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What is sharper than parody? Done well, it is not shrill, but gives your enemy the respect he deserves before smashing him to bits.

Shakespeare mocked the French to no end in Henry V (which I read out loud with some friends this past weekend). But he learned French to do it.

Think angsty music videos are ridiculous? You can complain about them or preach a sermon against MTV. Or, you can take the time to craft your own and show how ridiculous they really are.

I found this to be completely hilarious, (except for the last part where it takes a pointless and vulgar turn – fortunately this embed code lets to specify the timeframe when embedding video – rockin’!).

If what you are against is worth really being against, then it is worth learning it from the inside out. If something is worth criticism, then the best thing you could do is to parody it well.

If you can’t, then either:

• A) You haven’t done your homework and your criticism is probably weak
• B) The thing actually ISN’T worth criticizing. Either you are in the wrong, or it’s not important. Chill out.

Here, Wendell Berry makes a very interesting observation about the nature of problems and solutions in general, or more specifically, about cultural disease and healing.

These things that appear to be distinct are nevertheless caught in a network of mutual dependence and influence that is the substantiation of their unity. Body, soul (or mind or spirit), community, and world are all susceptible to each other’s influence, and they are all conductors of each other’s influence. The body is damaged by the bewilderment of the spirit, and it conducts the influence of that bewilderment into the earth, and the earth conducts it into the community and so on.

-Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, p.110

He is talking about how all the parts of our world and community are connected and that a problem in one section will never be isolated. It will always have far reaching effects. For example, if more families are torn apart by divorce, all kinds of other bad things follow: damaged children obviously, but also interrupted employment, litigation, etc. When a school goes downhill, it has far-reaching effects on it’s students. When a farmer abuses the soil for short-term gain, it can impair the next generation significantly. When a man visit’s a prostitute, he spreads disease, furthers the abuse of women, financially props up the pimp, etc. When a man smokes weed, his twenty dollars trickle all the way back to gangs on the Mexican border who like to leave severed heads lying around. He also hurts his employer by being spacey. He hurts his neighbor by caring less about him too, at least for a while.

Now, none of this is news. You’ve probably all heard the illustration about how a drop of water in a pond can send ripples out all the way to the edges.

All that is certain is that an error introduced anywhere in the network ramifies beyond the scope of prediction; consequences occur all over the place, and each consequence breeds further consequences. But it seems unlikely that an error can ramify endlessly. It spreads by way of the connections in the network, but sooner or later it must also begin to break them. We are talking, obviously, about a circulatory system, a disease of a circulatory system tends first to impair circulation and then to stop it altogether.

Berry also notes that, because an error in a network (I’m going to substitute “selfishness in the community” for “error”) is, by nature, destructive, it tends to break ties as it goes. The horrors of divorce cannot spread to a thousand generations since those generations aren’t going to exist. The decadence of Rome before it’s fall didn’t spread to the whole world. After enough of the empire was broken, it imploded and was overcome in war. Because evil burns its bridges, it can only travel so far. A comforting though actually!

Now here is what I found the most curious:

Healing, on the other hand, complicates the system by opening and restoring connections among the various parts – in this way restoring the ultimate simplicity of their union. When all the parts of the body are working together, are under each other’s influence, we say that it is whole; it is healthy. The same is true of the world, of which our bodies are parts. The parts are healthy insofar as they are joined harmoniously to the whole.

Healing, by it’s very nature, makes the network more complicated. When you restore connections in the family, then you have to learn to live with these people. If you and your wife get back together, then you have to learn to relate to her mother-in-law again. And you have to feed to dog, which you didn’t have to do before. A lot of people talk of ways to fix education. But do you realize that if you fix education, it will not make it suddenly simple and elegant? If the interaction of teachers, students, parents, and the rest of the technology is made richer and more healthy, it will also be increasingly difficult to put your finger on one thing that is holding it together.

We often, very often, imagine that healing will simplify things. The newsstand is full of magazines offering ideas to simplify your life. They even have titles like “Real Simple”. Religious fundamentalists also tend to think like this. Introduce this one big change, like everyone taking the bible literally or everyone submitting to Sharia law, or everyone tossing away their “crutch” of faith in a fit of secular humanist existential ecstasy, THEN the world will be less tangled up. It will be simple! No. Our world, our community is a circulatory system. The more healthy it is, the more tightly integrated it will be – the more difficult it will be to understand. Yes, in some ways, when life is healed it is simpler. But it is also thicker.

