We Should See Other Blogs

If the “get rich” book you’re reading doesn’t first and foremost recommend that in order to get rich you should write a book on how to get rich and sell it to dullards like yourself, it’s all lies.

Ethics are like songbirds: How you feel about them depends on where they are.

We can all train ourselves in certain ethical principles, but ethics are largely a matter of perspective. (I know. If wishing made it so, the world would be black and white.)

Not only are ethics relative to the situations we apply them to, but I think a lot of the time we try to justify how our ethics change by making up principles that allow us a lot of wiggle room.

When a large corporation sues an individual, I’m almost always on the side of the individual. This is guy instinct. Root for the little guy. When the tables are reversed, when an individual sues a large corporation, I’m still on the side of the individual. This seems on first glance to be obvious. David vs Goliath and all that. Yet it really isn’t obvious. What’s good for Goose Inc, should be good enough for Citizen Gander.

My mind tries to wiggle out of this odd ethical double standard by inventing new positions (corporations have immense amounts of power and the little guy often gets screwed, so corporations need to be held to a higher standard), but is that really anything more than smoke and mirrors?

Here in Canada, we have an election approximately every two years or so. This is because we have a minority government. The Conservatives (who are actually called what they are here) got less that 50% + 1 in the last few elections, so they basically have to work together with the other parties to get things done.

This of course means that not a whole lot gets done. Or at least when things are done, they’re driven to the ideological centre instead of the comparatively hard right where The Right Honourable Stephen Harper would, I think, gladly bulldoze us.

It’s a good thing. The various parties dangle the spectre of election in front of eachother, everyone goes home suitable angry and frightened, and the secretaries and bureaucrats who actually do things do things. There is no radical, decisive action, everything is completely gridlocked, and the boat doesn’t get rocked.

This is, I think, how government should be. It should be a lot slower than it is to make big decisions. Take, for instance, the American PATRIOT act (another in a long series of American legislation named the opposite of what they actually are). It was obviously sitting in a drawer somewhere, waiting to be trotted out at the appropriate moment. Should it have waiting a while so cooler heads could prevail? I think so. It’s a bad piece of legislation written by people who are very much not the patriots they think they are.

In this sense, the Republican victory this year is a good thing. There will be no groundswell of liberal or conservative change. The two parties will dangle the “American public” and the “mandate” they received in front of eachother, everyone will go home suitable angry and frustrated, the Democrats to their secret Communist societies, and the Republicans to their secret extra-marital homosexual trysts, and the secretaries and bureaucrats who get things done will get things done.

It’s a beautiful thing.

You know, I’m still kind of idealistic. I’m pushing 30, but I keep a bit of that idealistic vigor in a bottle somewhere. You see, I’m idealistic about pragmatism. I think it can work, at least most of the time.

I keep looking at the things we ban, or try to hide, or ignore as a society. We ban drugs. We try to hide racial hatred and racial discrimination. We try to ignore sexual abuse in families. Instead we play mind and word games while the epidemics rage one.

Trying to address these problems ideologically isn’t working. Pushing drug culture underground has only nurtured a system of gang violence and disease. Pushing racial hatred underground merely makes it fester. Ignoring sexual abuse in families turns the threat inside out to a hysterical fear of the mythical predator.

These are only three of a long list of problems and issues that we can’t seem to fix by beating on them with the ideological stick. There are many more (teen pregnancy, anyone?).

I think the American “founding fathers” got this one right. You get to say whatever you like. Your ideas go into the public square, where if you’ve said something supremely stupid others can tell you that you’re stupid. There can be an argument. There can be a discussion. The racist can perhaps be convinced he is wrong.

In the same vein, let people shoot up as they wish. But stop treating addiction like a law enforcement problem, and instead treat it like the medical problem it is. Strip away the culture of drug violence. Help prevent disease.

Stop fearing sexual abuse by predators on the street. The biggest threat of sexual abuse is from the people you know. Face this fact. Deal with it. Talk about it.

I’m idealistic about treating these problems with the things that get the best results. Yes, sometimes the ends do justify the means, especially if the end result of the means is merely knocking down a collection of cultural hang-ups that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

I’m not here to be a curmudgeon. (Get off my lawn!) Really, I’m not. But you need to like fewer things. You need to be more selective. You need to insist on a higher standard of quality.

If this means watching fewer films, so be it. Only go to see the few that interest you. Don’t go and see everything that comes out of the off-chance some of it might be good.

