in fact that the narrative becomes corrupted. The way in which we impart meaning is by this same meaning first being imparted to us in equal portion as a representation of the image of God. Which is precisely what the God-Creation-Human story is all about. As we engage in and with creation through the very human vocation and call to “create”, we are invoking the shared image of God in one another and thus filling the earth with a diversified whole. This is what the Sabbath, an eternal natured idea, is all about. Creation begets new creation, and properly ordered in God’s image this leads to newness, unity and life, which is precisely what allows us to trust and rest in the beauty of the present. Disordered within the creation of socially driven gender constructs made in our own image, this leads to division, inquality, death and decay, which is precisely what causes us to then become and remain obsessed with the future and forever anxious about its provision, the very thing that continues to breed inequality at the hands of these power imbalances.
To say this more succinctly, to be a mother is not a “gendered” vocation, it is a human vocation that finds its pattern most fully expressed in the shared image of a God.
After seeing and being taken with Chloe Zhoa’s The Rider, one of my all time favorite films, I became enamored with whatever it was that she was going to make next. When Nomadland was announced I eagerly awaited it’s arrival. Which took a long, long time to finally become available. Having read the book in the meantime, I became even more excited to see what Zhoa could bring to the intimate nature of this true life story. The end result is a poignant and emotionally gripping reminder of the world we call home, the spaces we occupy and call home within this world, and the people that give these spaces and these homes their sense of life.
Saint Maud (2019)
A haunting portrait that explores that line between religious devotion and obsession. It gets particularly powerful in the way it examines the nature of past sins and the possibility of restitution, especially where these things connect with important religious ideas such as salvation and transformation. It’s wonderfully atompsheric, giving us a sense early on that something is not quite right, and the film exploits that sense of unsettledness to evoke the weight of its own spiritual concern.
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
My first thought after catching up with this older gem from the 1940’s was, they don’t make them like this anymore. This story about three World War 2 soldiers returning home and the life they struggle to reoccupy is epic in nature, rich in substance, character and dialogue, and beautifully structured around the simple power of its story beats. The film has a visible presence in the post war world and captures a world emerging from its rubble while also giving us a sense of these particular American stories. Undeniably perfect in so many ways.
The One I Love (2014)
Probably the biggest surprise for me of the month, this film represents one of the most billiant depictions of relational struggle that I’ve seen in a long, long time. It’s creative, incredibly astute, equal parts reflection, joy and devastation, and also challenging in how it posits these ideas of forgiveness, fualts, healing and reconciliation as connected to both matters of the will and choice and the reality of our social circumstance.
Joji (2021)
My first real contender for my top films of the year. And unfortunately, and not suprisingly, no one is seeing or talking about this film much at all. This film from India is an exceptional retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (more inspired by than an interpretation of), giving the themes in that familiar tale some weighty context as it explors the evils and trappings of greed, isolation, family struggle and guilt. It’s a slow burn approach, but it utilizes every ounce of the space that it lives in, which is a contained setting (a large house and its grounds) rich with symbolism, especially in how it imagines these hierarchal systems in terms of this vertical and horizontal movement (most notably as we move from the despair and the sludge of the pit to the nearly royal position of the mansion’s highest rooms). Equally present is the picture of blood, with the blood defining relations, life and death, purity and evil, with the binding relations contrasted with the tearing apart of these relations.
Honorable Mention: What Drives Us (2021) Another leading contender for film’s of the year. A documentary for the hidden rocker in all of us.
Books
Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots by James Suzman
I have written in this space about some of the ways this book inspired me over the course of this past month. It certainly would not have been Suzman’s intent, but his examination of this notion of work inspired my faith and awoken me to some questions about the way we do things (and why) that I had not really considered before. Most compelling is one of his central thesis, which posits that with the discovery of fire, for the first time in human history we have an energy source doing the work normally attributed to us. This changed the force of entropy in terms of our human development and social discourse, and also redirected the evolutionary narrative away from a model of abundance to one of scarcity, which has been the dominant narrative ever since. Scarcity lies at the root of so much of humanities social struggle.
Super compelling book that I’ll be thinking about for a long while.
The Orchard by David Hopen
If ever there was a book that deserved the moniker “compulsively readable” it would be The Orchard. I kept waiting for this story about a conversative Jewish family from a conservative Jewish neighborhood and Church in Brooklyn who move to a liberal neighborhood and Liberal Jewish school in L.A. to devolve into tropes and caricatures of either the necessary secularizing of the religiously conditioned and pious young boy (the central character of the story) or the pitfalls of outmoded religious belief. And yet the book never goes there, instead following this boy’s journey from innocence to discovery, and thus from faith to questions and back to faith again with fresh perspective in tow.
I was actually quite surprised actually with where the story ultimately ended up, which is in a place I did not expect, but what makes this book so compelling is the character development. Structured by way of the months of the school year, as our main character arrives in the summer and begins this new school, watching him gradually come to grips with this foreign world is never treated in black and white terms, but rather captures the nuance of faith’s uncertainy and the world’s allure, as well as the world’s pitfalls the faith’s power. Unconventional in this sense, but I could not put it down.
New Yorkers: A City and Its People In Our Time by Craig Taylor
I absolutely loved Taylor’s book The Londoneers. This one isn’t quite as focused given the nature of his writing process. It’s basically a collection of interviews he derived from different relationships he established when he intentionally moved to New York for a short while for the purpose of this research. He wanted to capture the authentic voice of the city and allow it to speak for itself as it it at this moment in time.
I adore New York City, and so to that end this one left its mark in a way that was different than Londoneers, which compelled me more on an intellectual level. This one carries more of a personal bent with its focus on experiences, and while it has something of a narrative structure to it, the meandering style is easy to get lost in. Not every interview works as well as the next, but taken together they offer a compelling snapshot of a city defined by change.
Northland: A 4,000 Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border
We can’t travel right now, so this was going to have to suffice. And it was a ton of fun. The early going is the most interesting as we saunter across the borderlands from East to West. The book does an interesting job at pulling out the history and development of this shared area of our two countries, and in the process links that to the larger history that plays out from these forgotteen spaces. If there is one knock, it would be that it ignores Canada even though its story depends just as much on the Canadian side of the border as the American. I felt like this was short sighted and could have provided a really interesting way into the discussion that we don’t otherwise get. That aside, this is still a well written book with lots of great information, history, adventure and personal experiences. That’s what happens when you set out to travel the forgotten borders with next to nothing.
Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer
I highlighted this book like crazy, documenting much of its information on memory for my own personal research. This is another book I reflected on elsewhere in this space, and most of that reflection came from the unexpected attention it gives to the history of memory. This is not a how to book, even though there is a componant of the book that deals with how to strengthen your memory with key memory exercises. Rather this is an exploration of what memory is, what memory does, and why we have lost sight of memory and its importance in our modern age. This the portion that excited me the most, and much of what this book has to say intersects with much of our modern practice in a revealing way. We don’t tend to think of memory as something we are gradually losing due to the way we function in modern society, and yet this is precisely what is happening. We can literally see that we are rewiring our brains. Not only that, our brains are being rewired in artificial ways, redirecting the evolutionary narrative in ways that force our brains to adapt to artifical rather than natural function. A sobering thing to consider.
Honorable Mention: My Salinger Year by Rakoff Joanna (I talked about the film last month, and the book proved to be a great compliment, highlighting and bringing to life in a fresh way some of the best parts about the film)
Podcasts
The C.S. Lewis Podcast with Alister McGrath (Episodes 1-4)
Alister McGrath penned an official Biography on Lewis’ life (titled Lewis: A Life), and he is recognized as a leading expert in C.S. Lewis. I had been eagerly awaiting this podcast which arrived this month, and thus far it has not disappointed. Each episode looks at a different theme related to Lewis, with a short run time making them an easy and breezy listen.
Undeceptions with John Dickson: Childish God (Episode 50)
Guest Justin Barrett wrote a book studying the science of religious belief called Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief. Not everyone will embrace his findings, but ever since he published back in 2012 I have found some of the conclusions to be fascinating. Especially in a world where assumptions about religious belief abound. This was a great refresher on on the ways these studies helped to shape our understanding of belief.
History Unplugged Podcast: The 15-Hour Work Week Was Standard For Neearly All of History. What Happened? (Episode 527)
This was the podcast interview that led to my interest in James Suzman’s book, which also made my list above. If you don’t have time to read it, I would highly recommend this episode as a way into some of the bigger ideas he explores regarding why we have the view of work that we do today.
Myths and Legends: Samurai Legends, The Devil Went Down to Kyoto (Episode 307)
These stories are always fun, and for anyone interested in a mix of history and myth and culture, this episode on Samurai’s should hit the mark.
Gifford Lectures 2018 (N.T. Wright)
This led me to pick up the book based on these lectures by Wright called History and Eschatology, a book exploring a way back into natural theology following years of ignorance and suspicion in our modern age. The lectures are amazing, and so far the book is just as profound.
Music
Amy Shark- Cry Forever
Intimate and revealing, but also bursting with energy, this personal record tells her story while offering us these intricately woven arrangements that invite us into these stories in a way that makes it our own, or at least a participant in them. This intricacy never betrays the simplicity of the melodies, making that the most defining trait of these songs.
Dante Bowe- Circles
A modern fusion of hip hop, R+B, Gospel and truly urban pop vibes. Bowe’s hooks are undeniably catchy, the soul immediately enrapturing, with both of these things sweeping you under its spell.
Eric Church- Heart and Soul
This has been described as a “concept record… about the everlasting power of music” in Bernstein’s review for Rolling Stone. He notes Church’s penchant for making bonafide, simple, Country songs while also quietly and subtly pushing the boundaries of what Country is, both on a creative level and on the level of genre. He stands apart from the crowd in this respect, adn taken together these two albums provide both the heart and soul of what makes Eric Church Eric Church. It’s a church serivce I will always be keen on attending.
The Choir- Deep Cuts
The product of a kind of kickstarter campaign, Deep Cuts was finally brought to life and made available officially to the broader public. It’s one of their most compelling records in their long history of making music, and it’s such a thrill to have them gracing the stage again (and still). It’s recognizably them with its fusion of instrumentation and melody, but it also feels very intentional, deeply personal and genuinely interesting as composition.
Justin Bieber- Freedom/Justice
We didn’t get just one, but two suprise releases by Bieber this month, with Freedom being the biggest suprise of the two given how it came out of nowhere and just might be his most vulnerable, pasionate, and spiritually laden record to date. Taken together this represents a genuine creative effort that hlds suprising power and intrigue moving forward.
Honorable Mentions: Two new singles announce the return of Imagine Dragons to the scene with the dynamic tunes Follow You and Cutthroat singling that they are as strong as ever. Also, Needtobreathe’s Live From the Woods Vol. 2 captures the spirit of this hopeful return to some kind of normalcy in the future with its first live show captured and taking me back when I saw them playing against the backdrop of downtown Minneapolis and the Mississippi river. Memories and hope combine with this band’s unique fusion of gritty country roots rock, spiritual reflection and soulful/singable melodies.
My recent reading through the book Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age To the Age of Robots by James Suzman, has really been shaking up my understanding of what work is. I’m sure that this would not be Suzman’s intent, but it has also reawakened and reinvigorated my faith in God, particularly in how it is that I see (and understand) the God-Creation-Humanity relationship.
A big part of the Suzman’s larger thesis has to do with how it is humanity has shifted the human relationship to work from a view of abundance to scarcity. And I think this has much to say regarding the recent annual celebration of Earth Day and all that this day represents.
The basic tenant of the argument goes like this:
The story of human’s relationship to the world (or the earth) used to be focused on the immediate and the present, where they (we) looked out at their environment and observed and trusted in the providential nature of God and earth to provide what one needed. Therefore there was no necessary language for which to assume or describe anxiety about the future. Work set us in relationship with God and land where the functional nature of this relationship (work) trusted in immediate needs being met through the fruits of that relationship, and rest then giving us to the time to reflect on and grow awareness of God and Land.
Anxiety about the future surfaced with the creation and discovery of fire precisely because for the first time in our world’s history we had an external source of energy that demonstrated the idea of “excess”. In other words, for the first time something else did the work that normally would have been attributed to us. This brought about both physical and social/cultural changes. The problem of excess is what then formulates the rest of the human story as one concerned less with the present and more with the future, bringing with it a very real anxiety that undermines the trust of this relatationship to and with God and Land.