Hate causes a mess, but love causes even more of mess!

After using Wendell Berry as my example earlier of being “long on diagnosis, short on cure”, I was delighted find him admit this straight-up on the one of the last pages of The Unsettling of America.

And so we come to the question of what, in a public or governmental sense, ought to be done. Any criticism of an established way, if it is to be valid, must have as its standard not only a need, but a better way. it must show that a better way is desirable, and it must give examples to show that it is possible.

This should be obvious, right? Practical examples? But as I mentioned in earlier posts, there is a great dearth of them.

This was followed by two pages of self-admittedly brief and vague solutions. They did include numbered bullet points though! What more could you ask for? I’ll try to summarize them here with a few comments. Remember, this was published in 1977.

1. “Withdrawal of confidence from the league of specialists, officials, and corporation executives who for at least a generation have had almost exclusive charge of the problem and who have enormously enriched and empowered themselves by making it worse.” Wow. And he is talking about the department of agriculture and the food industry here, but he could be talking about anybody. Wall Street? The housing bubble? City planners? The military overseas. You name it, this could be point #1 on just about anybody’s list. Stop trusting the people in charge. This isn’t a call to rebel against them, but to simply no longer believe what they say without thinking about it first. Very good advice.

2. Using some of his philosophical language about “energy” he ask us to learn self-restraint in our consumption, and to learn to enjoy working hard.

3. Return to the U.S. founder’s philosophy about government protecting the small and weak from the great and powerful through negative law. That is, by stopping bad stuff from happening, not by throwing lots of money at allegedly “good” stuff.

4. Make very low-interest loans available to those wishing to become small farmers and buy small pieces of farm land.

5. Price controls to protect farmers and prevent waste. (Yikes!)

6. Promote fresh local food to reduce dependence on distant imports.

7. Make every town and city operate an organic waste depot for converting sewage, garbage, etc. to fertilizer to be used on local farms. This will break our expensive and dangerous dependence on mined fossil fertilizers.

8. Reform sanitation laws and get rid of the ones that are killing small farmers and ranchers by making it too hard and expensive to meet FDA standards.

9.1 Encourage technological and genetic diversity for conserving soil.

9.2 Forbid state-funded university professors from simply being the R&D departments of private corporations, yielding no public benefit.

10. Force agriculture professors to spend 50% of their time operating a small farm. Half their salary must from practical experience.

11. Some more philosophy. This time advocating a more moral and humble anthropology. Self-restraint.

12. “Having exploited “relativism” until, as a people, we have no deeply believed reasons for doing anything, we must now ask ourselves if there is not, after all, an absolute good by which we must measure ourselves and for which we must work.” He goes on. The final point is a condemnation of relativism and thinly veiled support for, essentially, theism.

This is an interesting mix of solutions! Some of them are very conservative, pushing for less government involvement. Others are just the opposite (price controls and farm loans) which call for more legislation and enforcement. (By the way, I think history makes a strong case that price controls almost always backfire). The bulk of the points are moral though and for moral arguments to work, you need his last point, which is theism. Berry is a fervent Christian, though he seems to be going out of his way not to mention it in this work so as not to alienate his secular audience. Nevertheless, he can’t help quoting the Bible about every third page. What I see this meaning is that, more than anything else, the church needs to be aware of these issues. We have denounced consumerism from time to time, but we are so caught up in it, we are usually unable to denounce it near enough. Instead we have the prosperity gospel. Even in most orthodox American churches, how many in the congregation are chained to high mortgages and credit card debt? A heck of a lot. It’s part of the same root trouble that has also led to the exploitation of the land that Berry draws attention to in this book.

I need to track down some follow-up material from Berry to see what he thinks of the situation now in 2011. For example, in one chapter he advocates organic food and local farming. That dimension has exploded since he wrote this in the late seventies. As far as I can tell, soil conservation practices, such as crop rotation, are in a healthier state than three decades ago too. Other sides of the coin are quite a bit worse though. I would guess that he continues to be dismayed at his conservative Christian colleague’s allergic reactions to environmentalism. On the other hand, I can imagine him being equally frustrated with environmentalists who do not fear God and dream of left-wing fascism.

