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Looking for the Obvious Things that aren’t so Obvious: Smuggling Wheelbarrows

In The Cultural Paradox of the Global Village, Mark Federman tells an interesting little parable. Allow me to paraphrase At some obscure bordertown, for years, a man crosses the border almost daily with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. Each day border security digs through the dirt looking for contraband; and each day it’s the same story – it’s just dirt. He’s filling up a hole. Years later, a retired border patrolman runs into the wheelbarrow man in a social setting. He’s just got to know the real story behind the dirt. “There’s no way you were just bringing dirt across the border; what were you really doing?”

The reply: “I was smuggling wheelbarrows, of course.” ______________________________________

The point of the story is that the obvious isn’t always so obvious. I’ve heard someone say that the Father Brown stories of G.K. Chesterton point out much the same thing. Father Brown is always asking the most basic question that no one else seems to be asking. This is how he solves crimes when others can’t. A Christian critique of our culture, whether it regards social-moral issues or media ecology, is going to have to come to grips with the fact that we are often missing the obvious. We need to train ourselves to look for the obvious things that aren’t so obvious. Often we’re so busy rifling through the dirt that we miss the wheelbarrow. Federman’s solution, based on the work of Marshall McLuhan, is as follows:

The challenge in achieving the awareness to notice the formerly unnoticed – what we call achieving ‘integral awareness’ of our total environment – is to create an appropriate ‘anti-environment.’

The fish in the water doesn’t notice the water. He has to get out of the water. The church should provide the greatest of all anti-environments. Yet, as we engulf ourselves in worldliness, and manage simply to mirror the world, what we are really doing is crippling our ability see the obvious all around us. We cannot critique the music of the world because we are too busy humming along.

The GOODS, the True, and the Lovely

Trade is all very well in its way, but Trade has been put in the place of Truth. Trade, which is in its nature a secondary or dependent thing, has been treated as a primary and independent thing; as an absolute. The moderns, mad upon mere multiplication, have even made a plural out of what is eternally singular, in the sense of single. They have taken what all ancient philosophers called the Good, and translated it as the Goods…

When God looked on created things and saw that they were good, it meant that they were good in themselves and as they stood; but by the modern mercantile idea, God would only have looked at them and seen that they were The Goods.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows

As I am transitioning from pharmacy life into the field of education, I see this more and more. We really are at a point at which we think education is simply about learning a trade in order to ‘contribute’ to society. We are more concerned about the goods than the good.

It is an absolute must in this environment that the church, and individual Christians, strive to be different. We must not look at creation and culture and simply see ‘goods.’

This is one of the reasons why I focus on technology to the extent that I do. Technology can kill the existential. I am not saying that it always does. I am saying that it is capable of doing so. It can rob the beauty of ‘being.’ It can turn a beautiful sunrise into a mere photo op. It can turn friends into icons on a screen. It can turn wonderful things into internet equity – that is, into goods.

It’s not just technology though. We can turn anything into goods. Spouses, kids, art, whatever. As we brush back against this, the idea is to see the innate good of things without seeing them as things to use as a means of gaining equity. Enjoy the world and life without putting it on our socially constructed eBays.

Anyway, it’s a great quote from Chesterton.

Technological Mysticism and Mediation

But what is this omnipresent space we increasingly inhabit?…What is not always apparent is how our time in this disembodied, alluring, liberating world changes us and especially influences our relations with each other…Cyberspace, in science fiction writer Williams Gibson’s words, is a ‘consensual hallucination,’ more so than any of the alternative worlds man has ever created – from Greek mythology to the layered slices of the medieval heavens to film or theater. We aren’t just mulling and imagining our new realms. We live in them.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, p. 48

I once heard a comedian (I can’t remember who) begin his set with a joke that goes like this: Anybody here believe in telepathy? Raise my hand.

I think the term ‘telekinesis’ would actually be more fitting. But we’ll run with it.

At one time the idea of controlling other people or objects from a distance was sheer telepathic spiritism. Now we can unlock our front door or adjust our thermostat from another continent. Anybody believe in telekinesis? Turn the heat up from across town.

The idea of reading someone else’s thoughts was mystic nonsense. Now it is an online reality. How many websites exist today that allow us to read the random and quasi-private thoughts of others. Anybody believe in telepathy? Interpret my secret emoticon 🙂

The idea that we can have certain knowledge of the future was once wrapped up in divination. Now we have meteorologists who go to school for that sort of thing, and the certainty of science about the destinies of far off glaciers. Anyone believe in divination? Predict a hurricane.

Once the idea of locking people into image induced trances was mesmerism. Now it’s simply entertainment. Anyone believe in mesmerism? Get me to sit in front of your TV screen for three hours without getting up.

A big takeaway from the first two chapters of this book (for me) is the picture Maggie Jackson paints of the fantasy, spirituality, and ethereal nature of our technology. If you follow that line of thought you will come to the conclusion that we live in an age of mysticism and plasma mediation. It is mystic in the sense that we experience the presence of others who are separated by distance without giving thought to the mediation that makes the experience possible. It is mediated by plasma in the sense that screens become the gateway to other worlds – she calls this omnipresent space.