The Gift of Free Time
As the author suggests, considering cooking to be one of the primary roles of fire that led to direct changes in human function and physicality, “Perhaps it is because so many see cooking as hard work that we have paid so little atteniton to what may be among the most important of fire’s many gifts: the gift of free time.”
This free time has led to the increased development of more and more external energy sources that do the work for us, creating this unending and interrelated cycle of future oriented thought processes and increased anxiety. When we no longer have a relationship to the present, we instead spend our time obsessing over and saving up for the future, something that has its greatest demonstration in Western development and society. This has flipped our attention from trust in the idea that our needs will be met (that providential relationship with God and land) to to the notion of increasing want. When these external energy sources do our work for us, all of this free time leads to both the positive and negative creation of excess. This shift from need to want has led to a society that attributes to work all manners of external, identity shaping attributes that then demand that we work harder and harder and harder for these wants rather than working less to obtain our needs, and we do this precisely because of all this “free time” and “free energy.” Its a paradox and a conundrum built on anxiety that creates more and more anxiety even as it continues to progress ingenunity and invention at an unprecedented rate. Further, as external energy sources do the work that we once did, not only do we disconnect from God and Land, we also end redirecting the evolutionary process that creative entropy holds together. Most of the evolutionary process is now artificial, from the cities we create changing natural patterns and adapted species to the very rewiring of our brains and the ongoing manipulation of the earth for these energy sources.
One place where we see this most readily is in the movement from fire to the rise of the farming, the structural premise that gives rise to growing civilization and reshapes our relationship to the Land, and thus also the life that shares this land with us. Reflecting on some of the narrative problems that flow from this shift Suzman writes,
“People and their domestic animals now comprise a remarkable 96 percent of all mammalian biomass on the planet. Humans account for 36 percent of that total, and the livestock that we nurture, nourish, and then sense to the slaughterhouse account for 60 percent. The remaining 4 percent are the ever diminishing populations of wild animals…
Descartes had his famous “night of visions”- a sequence of dreams that persuaded him that his ability to reason was sufficient proof of his own existence, giving rise to the now famous disctum, cogito, ergo sum- I think, therefore I am. It also persuaded him that the human body was no more than “a statue or machine made of earth,” and animals like the warhorses that sustained his amry, lacked the faculty for reason and so were nothing more than elaborate barley- and oat-fueled automata….
almost all societies that depended on hunting for meat considered animals to have souls… many also considered the fact that hunters were in effect harvesters of souls to be morally troubling and came up with a different way to rationalize the killing…
For farmers involved in meat production or butchers, there is little room for the intimacy that comes from hunting an animal on foot with a spear or bow. The emotional weight of animals souls would be too great a burden to bear. Humans, though, have evolved the ability to be selective in deploying the empathy that underwrites our social natures… (thus) Farming socities adopted a variety of different approaches to dealing with the ethical problem of killing animals. Some simply chose to hide the messy business (Eastern and Indigenous cultures)… another option was regulation (Abrahamic Religions)… the final option was to take Descartes’s approach and think of animals as little more than machines and so assume that they were already dead even while they still lived….
When he argued that animals are for the sake of man, Aristotle wasn’t only talking about food but also the work done by creatures like oxen, horses, and hunting dogs. This too was part of the natural order of things. Perhaps unsurprisingly he rationalized slavery in a similar way…. the only circumstances he imagined slavery no longer being an institution would be if there was no work for slaves to do. And the only circumstances in which he believed that could happen were if somehow people might invent machines that could work autonomously, “obeying and anticipating the will of others,” in which case “chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters, slaves.”
To him, though, that was something that might only happen in the world of fantasy and the false stories religious people told one another… Aristotle may have built his reputation by using reason to interrogate the nature of uncertainty, but he had no doubt that slaves existed precisely so that people like him could spend their days solving math problems and having clever arguments rather than producing and preparing food. His defense of slavery is a reminder of how people in all societies have insisted that their often wildly different economic and social norms and institutions reflect nature.”
From Human Exceptionalism to Technology: The Age of the New Gods
We are at a tipping point in human history where technology and artificial evolution is taking the place of this planet’s primary energy producing source and therefore functioning as “god” so to speak, with the caveat that the narrative this is following is all based now on the notion of scarcity rather than abundance. This notion of scarcity is precisely what creates this conundrum of a planet that needs to use more and more resources while also anxiously understanding that there won’t be enough resources to sustain us into the future. It also lies at the root of understanding how it is that we moved from fire to farming and modern socio-economical practices, practices based almost entirely on the notion of preparing and storing for the future. Perhaps most notable are the ways in which this model of scarcity becomes the driving force for the creation of inequalaity with fear and uncertainty for the future forcing us to reminagine our relationship to God and Land (in providential terms) and thus to one another.
God, Land, Abundance and Scarcity
Here we have the central quesiton of how it is that life “works”, and thus how we understand our relationship to “work”. The laws of entropy (the simaltaneous destruction of or taking of energy and the making and dispersion of energy) must still be applied somewhere. The real question for this anxiety laden future is how it is that technology as the main energy consumptiive plays into this equation. This becomes especially apparent in modernity where it is assumed that our relationship to God and Land is a thing of the past, and where progress and fear of that uncertain future must be the dominating narrative driving energy producing and energy consuming practices now dominated by technological sources in order to ensure our long term survival.
Interestingly to this end, this is precisely why the problem of “scarcity” is written so sharply into religious conviction, and why in the Abrahamic religions most specificially we have such a strident focus on reclaiming this God-Creation-Humanity relationship. The ancient world bears much evidence towards the basic intuition of this shift from abundance (the Garden narrative in Judeo-Christian Tradition) to scarcity (the wilderness in Judeo-Christian tradtion), with the outcome being perpetuated by this sift being a necessary division between land and people (taking its energy sources for our wants), people and God (no longer trusting in provision but working to obtain it and control it ourselves) , and people and people (inequality based on scarcity). In the Judeo Christian Tradition, desire is the primary word used to understand a definition of sin, from which we arrive at this overarching theme of God’s either dwelling in the cosmos or dwelling apart from it. The mark of human progress captured by the Tower of Babel story in particular, a story that in itself can only be understood in the light of the first chapters of Genesis which defines both God’s dwelling within the order of creation and to call to work in relationship to God, Creation (Land or earth) and People, and the problem of desire which leads to disorder (the flood) and the picture of “empire” that posits a people controlling the narrative of the human story as one of scarcity rather than abundance (by making this tower, let us make a name for ourselves). That this happens continually within our very human awareness of the problem of scarcity suggests that the same order-disorder, chaos and creation story that guides this religious conviction with the ancient world is still very much in play. When natural disasters hit (a pandemic, for example), the fear that the narrative of scarcity brings emerges ten fold. These things then foster a never ending discourse revolving around the human capacity to control the future on one side and concerns over our failure to exist in proper relationship to God and Land on the other.
