—

But the steady stream of good things is relentless as well. …I think there is evidence that on average and over time, the new solutions outweigh the new problems. (74)

There is more good than evil in the world — but not by much – Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

Unexpectedly, “not much” is all that’s needed when you have the leverage of compound interest at work — which is what the technium is. The world does not need to be perfectly utopian to see progress. …if we create only 1 percent or 2 percent (or even one-tenth of 1 percent) more positive stuff than we destroy, then we have progress. This differential could be so small as to be almost imperceptible, and this may be why progress is not universally acknowledged. When measured against the large-scale imperfections of our society, 1 percent better seems trivial. Yet this tiny, slim, shy discrepancy generates progress when compounded by the ratchet of culture. Over time a few percent “not much better” accumulates into civilization. (74)

—

So what are we to think about “progress” in light of the recent slew of articles and programs highlighting the complex relationships between workers, human rights, technology, poverty, and politics? Add to that Steven Pinker’s most recent work Better Angels of our Nature proposing that we are living in a less violent era than in all of history. Are there connections? And what are the proper ethics? Is there a better way?

Below are a few of the articles, the full transcript of the program from “This American Life,” and my comments.

NYTimes.com: In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad

NYTimes.com: Made in China

CNET: Apple’s China Problem

CNET: Ep. 1578: Who died to build your iPhone?

CNET: NY Times responds to Apple memo

This American Life: #454: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory

Transcript: Originally aired 01.06.2012

Note: This American Life is produced for the ear and designed to be heard, not read. We strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that’s not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

© 2012 Chicago Public Media & Ira Glass

Prologue.

Ira Glass: OK, I am holding a new iPhone 4S in my hand. This is the one that you can talk to, and it talks back. It’s a program called Siri. So let’s try this. I’m just going to hold it up to the microphone here and push a button.

Ira Glass: Siri, where do you come from?

Siri Software: I, Siri, was designed by Apple in California.

Ira Glass: Where were you manufactured?

Siri Software: I’m not allowed to say.

Ira Glass: Why?

Siri Software: Good question. Anything else I can do for you?

Ira Glass: Can I say I love especially “I am not allowed to say,” because it implies that Siri somehow knows the answer, but she’s just not allowed to tell me. Which is insane, because she’s a machine. Especially because– flip over the phone– right here on the back it’s printed, assembled in China. Which we all know anyway. It’s not like this is some big secret. We all know that stuff is made in China. Our phones, our computers, our clothes, our household goods.

A couple weeks ago I saw this one-man show where this guy did something on stage I thought was really kind of amazing. He took this fact that we all already know, right, this fact that our stuff is made overseas in maybe not the greatest working conditions, and he made the audience actually feel something about that fact. Which is really quite a trick. You really have to know how to tell a story to be able to pull something like that off.

And I bring this up because today we are excerpting that story here on the radio show. The guy’s name is Mike Daisey, and he makes his living doing monologues on stage. He’s been doing that for years, though you’re going to hear in this story that he turns himself into an amateur reporter during the course of the story, using some investigative techniques once he gets going I think very few reporters would ever try, and finding lots of stuff I hadn’t heard or seen anywhere else, not like this.

From WBEZ Chicago, it’s This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I’m Ira Glass. Today on our program, Mike Daisey takes us where Siri fears to tread. What you are about to hear is an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s show which he adapted for the radio and performed for a small audience. Here is Mike Daisey.

Act One. Mister Daisey Goes to China.

Mike Daisey: My only hobby is technology. I love technology. I love everything about it. I love looking at technology. I love comparing one piece of technology with another. I love reading rumors about technology that doesn’t exist yet. I love browsing technology. I love buying technology. I love opening technology. Even when it’s in that bubble packaging, I love opening it. I love the smell of a new piece of technology, that sort of burnt PVC smell when you run electricity through it for the first time. I love that.

And of all the kinds of technology that I love in the world, I love the technology that comes from Apple the most, because I am an Apple aficionado. I’m an Apple partisan. I’m an Apple fanboy. I’m a worshiper in the cult of Mac. I have been to the house of Jobs. I have walked the stations of his cross. I have knelt before his throne.

And like so many of you who may be members of this religion with me, you may know that it can be difficult at times to keep the faith. And I have strayed now and again. In the late ’90s I did sleep with a Windows system or two. But who didn’t, really? But for the most part, I have been faithful.

But I do think it’s important to understand where I sit in that hierarchy of Apple geeks for the purposes of our story. And so the best way I know to describe it is to say that I am at the level of geekishness where to relax after performances like this one, sometimes I will go back to my apartment and I will field strip my MacBook Pro into its 43 component pieces. I will clean them with compressed air, and I will put them back together again. It soothes me.

So the truth is I never would have questioned this religion. I never would have looked deeply at this belief system, because it gave me so much pleasure, if it hadn’t been for the pictures. One day I was relaxing on the internet, which for me means reading Macintosh news sites, which I should specify have no actual news in them. They’re instead filled with rumors about what Apple will do next, written exclusively by people who have no goddamn idea what Apple will do next. But for some reason I find this soothing.

So I’m reading one of those news sites when this article gets posted. And it’s about the fact that someone bought an iPhone, and when they got it, it wasn’t blank. It had information on it from inside the factory. And in fact in the camera roll, there were pictures on it from inside the factory. And they posted these pictures into the article. And I looked at these pictures, and they took my breath away.