Ultimately, I enjoyed Berry’s book, despite the doom and gloom, especially the material related to work/life balance, generalist work, vocation, and fatherhood.

I don’t wish to teach my son
to work,
but rather to work, love, pray, and rest.
To sow and to reap,
to know grace,
when he sows the wind.
Instead of reaping the whirlwind,
fresh pineapple in December.

* Pineapple is such a wild, spiky and delicious fruit. How is it that I can have one on my table in the middle of winter? Some would say it is due to the triumph of coordinated global agriculture, high-speed international shipping and government trade agreements. But the pineapple isn’t normal. It will have none of that. It knows it’s there because of grace.

Photo credit

I wrote this while camping in the woods after reading Wendell Berry distinguishing between nature-lovers treating the outdoors as a “scenic” commodity versus the farmer (and anyone who eats food) being tied to it with much stronger bonds.

Is the wilderness a consumer good? Some folks want to live out here, but what are they going to do for a living? Write novels? Take photographs? Telecommute back to Oracle? Perhaps that is just affluence treating the forest like a slave. Like a strip-club patron throwing a twenty at the stage and shouting, “Dance!” We flex our purchasing power in order to buy a home on the edge of civilization. Oh, how natural of us. The forest doesn’t ask much of us though. It bides it’s time, occasionally bursting into flames on its own accord to brush off the brush and clear out campers.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

Who is “them”? The gentile Roman soldiers who were just following orders? I guess it’s easy to make an excuse for them. They’ll hear the gospel later.

Was he forgiving the mob then? The mob caught up in volent mimetic contagion (as Girard would put it)? They really didn’t know what they were doing either. They were out of control, imitating the thrower of the first stone. We’ll give them a pass too.

Was he forgiving the religious leaders and murderous plotters as well? The guy who really DID throw the first stone? Better to have a millstone tied around one’s neck and thrown into the sea than to cause the mob to sin. (Luke 17:2) Is he forgiving the model too? The arch-hater of God? If THAT guy was included in Jesus’ intercession with the Father while he hung on the cross, then who on earth does that leave out?

I’m not trying to advocate including them or leaving them out. I’m just asking, how hard are we going to work to make sure that someone gets excluded from God’s statement here?

Earlier, he told the same plotters, to their face, “You are of your father, the devil!” (John 8:44) But that’s the point, right? That’s why He was there, to reconcile even these sons of Satan.

By the way, this is good news for those of us who are sons of Satan. I think the good news stands. It is not just for the ears of the righteous, or (as Luke 23:34 implies) for the ignorant, but also for the rebellious.

Theological liberalism has no gonads. It is impotent. Ah, but it has seemed so influential! It’s taken over much of the western church. Has it not? No. The perceived influence of theological liberalism is only the encroaching dominion of unbelief – unbelief that grows like strep in a warm petri dish when the burning coals and solid ice of orthodoxy are nowhere to be found.

When an Episcopal Priest can stand up on Easter morning and declare to the congregation that Jesus did not actually, historically, bodily, rise from the dead (happened this year at a church in Nashville) – that is not the triumph of liberty, non-violence, and the love of Christ. It is the triumph dance of the enemy, declaring as shrilly as he can that God is dead. Perhaps if he shouts it a little louder, it will drown out the hum of the approaching eschaton.

Satan worked in the hearts of men to move the mob to murder Christ. Now, he must work to keep him murdered. The mob must have won. They must have killed him so well that He really stayed in the ground, despite whatever his crazy followers said afterwards. But they can talk all they want. God is liberated from the grave.

Listening to the spiels of several candidates for the top IT manager in my organization gave me time to scribble down some thoughts on the matter.

I found things I liked about each candidate but also some ideas I disagreed with.

Customer focus is absolutely necessary to maintain energy inside a service group. Introspection and nerdy-focus will implode it. Focusing on the technology makes life mechanized, meaningless, and dehumanized. Server uptime as a metric apart from the context of real people doing real creative work is meaningless. Not just meaningless, but destructive when you imagine it to exist in a vacuum.

Fun alliterative phrases heard:

“critical core competencies”

“support of service assements”

From what I can gather, the “Educause” conference must be a real snore.