Which is where we end up with these confused and competing narratives. On the one hand we find the grand story of capitalism that holds human exceptionalism, the very image of the Tower of Babel, in its grip. Suzman writes,
“The only thing universal about market capitalism was the hubris of its most enthusiastic advocates… market capitalism was a cultural phenomenon that emerged as the modern nation state replaced more granulaar, diverse socially grounded economic systems based mainly on kinship, sharing, and reciprocal gift-exchange. The substantivists insisted that the economic rationality the formalists believed was part of human nature was a cultural by-product of market capitalism, and that we should be far more open-mineded when it came to making sense of how other people aportioned value, worked, or exchanged things with one another… wants may be easily satisfied, either by producing much or desiring little. Hunter-gatherers achieved this be desiring little and so, in their own way, were more affluent than a Wall Street banker who, despite owning more properties, boats, cars, and watches than they know what to do with, constantly strives to acquire even more…. potentially for most of human history, scarcity was not the organizing feature of human economic life and hence the fundamental economic problem, at least as it was described by classical economics, was not the eternal struggle of our species.”
On the other hand, we see many looking to reapply a humanist interpretation of the sacred to the natural order as a way of downplaying human exceptionalism. This takes the old ideas of God in relationship to the world and God existing apart or absent from the world and replaces it with a view of the natural order as standing above artiifical evolution in light of God’s absence or non-existence. And yet if the problem of the first view is that it imagines humanity as its own god, and the us the earth’s most sacred and vital componant, this second view attempts to make the sacred the natural order. Both assume a guiding narrative, one focused on the past and the other obsessed with the future, but a narrative nonetheless. And narratives that have a tough time reconciling this notion of work with the distinctness of the human capacity and vocation without either diminishing it based on an assumed elevation of the sacredness of the natural order or elevating the sacredness of humanity above the natural order. We can’t assume the sacredness of the land as something the defines our relationship to it if the land cannot attribute this sacredness to itself, nor does it seem we can maintain the right and godlike ability to attribute this sacredness to ourselves (humanity) without necessarily subsuming the sacredness of the land itself for the sake of humanities future. We are stuck with narratives that have little to say about our (humanities) working relationship to Land in the present.
The Source of Life and Entropy
In any case, I think what is obvious as well is that there remains an uncertain longing for the sacred to be evident within the evident chaos. It would seem that the same storyline that we see in the Judeo-Christian story continues today, with the added question of this picture of cultural and human empire now shifting from people to technology as the new god of our age. Technology is increasingly driving and (re)defining the very defintion of ethics and morality, and will soon, if it hasn’t already, become its purveryor and catalyst. It is for this reason that I would suggest that our primary problem is that age old discussion about God as one who dwells within the created order or as one who dwells apart from the created order.
This age old question (is God absent of the natural order or involved in/present within the natural order) formulates itself in the modern age as a particular concern for this notion of a God who dwells within the created order necessitating a God who then also dwells within the chaos. This is not a question that concerned the ancients in the same way as it does today, but rather these are questions that now emerge from our modern understanding of the chaos in scientific terms. As Suzman writes though, what science demonstrates and what we are discovering more and more is that the creative process of entropy, that energy consuming and energy producing process from which life emerges and is thus contained and sustained, appears to require both the destructive and constructive edges of this process in order to function. Life emerges from death, order from disorder, production from consumption, creation from chaos.
The real question hinges not on the nature of this process (Suzman maintains this is not the essential mystery), but rather on the question of its source. That is, we can see and note the necessary pattern, but this requires something to set it in process, to jump start the laws of entropy and to define its necessary starting point. The process requires a source, a foundation by which it then comes into existence and finds its necessary pattern. Here in lies the conundrum of that ancient question. If God jump started the process, is God then still involved in the process given the evidence of both order and disorder. And if God is not, do we then just imagine that God is not involved at all in the human story. And if so, where then do we locate a reason to exist in relationship to the Land if the human story seems to necessitate a concern for a future that sees us existing apart from (our in control of) the Land? And perhaps the bigger question yet, if humanity is elevated to the position of God (that is, the source and arbitrator of ethics and morality and thus the ones who set the new pattern for life and entropy), how do protect against the exploitation that flows from humanity being in the position of the primary consumer of these energy sources and this energy existing soley to beneift our (now) natural human progress? We are less dependent on the earth now than we are dependent on our ability to harness it and thus tailor it for the purpose of humanities potential future apart from it. It’s a catch 22. Our best hope for the future is to use the earth for human advancement, while this using and coopting of the natural order for the sake of human advancement requires necessary exploitation.
If the entirety of the human story of progress (and even the very physical evolutionary progress and development that led to our unique exceptionalism) is built on “artificial evolution” (that is, evolution that humanity has cooopted and redirected in its participation within the natural order), to what end do we then demand an upholding of the sacredness of the earth? If we are presently in control of the narrative and therefore our potential future, by what means do we then choose to inhibit and hold back this potential by changing the new narrative of evolution for the sole (and seemingly irrational) purpose of elevating nature to a godlike status?
And further yet, what do we do when technology is already re-assuming this rolein our stead? How do we locate the relationship to God and Land that the ancients assumed within a narrative that leaves little room for it to exist? Technology might be the only way we survive in the future by giving us a way off this planet that we call home, but that technology demands the continued exploitation of this place we call home for our the purpose of human progress. This, it would seem, is the natural order of things with humans in the god role. And the reason technology is now subsuming our own position as gods is precisely because it is the product of the continued and necessitated practice of handing the production of energy that once was ours over to that technology.”