They’re not very good pictures, you know? They’re just testing that the camera on the phone works. They’re not of anything. But I’ll never forget them. There were four of them. First there was a stack of pallets, wooden pallets stacked up. And the second one was the edge of a conveyor belt. And the third was totally out of focus. It could just be an enormous space. And the fourth was a woman. She doesn’t know her picture’s being taken. She’s looking off in another direction. She’s wearing a clean suit. She has no expression on her face.

And I looked at these pictures, and I downloaded these pictures to my desktop, and I put them in a folder on my desktop. And in the weeks and months that followed, I found myself returning to them again and again almost compulsively. I would mouse over there, and I would fan them across my desktop, and I would look at them. Who are these people?

Because you have to understand, I have dedicated an embarrassing amount of my life to the study of these machines. I’m an amateur, but I’m a dedicated amateur. I understand as best I can how the hardware works, and how the software rests on the hardware. And in all that time, until I saw those pictures, it was only then I realized I had never thought ever in a dedicated way about how they were made.

It’s actually hard now to reconstruct what I did think. I think what I thought is they were made by robots. I got an image in my mind that I now realize I just stole from a 60 Minutes story about Japanese automotive plants. I just copy and pasted that. I was like, pwop, Command-V, pwop. It looks like that, but smaller, because they’re laptops.

I started to think how if this phone has four pictures on it taken by hand in testing, then every iPhone has four pictures on it taken in testing, every iPhone in the world, by hand. I started to think, and that’s always a problem for any religion, the moment when you begin to think.

Shenzhen is a city without history. The people who live there will tell you that, because 31 years ago Shenzhen was a small town. It had little reed huts, little reed walkways between the huts. The men would fish in the late afternoon. I hear it was lovely.

Today Shenzhen is a city of 14 million people. It is larger than New York City. Depending on how you count it, it’s the third largest city in all of China. It is the place where almost all of your crap comes from.

And the most amazing thing is, almost no one in America knows its name. Isn’t that remarkable that there’s a city where almost all of our crap comes from, and no one knows its name? I mean, we think we do know where our crap comes from. We’re not ignorant. We think our crap comes from China, right? Kind of a generalized way. China.

But it doesn’t come from China. It comes from Shenzhen. It’s a city. It’s a place.

And I am there in an elevator, going down to the lobby of my hotel to meet with my translator, Kathy. Kathy is fascinating. She’s very small. She has these sort of rounded shoulders. And she has these glasses that are way too big for her face, so they keep sliding down, and she has to push them up assiduously. She also has this sort of unnerving habit that when she is listening to you, she leans forward indeterminately, so you really get the feeling that if you were to talk to her for long enough, she would actually fall into your chest, and you would have to pick her back up again.

We go outside and get into a taxi and begin to drive through the streets of downtown Shenzhen. Shenzhen looks like Blade Runner threw up on itself. LEDs, neon, and 15-story-high video walls covered in ugly Chinese advertising. It’s everything they promised us the future would be.

We get out to the edge of the core of Shenzhen and we come to the gates. Because 31 years ago, when Deng Xiaoping carved this area off from the rest of China with a big red pen, he said, this will be the special economic zone. And he made a deal with the corporations. He said listen, use our people. Do whatever you want to our people. Just give us a modern China. And the corporations took that deal, and they squeezed and they squeezed. And what they got was the Shenzhen we find today.

And on the other side of the gates it’s the factory zone. And whew, it’s like going from the Eloi to the Morlocks, everything changes. I’ve never seen anything like it. Everything is under construction. Every road has a bypass. Every bypass has a bypass. It’s bypasses all the way down.

We pull onto an elevated expressway. We begin to drive under a silver poison sky. Because the air in Shenzhen– it’s not good in Hong Kong, but when you get to Shenzhen, you can actually feel it like a booted foot pressing down on your chest. But it’s amazing what human beings will get used to, isn’t it? Because after you’re there just a few days [DEEP INHALATION AND EXHALATION] you hardly even notice it at all.

And as we’re driving, we’re passing by arcology after arcology, these immense buildings that are so large, they’re redefining my sense of scale moment by moment. And then our taxi driver takes an exit ramp, and he stops, because the exit ramp stops in midair. There’s some rebar sticking out and an 85-foot drop to the ground. The only sign that the exit ramp ends is a single solitary orange cone. It’s sitting there as if to say, we’re busy, be alert.

We back back onto the expressway and begin to drive again. And then Kathy turns to me, pushes up her glasses, and says, excuse me, but I do not think this is going to work. And I hasten to assure her that it will work, but I’m talking out of my ass, because I don’t know that it’s going to work. In fact, I have a lot of evidence that this is not going to work. In fact, all the journalists I have talked to in Hong Kong when I told them about my plan, you can actually see them wrestling with just how to express to me just how totally [BLEEP] my plan is.

My plan is this. We are in a taxi right now in the factory zone. We are driving on our way to Foxconn. Foxconn, a single company, makes a staggering amount of the electronics you use every day. They make electronics for Apple, Dell, Nokia, Panasonic, HP, Samsung, Sony, Lenovo, a third of all of it. That’s Foxconn. And at this plant they make all kinds of things, including MacBook Pros and iPhones and iPads.