No only will you save quite a bit of money, but you’ll expose yourself to a whole raft of new things you’d never have though of finding before. After all, when you turn off your shitty radio station, you have time to fill the silence with something new. And believe me, with the amount of stuff out there, you’ll find something new and interesting before you know it.

As a society we’re quite tolerant of things that don’t last. For most things, that’s fine. History will sort it out. But if everything is impermanent, if everything is disposable, if everything is crap, where’s the 10% that history can sort out?

I used to be a closet libertarian. I admit it. I thought government regulation was evil, markets were efficient, contracts should sufficient for economic and personal self-regulation, et cetera and ad infinitum.

Of course, I was wrong. Libertarianism is a system of thought predicated on people’s rationality. We’ve realised over the last few years of experimentation that this is largely not so. People are subject to all kinds of irrational effects. These effects can be cleverly exploited by those who know how. There are built-in biases, things we call the human condition, in every single human being. None of us is rational. And millions of irrational actors does not a rational market make, the same way two wrongs don’t make a right.

Government is good. Or if it’s not good, it can be an instrument of good. Government regulations are one of the only barriers in the way of corporations sucking up the rights of the individual. (On the other hand, corporations are excellent at subverting the process: Look at the miserable state of the CRTC in Canada, and how its corporation-dictated rulings have only hurt innovation and broadband capacity in Canada.)

Markets are not efficient. They never can be. People are not rational. They never can be.

So there it is: I’m not sure what I am anymore, but it’s not Libertarian.

I’ve noticed something strange. Every time someone needs to justify something ridiculous, something clearly and obviously wrong, they go to the original manuscript. No matter what language it was translated from, no matter what kind of manuscript we’re talking about, you can go back to the original and make shit up.

Listen, if you read Brothers Karamazov in the original Russian, you’ll find out it’s all really about the aliens and their conspiracy to mind-control the clueless humans! Serious!

Do you really think this one guy can do a better job than the twenty scholars who slaved over the manuscript finding the best English analogue? Especially in manuscripts like the Bible which have been translated multiple times… you really think everyone missed that thing until your pastor cleared that up?

It wasn’t too long ago that people got together to form groups based on geography alone. We call these communities villages. Eventually towns and cities sprung up in which there could be multiple communities, but cities and towns were as much geographic creations as villages.

It also wasn’t long ago that two villages not fifty kilometres apart could have distinct ways of speaking, dressing, even acting. I like to call this the communal vernacular. Today we see this regionally, the communal vernacular of different countries or states. For instance, Australia and Canada are very similar, but have different accents, different cultural norms, different modes of expression (the Canadian brand Roots, for instance, makes for a bit of a laugh there, but not here), and even different modes of problem-solving. We have a regionally distinct communal vernacular while sharing a cultural vernacular thanks to the British Empire.

In the modern era geography became less important. Not unimportant, but less important. Telegraphs and telephones perhaps didn’t allow long distance community making, but they did help standardise the communal vernacular a bit. Radio and television did that in an even greater way, but geography was still important. We may have been watching the same programs, produced in far-off California, but we discussed that broadcast programming around a water cooler. That is to say, why the cultural product may not have been bound by distance any longer, the communal aspect of the product very much was.

We’re into a different era now. Geography is less important, and broadcasting is less important. The internet allows us to fragment into small communities based on whatever we want. Some call this the death of mass media culture, though I think mass media and the culture that goes with it won’t fade terribly soon. But considering that mass media culture is essentially an era created by cheap broadcasting and expensive long-distance interaction, it’s not really a bad thing. It’s just another revolution in a series of slow revolutions that have been going on for a long time.

We now have communal vernaculars based on shared interests, shared goals, shared experiences, shared religion, shared whatever. Geography isn’t the defining boundary any long. Language might be, but distance has essentially been erased. There are groups on the web who, if you pop into them, speak English but seem almost completely unintelligible. I find groups of programmers making jokes online that I can’t even begin to understand. This is good.

So where do we go next?

I’ve thought a lot about “the medium is the message”. It’s probably one of the most insightful phrases about media to come out of our media-saturated 20th & 21st centuries. I’ve mused about how live worship music (for instance) takes on the aspects of a concert no matter how hard you try to stop it, simple because using the form of a concert to worship with speaks as loudly as the music itself. Why do worship leaders drift away from using the word congregation and start using the word audience? Why does the audience spontaneously start clapping after a particularly invigorating song? Well, it’s because both the leader and the participant see a concert, not a service, and the language of a concert bleeds over into the worship experience.