These are big questions, and ones that I have been mulling around in my own mind. They seem to especially be pertinant for understanding why it is we should care about and celebrate something like Earth Day, something that seems to be far less about that working relationship and far more about that socio-political lobbying either to protect our god like status or to relegate it back to the natural order in a way that resubmits us to a source that can dictate and control our narrative as the source and virtuous authority. For myself I find myself compelled again and again back to the God-Land-Humanity realtionship that guides the ancient stories, and in particular the Judeo-Christian narrative mentioned above. There is something about the God imagined in this story as one who dwells within both the order and the chaos that continue to compell me, even if it challenges me. It provides me a way to locate the human story within the story of God and Creation as one that emboldens a “working” relationship, speaks to the problem of scarcity, and brings together past, present and future as a measure of trust in something that sits above us and holds it together in the patterns of order and disorder, even if that leaves me slightly out of control of that narrative. It allows me to revel in abundance as opposed to forever reacting to scarcity. And even more so, at the very least it provides me a means of participating within it in a way that makes sense, and even affords me the responsibility that comes from our ability to direct it in ways that don’t succumb to necessary inequality and allows me to respond to the inequality that scarcity creates and demands.
Approching the turn of the calendar year in 2020, I, like most people I think, found myself doing quite a bit of reflecting. Exhaustion with the pandemic and the never ending lockdowns has long since set in and taken its toll. While turning the page to 2021 didn’t actually promise much in the way of hoped for relief, it did seem to, if only for a brief moment, offer something symbolic- the imagining of some sort of a future. This reflecting eventually led to some renewed interest in a personal research project of mine on a subject intimately related to the future- the nature of “memory”.
I have written previously in this space about why it is that I became interested in the subject of memory, so I won’t rehash that here. But while most of my research thus far as been spent on the history of memory (as an idea) and the function of memory (as a science), I had yet to dig in to memory on a purely comparitive level, and in particular the comparitive relationship between memory past and present, and further yet the relationship of memory to how it is that we exist in the present.
To this end, I recently picked up a book by researcher Joshua Foer called Moonwalking with Einstein. While the book does carry a bit of a practical bent, taking its research and applying it specifically to some of the practicalities of memory building and memory strengthening exercises, by and large it is a powerful treaties on this comparitive exploration of memory past and memory present.
What Is Memory
One of the most striking things that I have found in my current research into the idea of memory is the basic admission that we still know so very little about it. Which is not to say there hasn’t been a lot of of headway made towards understanding what it does. At a base level though, much of the how and why of memory function remains as mysterious as those spaces in our brains where forgotten memories seem to gravitate towards. From the beginning of our awareness of memory as a function, recognized in early human development as the means by which we express our minds without the aid of developed language, to the modern age where new information now arrives at unprecedented rates, memory continues to play a critical role in human function, however different these expressions of memory might be and however negelcted these expressions of memory might have become.
What is clear in the pages of this book by Foer is that this is also true at a simple biological level, especially when seen through the simple picture of the human life span. As Foer explains, memory at birth is a curious entity in that it operates without a past. Everything is new at that age, which explains why it is that we then can’t remember our childhood until we hit age 4 and 5 (on average), because our minds as of yet have nothing to attach memories to. Everything is future oriented, essentially leaving our minds engaged in the process of building a foundation through which memories can then emerge. It is only after we have created memories, so to speak, that we are then free to interact with our memories as “experiences” which we can actively comprehend and thus translate into, well, memories. Memories that can then catapult us into the future with a functional narrative in tow. In this way, memory is at its heart a comparitive and creative exercise that requires real and actualized context to develop.
This correlates with the science of how the brains develops. In James Suzman’s book Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, he documents the uniqueness of the human brain by way of synapses. Unlike other creatures we are born basically completely dependent, our brains a quarter of the size of what they will become in our adult years (in comparison to a great ape, where they are born with a brain almost 50 percent of its adult size). This means a child’s brain is full of synapses that take in information and more information. As we grow those synapses begin to get pruned out until we are left with what these functioning synapses that can take this information and form them into active memories, memories that then propel us forward into the most essential human activity- creating, or working. Humans by nature need information, and we consume far more of it than any other creature on earth past or present.
Something similar happens when we get old, but in a slightly different fashion and context. If a crucial aspect of building and sustaining memory is in fact holding and having a future, or working and creating into the future, the very fact that in old age this future becomes smaller and memories themselves that much greater means that those spaces where memories seemingly go to be forgotten becomes increasingly active and aware and harder to retrieve. This is true simply on the basis that these memories no longer have an expansive future to be launched in to. Foer suggests that this is less about the breakdown of our brains or our inability to remember lost informaiton (information never truly gets lost, only irritrievable) and more about the ways in which memory is in fact built and developed. Debilitating diseases aside, it is possible to sustain memories well into old age by exercising our brains and keeping them healthy, but essential to this is enabling ourselves to continue to imagine a future even when that future gets smaller. Curiously, there is a good deal of study that could be done here on the role of religious conviction towards this end, especially as a belief system that understands the importance of, to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, the “spiritual imagination”.
What Does Memory Do?
To dial this down a bit further yet in dialogue with Foer’s book, what precisely is it that happens when we engage the process of remembering? As with the picture of a child building a past and then applying that to a broader picture of a potential and imagined future, memory building happens when something in our present becomes distinguishable against that which is routine, ordinary and familiar within our past. If anything from Foer’s book has stuck with me the most it would be this notion- what makes life appear to move fast is when everything blurs together, when there is no ability to distinguish between one moment and the next, or one day and the next. This might sound counter intuitive, because rationality and reason appear to suggest that old familiar adage “time flies when we are having fun”. But the truth appears to be precisely the opposite. At a very immediate and most practical level, this is what makes something like this current Pandemic so difficult for so many. When it first started one could notice a collective sense of fear contrasted by a collective sense of optimism. Having a chance to press pause for the short term and make space for things long forgotten in our busy-ness seemed like a genuine, welcome and desirable opportunity. Fast forward to today and those things no longer feel like novelties. This is because at a fundamental human level we are conditioned to live in a past-present-future co-awareness. There is only so long we can thrive, and sometimes even survive when the days begin to blend into one another without much in the way of distinction. With no way to plan for and anticipate the future, we cease making “memories” in their truest forms and life begins to, retrospectively, feel like it has disappeared or never existed at all. This, by contrast, is what makes life appear like it is moving fast. Memory is something that occurs only in retrospect, flowing from and depending on our awareness of those distinguishable moments that mark our place in time and space. We call this brain mapping. It’s the same exercise we engage in when we read a paperback book, ironically a fading art in our modern world. It is onlly in looking backwards and contrasting that with our present that we can locate these moments and recognize them as a building story full of memories, which has the very real affect of then making life appear to move slowly. To think back on our memories is to gain a sense of a life full and a life lived.