And so my plan is to take this taxi to the main gate, and then I’m going to get out of the taxi with my translator. And then my plan is to stand at the main gate and talk to anybody who wants to talk to me.

And when I tell journalists in Hong Kong about my plan, they say, that’s different. That’s not really how we usually do things in China. That’s really a bad idea. That’s really a bad idea.

But I don’t know what else to do. I have been trying to do things the right way. I have been working with a fixer for the BBC. I can’t get anywhere. All the doors are closed. And you reach a certain point when you realize you may need to obey your natural inclination. And at the end of the day, I am large, I am American, and I am wearing a goddamn Hawaiian shirt. And we are going to the main gates.

But I have to admit, when we get there, my resolve wavers because the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen is enormous. The Foxconn plant in Shenzhen has 430,000 workers. That can be a difficult number to conceptualize. I find it’s useful to instead think about how there are more than 20 cafeterias at the plant. And then you just have to understand that workers told me that these cafeterias can hold up to 10,000 people. So now you just need to visualize a cafeteria that seats 10,000 people. I’ll wait.

And I get to the main gate, and I get out of the taxi with my translator. And the first thing I see at the gates are the guards. And the guards look pissed. They look really pissed, and they are carrying guns. And I look back at the taxi, which is now pulling away.

And I’m involuntarily reminded of a Google News alert that popped into my inbox a few weeks earlier about a Reuters photographer who was taking pictures not at the Foxconn plant, but near the Foxconn plant. And Foxconn security went out, scooped him up, and beat him before releasing him.

And I look up past the gates and the guards. I look up at the buildings, these immense buildings. They are so enormous. And along the edges of each enormous building are the nets, because right at the time that I am making this visit, there’s been an epidemic of suicides at the Foxconn plant. Week after week, worker after worker has been climbing all the way up to the tops of these enormous buildings and then throwing themselves off, killing themselves in a brutal and public manner, not thinking very much about just how bad this makes Foxconn look. Foxconn’s response to month after month of suicides has been to put up these nets.

It’s shift change, and the workers are coming out of the plant. And I’m standing there under the hot monsoon sun and the gaze of the guards. I feel ridiculous. I look absurd in this landscape. I mean, I wouldn’t talk to me. And Kathy surprises me. Who knew? She turns out to be a spitfire. She runs right over to the very first worker, grabs them by the arm, drags them over to us. We start talking, and in short order, we cannot keep up.

First there’s one worker waiting, then there’s two, then there’s three. Before long the guards are like, er? Er? And we move further and further away from the plant, but the line just gets longer and longer. Everyone wants to talk. We start taking them three or four at a time. We still can’t keep up. Everyone wants to talk. It’s like they were coming to work every day thinking, you know what would be great? It would be so great if somebody who uses all this crap we make every day all day long, it would be so great if one of those people came and asked us what was going on. Because we would have stories for them.

And I’m just ad hoc-ing questions. I’m asking the questions you would expect. What village in China are you from? How long have you been working at Foxconn? What do you do at the plant? How do you find your job? What would you change at Foxconn if you could change anything?

That question always gets them. They always react like a bee has flown into their faces, and then they say something to Kathy. And Kathy says, he says he never thought of that before. Every time, every time.

And the stories are fascinating. I talked to one young woman who works on the iPhone line. She cleans the screens of iPhones by hand in these huge racks, thousands and thousands of them every day. And she shows me how she does it. And I show her my iPhone. And I hand her my iPhone. I take a picture of her holding my iPhone. And I say to her, we’ll never know, but you may have cleaned the screen of this iPhone when it came by you on the line. We’ll never know. And she, quick as a whip, she takes my phone and she rubs it against her pants. And then she says there, I’ve cleaned it a second time.

And I say to her, you seem kind of young. How old are you? And she says, I’m 13. And I say, 13? That’s young. Is it hard to get work at Foxconn when you’re– and she says oh no. And her friends all agree, they don’t really check ages. The outside companies do have inspections, but workers told me Foxconn always knows when there’s going to be an inspection. So what they do then, they don’t even check ages then. They just pull everyone from the affected line, and then they put the oldest workers they have on that line.

You’d think someone would notice this, you know? I’m telling you that I do not speak Mandarin. I do not speak Cantonese. I have only a passing familiarity with Chinese culture, and to call what I have a passing familiarity is an insult to Chinese culture. I don’t know [BLEEP] all about Chinese culture. But I do know that in my first two hours of my first day at that gate, I met workers who were 14 years old, 13 years old, 12.

Do you really think Apple doesn’t know? In a company obsessed with the details, with the aluminum being milled just so, with the glass being fitted perfectly into the case, do you really think it’s credible that they don’t know? Or are they just doing what we are all doing? Do they just see what they want to see?

Emboldened by my success at Foxconn, I decide to embark on a new plan. But I’m going to need Kathy’s help if it’s going to work, so I meet with her in the lobby of my hotel. And I say to her, Kathy, now you work with a lot of American businessmen, don’t you? And she says, yes, I do. And I say, great, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to call all the factories you have connections with, and I want you to call them. And I want you to tell them that I am an American businessman, and that I want to buy whatever they are selling.