Someone said, “Leadership is not just the responsibility of the president…”. Well, yes, in many ways it’s up to him least of all because he is too distant to affect real change. People close to you, people you love, these people can lead. Other, distant people can be safely imitated (for better or worse), but that is only an imagined leadership. Real people, close to you, on the ground need to lead.

Someone else said, “I believe in the value of advanced degrees, after all, it’s the business we are in.” After being in this business for 11 years, I can now say that I actually do not believe in the value of advanced degrees, in general. Often, not all the time, but very often, we are in the “business” of convincing young people to max out their credit cards for a gallon of snake-oil. And it’s not that we are shysters – we want so badly to believe in the value of education and degrees, just like the students do. They are pinning all their hopes and dreams on them and we don’t want them to fail. But the higher-ed bubble of the last 30 years has taken, is taking, it’s toll on many lives right now. With my own children, when they are older, depending on their interest, I will likely advocate some sort of apprenticeship instead. It’s not institutionalized, but has the potential to be far more valuable.

Imagining myself in in the position of these candidates presents a challenging thought experiment. It’s a complicated job with a lot of moving targets. The best way forward does not seem obvious to me at this point, though I have a pretty good idea what I would try to focus on and what I would not.

I’m reading Frederick Brook’s The Mythical Man Month right now. Very good stuff in here, and the clear thinking and writing is dry but exemplary.

A rather personal musing:

When I actually pick up my pen, when I actually get off my butt, so often, amazing things happen – I produce good work. The kids learn, my wife is blessed, my thoughts take shape on a page. The consistency is really pretty staggering. I do not constantly fall on my face. So why, why, why the hell do I refrain from DOING so often? It seems to me like despair. Despair when an effort, especially a great amount of effort, fails to affect. It doesn’t take very much despair to poison me. To neutralize me.

It also seems the most potent accelerate to this poison is envy. When I have been most crushed with despair, when I have been filled with the most hatred toward my neighbor, it has been when I have seen my peers succeed – when they seize the day and I do not. I hate them, as I hate myself. By God’s grace my hate for them wains and passes, but my own hatred of myself persists.

Kierkegaard said the following in The Sickness Unto Death:

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”

“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.”

These ring true. Being jealous of the future of your peer is a terrible psychological state to be in. It is also an explicit failure to be yourself. Instead of standing by and observing how this is just a natural part of the “human condition” (and it is that too), I shall, with S.K. name this despair for what it is: sin. Failure to be what you were created to be. But this is not an exhortation to myself to “get off my butt and git’r’done!”. That kind of law binds the will and leads only to more despair. What heals this alone is the utterly unwarranted love of Christ.

Well I’ve established (ha! or at least suggested) that a lot of books, especially contemporary religious books, are chock full of cultural critique, but are largely devoid of solutions.

Back to why. Why/how do these books even get written? Why only describe the problem more thoroughly? An academic researcher can probably get away with this, but a lot of these books, most of them in fact, or clearly intended for a popular audience. I am going to try and describe what I think is happening, at least some of the time here.

Most theology and Christian culture writers are minor celebrity pastors. They feel like personally, due to their ordained day job, are sufficiently “doing their part” and serving “more than enough” to be above reproach in their vocation. (Do you need to preach a sermon to Mother Teresa exhorting her to serve more? Nah, she’s got that covered at least.) So from this position of critical safety, they can opine about (quite literally) anything and everything. They can diagnose all day long and not BOTHER to articulate a substantial cure since they, personally, are already maximally involved as part of some sort of cure already (as far as they can tell).

In a vacuum where a well-reasoned cure does not exist or a proposed solution is only vaguely defined, what takes the place? It is filled by the person speaking himself. Whether they (the speaker) are actively seeking to promote themselves is irrelevant. What happens is that the “cure” becomes the replication of the speaker. And the listeners, intellectually agreeing and emotionally resonating with the diagnosis, desire the cure, desire to take part in the cure. And so they find themselves desiring to become like the speaker. People who sit under effective pastors find their legitimate list of vocations to include only being a pastor or something very similar. This is a natural reaction. It happens in the absence of a substantial solution. Not prescribing a concrete cure does not mean that none is communicated. The vacuum will be filled by SOMETHING, probably the speaker’s own person. When we are long on diagnosis and short of cure, then the cure becomes highly personal and imitative.