Getting deeper into the technicals, many of which this book helps to outline in an accessible fashion, we get to the following helpful distctions. First is the differentiating between artificial memory, that which we create and can manipulate, and natural memory, that which is generally unconscious and which drives much of our decisions and our choices. What’s important about artificial memory, which makes up the smaller portion of our memory systems, is that these represent the minute ways in which we can actually and willfully affect change in our lives, even as natural memory, the much larger portion of our memory systems, is what allows us to continue to function on a day to day level.
And then there is the difference between episodic and semantic memories. Episodic memories are located in time and space (as Foer suggests, concerned with where and when), while semantic memory is located outside of time and space (free flowing knowledge). This connects directly to the relationship between explicit and implicit memories. Explicit (declarative) memories are things you know that you need to remember, or that you know you remember, while implicit (non-declarative) memories are unconscious memories, things that you remember but that you are unaware that you remember. Thus explicit memories, like artificial memories deal with awareness in the immediate. They provide short term opportunity to enact real change and to shape our stories in specific ways. The unconscious memory in contrast doesn’t travel through the same short term memory circuits as explicit ones do. In terms of what dominates our lives, most of what we remember and what drives our choices is unconscious, while what we knowingly remember and thus can manipulate accordingly makes up a much smaller fraction of who we are. And yet there is an intimate and important relationship that exists between these two kinds of memories in terms of how we function and shape the human story. While one shapes who we are, the other shapes who we become, and who we become requires a very real trust in who we are, which is largely the sum of our unconcious awareness. In other words, memory making is a very real exercise in faith.
External and Internal Memory Making
Perhaps most important for the larger comparitive discussion of the history of memory and the function of memory in our present day is this notion of external and internal memory. What’s important to note here is that while external memory is all about the recording and capturing of memory in physical and material ways external to our being (such as writing it down), our brains developed and are conditioned towards internal memory function, that which we internalize and thus know as functioning knowledge. If there is one defining and disinguishing mark of the work of memory in history and the work of memory today, it is the simple fact that we now exist in an environment where most of our memories are captured by systems external to us. We not only have these external systems that contain our memories, we continue to build more and more of them out of necessity and dependency. This has the very real and measurable effect of eroding our ability to remember in internalizing fashions, and perhaps most strikingly has the most immediate impact on the very real essenence of what makes us “us”- our ability to understand our selves and our life as story through the development of connecting the explicit and the artificial to the unconscious or natural memory. In short, it has eroded our brains abiliy to the do the work our brains were developed to do. We might see it most in an external sense, be it the very real challenge of remembering more than 2 or 3 (on average) phone numbers or birthdays, but where this does the most damage is when we actually dig into that internalized reality, as this is where we make the narratives that define how it is that we function and live in unconscious ways from moment to moment. In the West where memory has arguably been most eroded, we see this most readily in the decline of the art of storytelling. We have grown skeptical of narrative exercises, preferring instead static information and rational “facts”. The problem with this is that our brains are not designed to simply retain facts. Memory itself depends on our brains necessary and adapted ability to filter through information and to forget that which we don’t need and remember that which is most important. It is on this basis then that weave this into a narrative that our unconscious selves can accept and our conscious selves can interact with.
To Remember and To Forget: The Right Ordering of Our World
In this sense, memory depends on the artful process of forgetting. Our minds developed to take in information and order it so as to then recast this information through story and narrative. And we do this for the purpose of building towards the future. This is what allows our memories to give our lives shape and locate us in this world in meaningful ways as something recognizable. When that gets eroded we end up feeling lost and aimless and unrecognizable. Reduced to mere facts that our brains can’t actually do anything meaningful with. As a human species, stories and narrative are as important to our diseminating and applying of truth as facts, and probably even more so. That we have become cynical of narrative “truth” in modern Western society is both a symptom of the erosion of the memory making process and a cause of our own increasing indebtedness to irrational processess, defined as facts artciulated increasingly without actual context through which to be formed and thus understood.
Our minds have long since been trained to forget by nature of how we consume information, just not in the fashion that our brains were actually built to forget. Foer points out that Socrates predicted this long ago when looking at the potential danger of putting what we know internally into print (external memory). Print, followed by indexes (the external ordering of information), and much much later the age of the internet, has played out Socrates’ very real concerns in a prophetic fashion. The world that is being created now is one based almost entirely on external memory systems whereas almost the whole of human history, on which the development of our brains hinges, was built through internal memory processes. As Foer suggests, progress is simply outpacing humanity at an unprecedented rate, and one of the greatest challenges of human society at large is our inability to address the changes this is bringing in terms of this internal/external process, something we can no longer fully engage and recognize because of this progressive lack of narrataive understanding and context. We have lost the ability to tell our stories, and thus our external reality has picked up where our internal process left off, ordering our memories and thus telling our stories for us. We are no longer what our unconscious memories make us to be, but rather what those external memories tell us we we must be.