And she listens to this, and she says, but you are not a businessman. And I say, that’s true, I am not a businessman. And she says, and you aren’t going to buy their products. I say, that’s true, I’m not going to buy their products. And she says, you will lie to them. And I say, yes Kathy, I’m going to lie to lots of people.

And for a moment I think it isn’t going to work. And then you can actually see the idea leap the synaptic gap from a problem to a problem to be solved when she says, you are going to need a lot of business cards.

And two days later we head out into the factory zone. As we come to each factory, Kathy briefs me on what it is they make and what it is I have said I am going to buy. The factories are all different, but really they’re more similar than different. There’s always gates and guards. When you get past those, there’s always a lawn, big and green and plush. No one walks on it. No one uses it. You go into the lobbies. The lobby is these huge empty Kubrickian spaces, totally empty except for a tiny little desk for the receptionist.

And you cross the huge, empty lobby to the tiny little desk. You introduce yourselves, and then the executives always come down in a gaggle, all together. They pick you up, and you go up together to a conference room.

After the PowerPoint, we head down to the factory floor, industrial spaces with 20,000, 25,000, 30,000 workers in a single enormous space. They can exert a kind of eerie fascination. There’s a beauty to industrialization on such a massive scale. You don’t have to deny it. There’s a wonder to seeing so much order laid out in front of you. And people are walking around, whispering statistics in your ear.

It’s easy to slip into a kind of Stalinist wet dream, but I try to subvert that by locking onto actual faces. They take me up and down the aisles. And the first thing I notice is the silence. It’s so quiet. At Foxconn you’re demerited if you ever speak on the line.

At no factory I went to did anyone ever speak on the line, but this is deeper than that. As a creature of the First World, I expect a factory making complex electronics will have the sound of machinery, but in a place where the cost of labor is effectively zero, anything that can be made by hand is made by hand. No matter how complex your electronics are, they are assembled by thousands and thousands of tiny little fingers working in concert. And in those vast spaces, the only sound is the sound of bodies in constant, unending motion.

And it is constant. They work a Chinese hour, and a Chinese hour has 60 Chinese minutes, and a Chinese minute has 60 Chinese seconds. It’s not like our hour. What’s our hour now, 46 minutes? You know, you have a bathroom break, and you have a smoke break. If you don’t smoke, there’s a yoga break. This doesn’t look anything like that. This looks like nothing we’ve seen in a century.

They work on the line, and the lines only move as fast as its slowest member, so each person learns how to move perfectly as quickly as possible. If they can’t do it, there are people behind them watching them. And there are cameras watching both sets of people, and people watching the cameras. They lock it down. They sharpen it to a fine, sharp edge every hour, and those hours are long.

The official work day in China is eight hours long, and that’s a joke. I never met anyone who had even heard of an eight-hour shift. Everyone I talked to worked 12-hour shifts standard, and often much longer than that, 14 hours a day, 15 hours a day. Sometimes when there’s a hot new gadget coming out– you know what the [BLEEP] I’m talking about– sometimes it pegs up to 16 hours a day. And it just sits there for weeks and months at a time, month after month after month, straight 16′s, sometimes longer than that.

While I’m in-country, a worker at Foxconn dies after working a 34-hour shift. I wish I could say that’s exceptional, but it’s happened before. I only mention it because it actually happened while I was there.

And I go to the dormitories. I’m a valuable potential future customer. They will show me anything I ask to see. The dormitories are cement cubes, 12-foot by 12-foot. And in that space there are 13 beds, 14 beds. I count 15 beds. They’re stacked up like Jenga puzzle pieces all the way up to the ceiling. The space between them is so narrow, none of us would actually fit in them. They have to slide into them like coffins.

There are cameras in the rooms. There are cameras in the hallways. There are cameras everywhere. And why wouldn’t there be? You know, when we dream of a future where the regulations are washed away and the corporations are finally free to sail above us, you don’t have to dream about some sci-fi dystopian Blade Runner/1984 bull [BLEEP]. You can go to Shenzhen tomorrow. They’re making your crap that way today.

When I leave the factory, as I can feel myself being rewritten from the inside out, the way I see everything is starting to change. I keep thinking, how often do we wish more things were handmade? Oh, we talk about that all the time, don’t we? “I wish it was like the old days. I wish things had that human touch.” But that’s not true. There are more handmade things now than there have ever been in the history of the world.

Everything is handmade. I know. I have been there. I have seen the workers laying in parts thinner than human hair. One after another after another. Everything is handmade.

I’m at a restaurant in the factory zone, seated at a table with Kathy. And this aphorism is running through my head over and over again– I can’t remember who said it originally– that paranoia is not paranoia when they’re actually out to get you.

And I go through my checklist again. I’ve gone through my pockets and found every slip of paper with an email address or a phone number, and I’ve destroyed all of these. I’ve hidden my paper notes off of my person, and I’ve erased everything on my laptop. And anything I can’t erase is on an encrypted partition that I hope is encrypted enough. I’ve done all of these things because I am in this restaurant to meet with a union.

Because there are unions in China. There are the ones that are fronts for the Communist Party, and then there are actual unions interested in labor reform. They’re called secret unions, because in China, if you’re caught being a member of or affiliating with a union like that, you go to prison. You go to prison for many years. And that’s why I’ve had to take these precautions.