So what is Wendel Berry’s solution? As far as I can tell it’s “Everyone become a small farmer and learn to be happy being poor, just like me.”

After writing this, I checked to see if there were any discussions regarding Berry on the BHT. It didn’t take long to find exactly what I was looking for.

OK, I guess I have to say something. I’ve been sitting this one out because my best friend is totally into Wendell Berry. I’m a little into Wendell Berry. I think eating local and thinking about community is cool. But my friend is so into it that it drives him to despair. He feels trapped, doomed to participate in an economy he hates and the burden of rage against the machine wears him out. I try to encourage him with eschatology, but it usually doesn’t take.

Why so much stridency on this subject? It seems so out of proportion. …from the little I’ve read of Berry he doesn’t seem as full of anger as his disciples. Anybody want to do a little armchair psychoanalysis of what’s going on here?

And a reply:

…I hate being stuck in an evil system, being part of an economy that promotes poverty, and that I can’t do a damn thing to get out of it. I would LOVE to have my own farm, big enough to sustain my family (in produce and in trade) and some of my close friends. I can’t afford it. I can’t afford to buy all organic, all cruelty free, or all local… and I love in Portland OR, mecca for the ultra green hipsters! I can barley afford to feed my family! If I think about this stuff too much, it will send me to depression… and I can’t afford to go there in any way, shape, or form. Thinking about the kingdom of our God and his Messiah swallowing up this evil, corrupt way we live (all over the world, I’m not talking just USA) is the only thing that gives me any hope.

I really hate to be picking on Wendell Berry (sorry Seth T.!) because he really is a sharp guy, but his work provides such a good example of what I’m talking about here. Berry offers a brilliant critique, but then articulates no cure. So what do his followers pick up as the cure? Be like Berry. So they get themselves a few chickens in their back yard (as much as the city will allow them), stop shopping at Walmart, eat out less and maybe try to get to know their neighbors. But they are frustrated because it seems like so very little in an ocean of waste and consumerism.

When I hear reformed fan boys invoke John Piper’s NAME far more often than his actual ideas, I wonder what is going on. I think that in spiritual matters, even something as systematic as Calvinism can fail to SEEM like a substantial solution to life’s immediate problems. That still involves (and will always involve) the long daily trek of faith.

Here is a counter example involving a local pastor, Doug Wilson, who has written on a lot of different (and sometimes very controversial) topics over the years.

The advocacy for Classical Christian Education is a very substantial, meaty solution to many of the problems presented by modern schooling. That is why the focus of the movement has been on the methodology and (to some degree) the philosophy rather than a particular person. In truth, this advocacy has probably been by far Wilson’s most influential contribution, but because it has been so long on cure, he, the person, is effectively diminished. He isn’t this larger-than-life leader of the movement. In fact, lots of people involved who may even now be teaching Sayer’s revised Trivium in schools across the country don’t even know who he is. That’s good. It keeps everyone’s eye’s on the ball. It also prevents Doug from personally becoming a stumbling block (and he would).

On the flip side again, we can also REJECT the given cure and try to imitate the person instead. Great musicians usually have one piece of advice to their wannabe fans: practice, practice, practice. But instead, we buy the Eric Clapton signature edition guitar, start smoking cigarettes, and even go shopping for the right kind of hat. That’s the stuff we can imitate and it’s easy. We don’t see him practicing four hours straight every morning. We just saw the four-minute clip on MTV.

Girard shows us that, for better or worse, we are always imitating others and imitating their desires too. For ideas to stand on their own, they need to be sufficiently separated or distant from the person presenting them. For discipleship (which is a form of intentional imitation) to be effective, the master and apprentice need to have a common goal strong enough to prevent rivalry with each other. The master musician and his student need to pursue music, not the teacher personally. The pastor and the lay minister need to pursue God, not the reproduction of the pastor. We need to be careful when being long on diagnosis and short on cure. We may think we are doing the world a favor, but maybe not so much. We can guard against this by being humble and minimizing ourselves personally from the solution. Reformed blogger Carl Trueman recently exhorted celebrity pastors to voluntarily NOT go speak at so many big conferences. It’s too bad the reception to his idea has been lukewarm.

“He must increase, I must decrease” said John the Baptist. He’s still right.