Intelligence, Dualism and the Decline of Narrative Memory Making
There is another important question to add to this discussion, and that is, what exactly is intelligence? Is it as we have been trained to define it in our modern understanding- data, facts, and information? There is a degree to which intelligence relates directly to knowledge based systems, but as this book points out, knowledge itself is entirely different than actual knowing. As described earlier, intelligence used to be based on our ability to take information, analyze it, and then forget what we don’t need and remember what is most important. It is from here that our brains apply this to a functional narrative that helps us to make sense of that which we can then come to truly know. Over time what has happened in the modern world is that we have been trained to disassociate facts from narrative. Narrative, or stories are untruths that the facts, the science, the knowledge, can set straight. This might be as simple as observing the gradual seperating of academics from the arts, or the subsequent subsuming of the arts into mere existential statements about the rational facts. It is also as complex as the exchanging of one worldview for another, which now sees the right ordering of the universe as the assembling of information rather than revealing and recovery of necessary and narrative shaping truth. This is the basis of enlightenment style rationalism. In any case, what has happened is we have essentially elevated this kind of rationalism as the new god of this new age, trading in the God-Human-Creation relationship that humanity once engaged through story for a new form of dualism. As theologian N.T. Wright often puts it, in this new world, this new age, God can either be out there detached from the world (epicurianism), or God can be non-existent altogether. In either case this is effectively doing the same thing, which is forming a dualistic picture of the world in which the facts exist apart from humanity and the natural order and we exist primarily as beings in service to this capital T “Truth”. We end up with naturalism as opposed to “natural theology”, but a naturalism that has no way of reconciling how it is that humans fit into this natural world in a meaningful way. A naturalism that has long since abandoned its ability to interact with the human story as a memory making process. Progress has become the new obsession, and rationalism is its god. This is the same thing that happened when persistant dualism affected and gradually corrupted the ways in which we are able to imagine the gods actually interacting with the natural world, essentially leading to this familiar divide of facts versus fiction, religion versus rationality, and narrative versus information. The real danger then is this gradual eroding of the very essence of what it means to be human and to exist in relationship to this natural world.
Historically speaking, as Foer rightly points out, back when print first emerged on the scene suddenly the songs, the poetry, the stories that were once synonymous with human intellect and true narrative driven knowledge were no longer seen as bastians and holders and expressions of truth. As the book says, they were free then to become art, but in that freedom they suddenly also became distinct from true knowledge. Dualism at work.
The Modern Problem: A Loss of Imagination
To speak of all of this in quite personal terms, when we pause to take a look at all that we consume today in what has become a society built on mass consumption, which includes in a very real way the mass of information we take in every second of every day, and it becomes startling how little of it we actually are able to remember. We consume so much and remember so little, all the while educating our youngest minds based on data driven memory based systems that, in the more concerning reality, do not have the time to actually settle into our unconscious and natural memory making systems. It is as if we are reconditioning our brains in a real tim, self made evolutionary process to exist perpetually in those first 5 years of our life. This is what defines progress today. There is so much information coming at us all the time, and it does so with a sense of urgency that says progress or cease to exist as a human species, that our world is being redeveloped around external memory making systems where there is no ability to actually reflect on and analyze this information in the way our brains need to do to make sense of it in a meaningful way. Everything is new, and thus in this world everything must be new all the time to qualify as progress. Rewatching films or rereading books or sharing familiar stories, for example, becomes a cumbersome exercise, Traditions become a hindrance. We have a tendency to fill our days unecessarily with work and we structure our lives according to expectations of building entirely towards this obsession with the future. Intelligence gets whittled down to the central concerns of our modern age (environmental concerns, technological advancement, space exploration), while, as the film Ad Astra so aptly captured in its powerful inditment of modern human progress, we stand a very real danger of arriving at the future with no ability to actually make sense of any of it, let alone to even be able to ask the right questions to begin with. To ask the necessary questions is a part of what it means to be human. To fit these questions into a necessary human narrative is a part of what it means to engage the memory making process. What we have become less and less able to do is that which our brains developed to do, which is to apply these facts to a narrative structure. To tell these stories of our lives and our history, of our persons, our communities, of our humanity in a way that can then translate to capital letter Truth regarding who we are and how it is that we live in this world in a meaningful way.
As Foer explains, the Latin word for memory comes from “inventory” and “invention”, two ideas combined to make a whole. Memory in this sense is a “tool of recording and a tool for invention and composition”. It is the process of “making new connections between old ideas”, and as Foer so aptly puts it, “memory makes” or imagines “new things.” We have been trained in this modern world to think of memory as stuffing facts inside our heads. But memory as both a concept and as a very necessary human exercise is not built for this. Memory is by nature an imaginative process that has its roots in narrative making societies and cultures. “Learning, Memory and Creativity”, the bastians of what truth fundamentally is and becomes, are shaped around the same fundamental idea, which is that truth emerges from this interrelated function of past-present-future realities. As the book points out, “the art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images and link disparate ideas” with memories of the past for the sake of the future. This is how story emerges. Creativity, then, as Foer suggests, is the ability to “form connections between disparate ideas or images”, the ability to “create something new and hurl it into the future so that it becomes”… a story. Creativity is “future memory” in the strictest and most fundamental sense of the word. Unfortunately we live in a world today where it is all future and no memory. We dismantle the external markers of our past in the same way we dismantle the internal markers of our past, forging our way into an unidentifiable future ill prepared to give it much in the way of meaning.
The Modern Solution: Building Memory spaces. Memory Blocks and Memory Castles.
So what is the solution? I think the solution remains the same as it always has- recognize the power of artificial, explicit and episodic memories to afford us agency for change. In other words, spend time building conscious memories. This is the way we begin to take back control of our memory making process from those external buildings to constructing internal ones. This is described in technical terms as building memory castles, metaphorical rooms and spaces through which to tell our stories and make meaningful memories. What’s important to note here is that while simply spending time doing meaningful things is important, what gives memory its shape is foward movement, definitive decisions, choices, actions, that shake up the routine and give us something to distinguish our story as a story that is being told, that is developing, that is building.
Secondly, reengage with story and the storytelling process by retelling the stories from our past and thefore giving them new and fresh context as time moves forward. Accept that just as the truth that guides our lives is mostly unconscious, telling stories is the best way to truly know this truth as something other than facts. We need to do away with our modern skepticism and embrace this ancient and human artform and creative exercise as the means by which we can make sense of all of this information in the modern age. We need to trust that our memories will preserve what it is that we need to know to prosper and learn how to step out through faith in our subconcisous and unconscious knowledge of this world and who we are, and yes, I would argue, God. This doesn’t make us less intellectual, it actually makes us more knowledgeable. What’s important here is that for as much as memory depends on forward movement, our ability to remember also depends on giving us the mental capacity to afford the present its meaning. Routine and Tradition is as important as change and progress in this regard, as that becomes the means by which we can then be able to connect the past with the future. One potential of connecting this in concrete ways to curating our explicit and conscious memories is through attaching these stories to concrete things, be it a meal, a park, a building. There is a deep and intimate connection, for example, to memory making and architecture. Seeing a film together in a public space like a local theater builds a visible and tangible marker into our memories in ways that seeing it home cannot.