And getting this meeting involved climbing a ladder of associations, going to meeting after meeting, each step along the way just making good my intentions, just being clear that I am a storyteller. Just want to hear people’s stories. Just want to hear what they have to say.

And the union organizers come in and sit down, and it’s awkward at first. And then they begin to tell me about the situation on the ground. There is so much turmoil in southern China, so much happening just beneath the surface. They tell me about the two Honda plants that have gone on strike in the north of the province, and how they helped organize that strike. And I think about what it would mean to go on strike in a country where even being a member of a union can get you thrown in prison, what it would take to be pushed to that point.

And I feel provincial saying this, but it’s true. I can’t stop thinking about how young these people are. They don’t even look college age. They look younger than that. And I say to them, how do you know who’s right to work with you? How do you find people to help you organize?

And this sort of breaks the narrative, and for a moment they look their age. And they look at each other bashfully, and they say well, we talk a lot. We talk all the time. We have lots of meetings, and we meet at coffeehouses and different Starbucks in Guangzhou. And we exchange papers, and sometimes there are books. And it’s so clear in this moment that they are making this up as they go along.

Then the workers start coming in. They come in in twos and threes and fours. They come in all day. It’s an eight, nine-hour day. I interview all of them. Some of them are in groups.

There’s a group that’s talking about hexane. N-hexane is an iPhone screen cleaner. It’s great because it evaporates a little bit faster than alcohol does, which means you can run the production line even faster and try to keep up with the quotas. The problem is that n-hexane is a potent neurotoxin, and all these people have been exposed. Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them can’t even pick up a glass.

I talk to people whose joints in their hands have disintegrated from working on the line, doing the same motion hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times. It’s like carpal tunnel on a scale we can scarcely imagine. And you need to know that this is eminently avoidable. If these people were rotated monthly on their jobs, this would not happen.

But that would require someone to care. That would require someone at Foxconn and the other suppliers to care. That would require someone at Apple and Dell and the other customers to care. Currently no one in the ecosystem cares enough to even enforce that. And so when you start working at 15 or 16, by the time you are 26, 27, your hands are ruined. And when they are truly ruined, once they will not do anything further, you know what we do with a defective part in a machine that makes machine. We throw it away.

And the thing that unites all these people is that they are all the kind of people who would join a union in a place where joining a union can destroy your life. I talk with one woman. She’s very birdlike, very nervous. And she just wants to explain to me how it is that she came to be in a union, because she never thought she would ever be in a union. It’s just that she couldn’t get her company to pay her overtime. And she complained and complained. This went on for weeks and for months.

And Kathy says to her kind of sharply, she says, you should have gone to the labor board. That’s what they’re there for. You should have gone to the labor board. And the woman says, I did. I went to the labor board, and I told them about my problem. And they took down my name and my address and my company, and they took my name and they put it on the blacklist, and they fired me. And then she shows me a copy of the blacklist. A friend of hers in Accounting photocopied it and snuck it out to her. She gives it to me. I hand it to Kathy to translate.

You know, in a fascist country run by thugs, you don’t have to be subtle. You can say exactly what you mean. The sheet is very clear that it comes from the labor board. And it says right across the top, the following is a list of troublemakers. If any of them are found in your employ, dismiss them immediately. And then there’s just column after column after column of names, page after page after page of them. Kathy’s hand trembles as she translates it.

I talk to an older man with leathery skin. His right hand is twisted up into a claw. It was crushed in a metal press at Foxconn. He says he didn’t receive any medical attention, and it healed this way. And then when he was too slow, they fired him. Today he works at a woodworking plant. He says he likes it better. He says the people are nicer and the hours are more reasonable. He works about 70 hours a week.

And I ask him what he did when he was at Foxconn, and says he worked on the metal enclosures for the laptops, and he worked on the iPad. And when he says this, I reach into my satchel, and I take out my iPad. And when he sees it, his eyes widen, because one of the ultimate ironies of globalism, at this point there are no iPads in China. Even though every last one of them was made at factories in China, they’ve all been packaged up in perfectly minimalist Apple packaging and then shipped across the seas, that we can all enjoy them.

He’s never actually seen one on, this thing that took his hand. I turn it on, unlock the screen, and pass it to him. He takes it. The icons flare into view, and he strokes the screen with his ruined hand, and the icons slide back and forth. And he says something to Kathy, and Kathy says, “he says it’s a kind of magic.”

It’s a long day. At the end of it I’m packing up everything to go, and Kathy says something to me out of nowhere. She says, do you think these people are mentally ill? Do you think it is possible they are making all this up? And I look at her as though for the first time, because I mean, let’s be clear. She’s my Chinese worker. I pay her for her time. I don’t think about her very much at all. But now I really look at her. She is exactly who all these workers I’ve been talking to for weeks, she is exactly what they are all dreaming that their children will one day be. She has a good life in the center of Shenzhen for her, for her family. What does this look like to her?

I say to her, what do you think? Do you think they’re mentally ill? And she suddenly looks very tired. She takes off her glasses, and she rubs the bridge of her nose. And she says, no, I do not think they are mentally ill. It’s just that you hear stories, but you do not think it is going to be so much. You know? It’s just so much.

And I reach across the table, and I touch her hand. It’s the first and last time we will ever touch, I and this woman whose real name I don’t even know. I say to her, I know exactly what you mean.