We like to think that our species is evolving and becoming more rational and scientific. In reality we are just using different forms of mysticism and different means of mediation. I am not knocking it wholesale. The issue is that folks need to wake up to the fact that there’s more going on here than plastic, plasma, and science. I find that more and more people are interested in mysticism these days. But it seems that few are giving attention to how ‘media ecology’ if involved in such a trend.

One plus of this line of thought is that, I think, it can be helpful in teaching the importance of mediation; or, at least, it could serve as an illustration of the need for mediation. Eastern religions and Catholic Mysticism have tended to lead to the idea that we can have direct, unmediated experiences of the presence of God. But, as my former pastor used to say, heaven is the presence of God with a Mediator. Hell is the presence of God without one. God has chosen to reveal himself and allow us to experience his grace and love and presence through means and mediation.

Boredom and Creativity: Take Time to be Bored

The subject of boredom is one of my hobby horses. I’ve written about it before (HERE and HERE, for example). I do not allow my children to use the word ‘bored’ in reference to themselves. I do not say it myself. And anyone in general who says it in my presence will likely get some sort of cross examination thrown their way. Boredom, says me, is like spiritual and intellectual self-mutilation. In addition to that, it also a big middle finger at pretty much everything that has ever been made in all of creation. But I digress.

I was listening to Studio 360 on NPR yesterday (a regular Sunday habit of mine during drive time) and heard an interesting discussion on the topic of boredom. During said interview, Manoush Zomorodi was sharing some ideas and research on the relation of boredom to creative work. It’s always nice to hear others backing up your own opinions… Anyhow, she was making the point that research points to the fact that most creative work flows out of what modern Americans would tend to call boredom. Without the time to daydream, to sit alone and think, to take stock of life and goals, to build imaginary castles and characters, we are cutting ourselves off from any great work that we might perform. And what is the major culprit of our shrinking time for daydreaming? You guessed it. Technology.

Great parent that I am, I immediately turned off the radio and made my kids (and myself) sit in silence for half an hour. Maybe they’ll thank me later (sarcasm intended). Well, they weren’t exactly in silence. They actually know how to play games and have conversations. They even know how to amuse themselves. It’s a lost art for adults much of the time.

When I posted on boredom a while back, a commenter shared a Blaise Pascal quote: “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” A bit hyperbolic, but he makes a good point.

It’s an interesting discussion, so, by all means, check it out HERE.

Technology and the Loss of Depth

Maggie Jackson quotes Sven Birkerts:

Inundated by perspectives, by lateral vistas of information that stretch endlessly in every direction, we no longer accept the possibility of assembling a complete picture…We are experiencing in our time a loss of depth – a loss, that is, of the very paradigm of depth.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, p. 42

If you stretch the ocean out far enough it eventually becomes shallow. If that is what we are doing via technology, it should be no surprise that our thinking should follow suit. Cue Portlandia’s portrayal of the Hipster version of depth HERE.

Technology as Spiritual Medium

Now we weave in and out of a vast array of relationships, dancing across multiple spaces of connection, seemingly freed from the limits of body and earth. Attention becomes ethereal in a world of multiplicity. No longer do boundaries matter.

Along with simultaneity, cyberspace’s precursor was the realm of spiritualism, the nineteenth-century movement to communicate with the dead…

Now exploratory forays into unseen worlds are burgeoning into a determined desire to increasingly inhabit new dimensions…We spend increasing portions of our lives in alluring netherworlds that we have constructed ourselves…Are we perfecting ‘wired love,’ upgrading ourselves, grasping for transcendence on earth through our screens?…

Whether via mediums or cyber-games, past and current technologies share a stubborn certainty that utopian ideals of connection are within reach of explorers of these other realms.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, pp. 35-36

These quotes are basically a snippet. She fills in the argument with several examples to try to prove the point.

Those familiar with C.S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man is a good example) will have seen this point before – the connection of technology and ‘applied science’ to magic or spiritualism. Usually when I have thought of technology as a ‘medium,’ I have had Marshall McLuhan’s idea of ‘medium’ in mind. Maggie Jackson loads up the word with even more meaning. She has the same type of medium in mind as King Saul when he visited the witch at Endor (1 Sam. 28).

The issue here, as with most of what I’ve found so far in Jackson’s book, is that we need to wake up and open our eyes. It is not that technology is inherently evil; rather, the issue is that we need to realize that there are subtle, tacit elements at work that we tend to be unconscious of. A good illustration of that is a stanza from The Lonely Island’s song I Threw It On the Ground:

At the farmer’s market with my so called girlfriend
She hands me her cell phone, says it’s my dad
Man, this ain’t my dad!
This is a cell phone!

I threw it on the ground!
What, you think I’m stupid?
I’m not a part of your system
My dad’s not a phone!
DUH!

It’s common sense, but we do tend to forget about mediation, we really do pick up a phone and think it somehow has become the actual person that we are talking to.