Third, and in conjunction with the second point, we need to be willing to temper the amount of information we take in by allowing ourselves the space to forget so that we can then begin to remember that which is most imporant. This might look like creating space to connect once again with nature in a way that brings our human experience into relationship with it. This might look like prayer and meditation. This might look like creating Traditions, forcing ourselves to rewatch important films or read important books, sharing familiar stories over the supper table. It might look at resting on a piece of information and submitting it to dialogue and conversation with others as much as we can. It might look like spending time reading or listening to longer forms of discourse or camping out on singular ideas despite that feeling that we simply don’t have the time for this or that we must keep up with this world’s astronomical pace of disemmination. This might look like taking the time to journal or blog or write out thoughts about certain ideas. And like above, attaching these spaces to something visually tangible like a building or a park or a coffee shop or a river side ect. can be a very real thing we can reintigrate into our lives in this fashion as well. It probably looks like all of the above. The more we do this the more we give our brains the chance they need to begin to build these internal systems of memory that can then translate these experiences and this information as necessary or unnecessary for telling the story we are building through our memories.
Space is tied to time, with memory recognizing this as our means of occupying a “when” and a “where” and then knowing and understanding the “why”. For me personally, when I think back over 2020 what I recall is a blurry and indistinguishable mix of activity that feels like it never actually existed at all. And I remember feeling in the past few weeks that this is a frightening notion when it comes to thinking about my life moving forward. My story is marked by pre-pandemic life, with my last meaningful and identifiable memory essentially erasing a year and a half of my life from my mind (and thus my story). This presents a very real challenge for the memory making process in a world where the memory making process is already being eroded. And yet perhaps there continues to be an opporunity for the empty space this pandemic has created to awaken us to this larger reality of our memories potential for knowing and for Truth and identity. However it is that we eventually emerge from this pandemic, if we can allow the experience to empower us back towards the memory making process this can go a long ways in helping to push back on the forces of this modern shift towards external building memory blocks and reclaim control of the human narrative in an internalized sense. Let the past inform our present so that we can reiminagine a future by way of a better and arguably more ancient story.
“When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” – John 20:19-31
If you are not and have never been part of a liturgical Church expression, chances are you are like I was was before experiencing liturgical worship and assume that the Easter season ends on Easter Sunday. In the liturgical calendar the story of God continues with the celebration of Eastertide (or Paschaltide), literally rendered “Easter Time”. This is marked by these weekly cycles that allow us to enter into the story of the Resurrection, culminating in the Day of Pentecost where the spirit given empowers the Church to be the mission of Christ to the world.
The Second Sunday of Easter (also known as Divine Mercy Sunday), is especially relevant because it establishes what for the Gospel of John is this pattern by which can recognize the new creation reality established in the death and resurrection of Christ. The writer of the Gospel of John builds the narrative of Jesus around a new “Genesis”, a new beginning, and in the end of the Gospel we are brought back in line with the opening phrase “in the beginning” by nature of this being “the first day of the week” of this new creation order. It brings to mind our role as image bearers placed in God’s temple, which in a bit of irony contrasts the “locked” doors of a building and this charge of being “sent” outwards into the world. The beauty of the Cross and the Resurrection is that it is not an exclusive property of faith meant to assure us of our salvation and bolster our fortresses, but rather it is the proclamation of both identity and vocation. “As” I have been sent, says Jesus, “so” I send you. To do what? To live and embody the ministry of Jesus in the new creation. In other words, to get on with task of creating and building that informs the Genesis imagination.
What’s striking to me about this new creation vision is that it begins with the simple words peace which contrasts with the word fear that precedes it. This word peace is deeply interested in and intereconnected with this notion of sending. It’s not simply a message that says, Jesus died for my sins and now I get to go to heaven, as the Gospel is so often understood. It is peace for the purpose of vocation. And how does this vocation get summed up? As a reconciliatory work. A unifying work. Forgive so that you can be forgiven. In other words, the resurrection breaks down the barriers of fear that comes from looking out on a world that feels hostile and uncertain and divided, and affords us this phrase “peace be with you”, a phrase in liturgical circles that actively embodies a time of reconciliation with one another. In the ancient world of this text, this would afford us a new vision of a world no longer bound by the cycles of division that we see instilled and perpetuated in the familiar story of Cain and Abel, one built on an eye for an eye form of justice and the never ending repayment of the sins of the people that flows from this kind of division. In Christ this cycle is broken, and thus in Christ we can move out into the world declaring “peace be with you” precisely by living in this model of forgiveness. This calls forth this great story of a whole humanity (literally rendered “Adam”) divided in order to become one in our divsersity (the fruits of labour bearing the child as a unified whole), a vision distorted by the idolatry of our desire which leads in the narrative picure John is evoking to a humanity divided (Cain and Abel) with no way to become a diversified whole. The competing image is that of Babel, where homogeneuity tells a different story than that of being fruitful and multiplying so as to fill the earth with our diversity, becoming the very template for the notion of nationalism and empire that flows from the term “Babylon”.
In the new creation of the Gospel of John, Jesus occupies the center of the new temple of creation enabling us to begin the reconciling work needed to heal a divided world. It is precisely through setting all that divides us at the feet of Jesus that we can both declare and live the kind of peace that bears the promise and mark of this liberating Gospel message. The breath of life in the Garden is the same breath of life declared in 20:22 and 20:31. Faith then, the kind of faith the Gospel of John contrasts with Thomas’ doubt, is the simple notion of believing that this promise of life is true in a world that often looks quite different. It is the proclamation that in the Resurrection God has been faithful to the promise to bring about this new creation reality. To bear out the promise to make Abraham the father of many nations bound not be this idea that some are made in the image of God and some are not, but so that our true identity as image bearers can once again be made known, and in so doing ushering and bringing the diversity of these fractured and scattered nations of image bearers into this creative vision of a diversified whole. What Eastertide reminds us of on this second Sunday of Easter is that Resurrection is not the end of the week, it is the first day of the week, the great imagining of a new world reality that has only just begun. The great bearing out of this new world reality through this peace giving and unifying vocation as image bearers.
The Stories of my Life 