Ira Glass: Mike Daisey performing an excerpt adapted for radio from his one-man show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. After the break, what are we supposed to think of all this? That’s in a minute, when Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues.

Act Two. Act One.

Ira Glass: It’s This American Life. I’m Ira Glass. Today on our program, Mr. Daisey goes to the Apple factory. We’ve arrived at Act Two of our show, in which our subject is actually Act One of our show. And so Act Two of our show, Act One.

When I saw Mike Daisey perform this story on stage, when I left the theater I had a lot of questions. I mean, he’s not a reporter, and I wondered, did he get it right? And so we’ve actually spent a few weeks checking everything that he says in his show. We invited Apple to come onto the program and respond, and they turned us down. We invited Foxconn to come onto the program and respond, and they also said no. Mike, however, was willing to come in and explain his methods at Foxconn’s gates and in the factories that he visited.

Mike Daisey: I had talked to about 100 workers, a little over 100, over a number of different days.

Ira Glass: Staying outside the gates?

Mike Daisey: Outside the gates. And I went to about 10 different factories when I was posing.

Ira Glass: When you met with the union workers, how many of those did you meet with?

Mike Daisey: There were three of them.

Ira Glass: And then the workers who came through to meet you?

Mike Daisey: God, there were like 25, 30 throughout the course of the day.

Ira Glass: As for Mike’s findings, we have gone through his script and fact checked everything that was checkable. In one instance, we think that his translator may have misunderstood or mistranslated a fact for Mike. He says in his show that workers told him that the cafeterias at Foxconn seat 10,000 people, but based on press accounts, we think that it’s possible that they serve 10,000 people, but seat only 4,000 at a time. Foxconn wouldn’t answer the question for us directly.

When it comes to the suicide rate at Foxconn, there were about 12 suicides at the Shenzhen plant in 2010. It was actually hard to get the exact number. Some people have pointed out that 12 suicides for 400,000 workers is actually much lower than China’s suicide rate as a whole, as China has an unusually high suicide rate of 22 suicides per year per 100,000 people. That would work out to 88 suicides for 400,000 workers. Mike Daisey points out that we don’t actually know if these were the only suicides at Foxconn.

Mike Daisey: And the biggest problem is that it isn’t the quantity, it’s the cluster. If there was any company in America where a sizable chunk of your workforce went up over a period of time, especially close to one another, and killed themselves in the same way very publicly, it would be an enormous news story because it’s far outside the norm.

Ira Glass: Overall, we checked with over a dozen people. Those would be journalists who cover these factories, people who work with the electronics industry in China, activists, labor groups, about the working conditions that Mike Daisey describes in his show, and nobody seemed very surprised by them.

Ian Spaulding: Well unfortunately I think some of these conditions sound actually quite common.

Ira Glass: This is Ian Spaulding, who estimates that he has been in or worked with about 1,000 factories throughout China. The company that he founded and runs, INFACT Global Partners, goes into Chinese factories and helps them meet social responsibility standards that are set by Western companies so those companies are ready when outside auditors come and check on working conditions. He has a staff of 45. They do hundreds of factories a year, including electronics.

Ian Spaulding: There are hours in factories that are often too long, and are excessive, and required over time. Things like cramped quarters can also happen, and repetitive motion injuries can be quite common.

Ira Glass: Another thing that Mike Daisey says that’s disturbing to hear is he says that the companies will deceive the auditors when the auditors come in. Have you seen that?

Ian Spaulding: Yeah, that actually is quite common, and I think many other people have also exposed this problem.

Ira Glass: Now don’t get the wrong impression. Ian Spaulding did have a few quibbles with Mike Daisey. He said that if a worker gets injured and then is fired by his company, he or she can sue the company, and he said that lots of people were doing that these days. He said electronics companies have been improving their handling of toxic chemicals.

And his only real objection to anything that Mike Daisey found had to do with child labor. Ian Spaulding said yes, there definitely is child labor in China, but not at the top tier electronics manufacturers. Other people who we talked to agreed with this. Even people who are critical of Foxconn for all kinds of things agreed with this. He said maybe a stray worker here and there might get in on a borrowed ID, but it is not a widespread problem.

Mike Daisey: Well I don’t know if it’s a big problem. I just know that I saw it.

Ira Glass: Again, Mike Daisey. He says sure, maybe it’s not prevalent.

Mike Daisey: I know that I met people that were there, and I know that I talked to them. I mean, there weren’t very many as a proportion of the total group. I talked to more than 100 people. I met five or six who were underage.

Ira Glass: And they were over the course of days?

Mike Daisey: No, they were together in a group.

Ira Glass: So it’s basically the girl who you describe who deals with the iPhones–

Mike Daisey: Yes.

Ira Glass: –who wipes off your thing, and then her friends?

Mike Daisey: And then some people that were with her. They seemed like savvy kids, honestly.

Ira Glass: The one source that I could find that backs up Mike on this one at least a little bit is Apple. Apple has released a report stating in the year that Mike was in China, 2010, Apple’s own auditors went into 127 facilities around the world that make its products and say they found 91 underage workers. It doesn’t say which facilities the workers were at. The report states that Apple helped install systems to verify ages, educated suppliers on recruiting practices, made them return underage workers to school, and made them pay for the kids’ education. And then it stopped doing business with one supplier that has 42 underage workers and showed no commitment to addressing the problem.