Now, whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing (or both) is yet to be seen. For better minds than mine to figure out. But at least we can agree that tossing the conventions and traditions and history of the church casually aside without any thought whatsoever is a bad idea. And that we need to talk about these things.

Another area this happens in is preaching. The way you preach is a powerful message, perhaps even more powerful that the message you wrote because it’s not something your listeners are going to think of.

Preaching is a craft and a calling. It’s not for everyone. It requires someone who can think not only about what he’s saying, but also about the way he’s saying it.

If you take the huxter revivalist preaching tradition as an example, what does the rhythmic, almost hypnotic style of preaching say about what you’re saying? Is it, perhaps, that you’re trying to bypass the brain? Is it that you don’t trust people to be convinced (as, I might add, Paul was convinced) as much as brainwashed?

Or take the sedate, methodical, three-point sermons of the Reformed church. Is there a distrust of emotion there? Is there a desire to satisfy an intellectual hermeneutic framework without addressing the whole person?

Or imagine a topical sermon that simply references scripture to support its points, when it feels like it. What does this say about scripture? Does it say that scripture is to be used as a crutch for your arguments only when you can find a verse? Or, deeper, does this say something about our basic trust in the Bible? Maybe it’s saying that we don’t need scripture as the source, the thing that we go to first to find where to start instead of where we go to confirm our biases.

To put it another way, translate the message of a sermon into the message of a life. If a person says he’s a Christian but only appeals to the Bible selectively when he feels like it, to confirm what he’s already doing, what does that say about his foundation? Isn’t he supposed to go to scripture first and let it and the Holy Spirit guide him to the truth? Isn’t he supposed to hide the word in his heart so he doesn’t sin, as opposed to hiding it in his pocket so he can win arguments?

Recently my wife wrote an article about how she loves going to church because church is a place to hear God’s word. And this is as it should be. The difference between the church and a bunch of losers is the Bible. This is an important difference. It’s a difference that bears repeating, and examination.

So what does your preaching say? Where do your sermons come from? What’s the hidden message behind the message?

We really don’t get it.

When we waltzed into church with our electric guitars and drum kits, hoping to make the painfully dated music of the church cool, we didn’t understand what that would lead to. Where the pursuit of cool would go.

It’s like hippies railing that the culture had co-opted their subversive coolness. They didn’t realize that the counterculture was the culture, or at least became the culture.

So the church seized on “relevance” and “authenticity” and suddenly became uncool and inauthentic. The church counterculture became the church culture, and we still don’t get what’s going on.

There’s no problem with updating the music of the church. That’s an ongoing process that’s been ongoing for as long as the church has been the church. The pursuit of coolness, of hipness, though, that’s new. And it’s not a good thing. The church youth movement with its fads and horribly imitative para-culture ends up looking like a stale translation of secular idea. Along the way we forgot that decking ourselves out in faux-clever t-shirts, eating Christ-flavoured mints, and listening to bad imitations of bad secular music isn’t the same as actually being a Christ follower.

The hippies became the yuppies as the culture at large gradually figured out how to make money off of youth and beauty counterculture. Now every clothing and shoe company in the world is trying to be subversive. And of course when everyone is subversive, no-one is. The culture doesn’t care how they make their money; if they can sell you something to make you feel hip or cool, they will. In any case there’s nothing to subvert because hippies defined themselves largely by what they bought. I’m sure Volkswagen thanks them for that.

In the same way, church counterculture is church culture. You define yourself by a certain style of music and a certain way of dressing, and people will sell you that stuff. People will sell you clothes and music and guitars and accessories with Jesus tacked on (if necessary). Just follow the money.

In the name of relevance, the church will embrace your fads and try to turn that into membership and numbers and whatever else they’re focusing on in the end. If you’re particularly jaded you might say, Just follow the money.

We’re repeating the same process in the church now that the culture at large is repeating over and over again. A new type of subversive church arises and become mainstream. The young and hip make a new church because the mainstream seems tacky. That new church becomes mainstream. Rinse, repeat.

There’s only one way out of this cycle, and the answer is the same for the church as it is for counterculture in general: Opt out. Don’t define yourself by the things you wear or listen to. Don’t chase cool. Don’t jump on or co-opt fads.

Instead try to create authentic community. (I even hesitate to use the word “authentic” here.) Which is hard, doesn’t depend on slogans, doesn’t need a certain kind of music, doesn’t fit well onto a t-shirt, and doesn’t support a cottage industry of moneylenders in the temple.