All this research that we did did fill in some interesting details about working conditions at Foxconn that are not in Mike Daisey’s show. There’s an advocacy group called SACOM, which is Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior. They’re based in Hong Kong. And since the suicides at Foxconn in 2010, they have put out three reports investigating conditions at the company. Each report surveyed over 100 Foxconn workers.

And they even had a researcher go undercover and take a job at the Shenzhen plant. Debby Chan Sze Wan is a project manager at SACOM. The surveys that she did of workers depict a company where many employees have to stand all day long.

Debby Chan Sze Wan: Because there’s some research in the industry that workers who stand during work is more efficient than those who sit. And workers, they are regularly yelled by the supervisors. And if they make some mistake then they have to write confession letters, et cetera.

Ira Glass: In your documents, you call this military-style management. Why is that what you call it?

Debby Chan Sze Wan: I think it is the word given by some of the workers.

Ira Glass: According to SACOM’s surveys and reports, the wages at Foxconn are not much more than the Chinese minimum wage. SACOM claims that it’s only with tons of overtime that the money approaches what SACOM calculates is a decent living wage for a family.

But probably the most surprising thing I learned about Foxconn and other Chinese electronics manufacturers from Debby and from Ian Spaulding had to do with the turnover rate. Ian Spaulding says that it could be 10% to 20% turnover per month. He says it’s a huge business problem these days in China.

Ian Spaulding: So you imagine the number of employees that you’re hiring and that leave after one week, two weeks, one month on the job, and you’re constantly trying to re-hire people into those positions.

Ira Glass: With so many workers quitting, why doesn’t that lead to companies changing conditions and raising salaries so they don’t have to go through the hassle of hiring new people?

Ian Spaulding: Well that’s the good news, is it is. Nowadays a lot of people talk about what should companies’ brands, US and European brands, do to make conditions better? And the reality is is that actually what’s proving to be more effective is this bottom-up labor market that’s emerging where employees are speaking with their feet. By leaving a factory, they’re forcing factories to improve wages, improve working conditions, and improving dormitories to make things more attractive for employees.

Ira Glass: When Apple turned down our invitation to come onto today’s radio show, in a rather Orwellian gesture they told us that they are 100% transparent– as they refused to come on the air. They referred us to these reports that they’ve been issuing every year since 2007 on working conditions in the factories that make their products overseas.

And these reports, I have to say, are remarkable documents. You can find these online at Apple’s website. Apple, like many companies, has a code of conduct that suppliers have to commit to before they can do business with them, and each year Apple audits many of the suppliers to make sure that they are complying with the code. If they don’t, then there are corrective action plans, and there’s training, and there’s follow-up audits. It’s very elaborate. And if it all fails, Apple stops buying from the supplier. Or that’s what they claim, anyway.

Apple monitors pretty much all the working conditions that Mike Daisey talks about in his show. The report covering the period that Mike was in China. Talks about what Apple did in the wake of the suicides at Foxconn. They say they did an independent review. They asked for mental health counselors and other changes, which Apple says Foxconn has implemented.

The report also has a whole section on n-hexane, which workers, not from Foxconn but from another plant, told Mike that they were exposed to, and he talked about it on his show. Apple says that it found 137 workers had adverse health effects after exposure to n-hexane. It says that the supplier using the stuff was told to stop using the chemical, and it’s been audited since then to make sure it has happened. Mike Daisey has read these reports.

Mike Daisey: I’m glad Apple does this. It’s unfortunate more companies don’t do it, and I do respect them for doing it. But it doesn’t change the fact that the situation on the ground, even in their own reports, is not good. And then every year the numbers are roughly the same in terms of people who are non-compliant with overtime.

Ira Glass: Yeah, I would say that in the 2010 report, Apple found that only 32% of suppliers that it audited followed its standard about working hours, though Apple doesn’t name the companies that they audited in the report.

Mike Daisey: And I really question the wisdom of that. I think that if they have a serious commitment to changing how things are done in the special economic zone in Shenzhen, then they would name those companies, and then those companies would begin to be held responsible.

Ira Glass: As it is, Daisey says, Apple is basically saying, trust us, we’re taking care of the problems. But without supplier names, nobody can independently verify any of it. Should we feel weird about the computers and phones we use, all the clothes that we wear that are made in faraway factories in Asia under harsh working conditions?

Leaving Mike Daisey aside for a second, that’s the question that all this raises, right? And the mainstream view that you would hear from lots of economists would be no, you shouldn’t feel weird. The famously liberal Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize for economics and New York Times columnist, has argued that in places like Indonesia, terrible factories, far, far worse than anything you’ve heard about here today, they raised the economy. They made everybody better off. Here’s a quote from Krugman. “It is the indirect and unintended results of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs. It is not an edifying spectacle, but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful, but nonetheless significantly better.”

Another person whose support for sweatshops may surprise you is one of Krugman’s colleagues at The New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof, who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, quote, “for his powerful columns that portrayed suffering among the developing world’s often-forgotten people.” Kristof spent years reporting in Asia. He co-wrote a book about the changes going on in China.

Nicholas Kristof: Well I mean, if you look at Shenzhen, for example, in Guangdong where Foxconn is, then there’s no doubt that it’s been a tremendous benefit, not only to southern China but indeed to much of Asia. It created massive employment opportunities, especially for young women, who frankly didn’t have a lot of alternatives. That tended to give women more clout within families, within the community.

My wife’s ancestral village is in southern China, not too far from Foxconn. And people in that village went from a really grim kind of lifestyle, basically in the rice paddies. And for them, and indeed for many Chinese, the grimness of factories like Foxconn was better than the grimness of rice paddies.

Ira Glass: There’s a passage of your own writing that we emailed you before you came in this morning. Did you get that?

Nicholas Kristof: Yeah, I did.

Ira Glass: Can I ask you to read it?

Nicholas Kristof: Sure, absolutely.

Ira Glass: So this is from a New York Times Magazine article that you wrote in 2000, and the article was called “Two Cheers for Sweatshops.”

Nicholas Kristof: 14 years ago we moved to Asia and began reporting there. Like most Westerners, we arrived in the region outraged at sweatshops. In time though, we came to accept the view supported by most Asians. In the years since our first conversations there, we’ve returned many times to Dongguan and the surrounding towns and seen the transformation. Wages have risen from about $50 a month to $250 a month or more today. Factory conditions have improved as businesses have scrambled to attract and keep the best laborers. A private housing market has emerged. A hint of a middle class has appeared, as has China’s closest thing to a Western-style independent newspaper, Southern Weekend.

Ira Glass: So you’re saying sweatshops are bad, but we should feel OK about it?

Nicholas Kristof: Well, it’s a very awkward thing to defend sweatshops, if you will. I mean, I think it’s useful to be reminded about how grim the conditions are. But again, I just think that if you try to think how you can fight poverty most effectively, and what has fought it within China, then I think sweatshops are a key part of that answer.

Ira Glass: For that, Mike Daisey says sure, he’s heard that argument, sweatshops are just a phase poor countries go through, a phase that all the industrialized countries already went through. But he says, even given that, don’t we have some basic obligation as outsiders coming in, to treat the workers the way that our country has already agreed that workers should be treated?

Mike Daisey: It may be true that over the long span of time in 100 years, people will look back and be happy about how things went. But I don’t think it’s as clean as that. I just want basic labor protections for people. That’s entirely compatible with everything that has been flourishing in Shenzhen. It’s absolutely compatible to have everything work as it has, but also people are rotated in their factories. It’s entirely compatible to have things work as they are now, but there are also independent people outside of individual corporations that inspect without announcement to see that basic labor standards are covered.

It’s a really basic thing. It’s a basic thing that we fought for in this country. It took 100 years of labor struggles to get to a place where that happened for most workers. Then we exported those jobs overseas, and we didn’t send the protections with them. And it’s not right.

Ira Glass: Mike Daisey. His one-man show about Apple is going back on stage this month in New York at the Public Theater. The full show has this entire other story line about Steve Jobs that you will have to buy a theater ticket if you want to hear.

[MUSIC - "OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND" BY THE FIVE KEYS]

Credits.

Ira Glass: Well our program was produced today, as always, entirely on Apple computers by Brian Reed and myself with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Jonathan Menjivar, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon is our office manager. Production help from Miki Meek and Matt Kielty. Scouting help from Elna Baker. Music help from [? Damian Gray, ?] from Rob [? Geddes. ?]

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, where we have links to information on Apple and on Foxconn, thisamericanlife.org. A note to our Australian listeners– yes, we are on the radio in Australia. I will be in Perth, Adelaide, and Brisbane this month, and there are still tickets available.

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. Torey, how much money do you make anyway?

Siri Software: I’m not allowed to say.

Ira Glass: And how old are you exactly?

Siri Software: Good question. Anything else I can do for you?

Ira Glass: I’m Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer: PRI, Public Radio International.

© 2012 Chicago Public Media & Ira Glass

— VIA —

It’s complicated. But it’s simple.

If people saw what kind of life workers lived before they found a job at Foxconn, they would come to an opposite conclusion of this story: that Apple is such a philanthropist. — Zhengchu1982

There are so many intricacies, circumstances, contexts, realities–almost as many as there are people on this planet–which make it virtually impossible to adhere to any objective statements about what is “good” and what is “right.” A friend of mine continually argues the point that these workers are no doubt suffering and being taken advantage of, but their situation is far better than if they had no job to begin with. This is a bit of what Kristof alludes to, as well as other articles. Plus, the fact that those workers choose their labors is telling in that they are NOT choosing something else. As long as choice is involved, then we can gauge a bit of the cost/benefit analysis of people’s decision making. (On that note, it does seem good to see that many workers are now choosing to leave, which is, de facto, making factories progress in their conditions.)

In addition, the delicate balance between consumer and production is more ethereal than numerical, and we must understand that the variegated demands in a free-market society are complicated, and cyclical. As demands for products increase, and demands for lower costs continue, so demanding pressures on supply chains are imposed. However, supply chains would not have existence, or the potential to be profitable, if they did not adhere to practices that help to meet those exact demands. Economics, as we know, has nothing to do with numbers, but more to do with human behavior, psychology, and bias.

So, it’s complicated.

But it’s also simple.

All of this can be easily addressed if we simply do two things: 1) listen, and 2) act. The vast majority of what appalls people is that Apple “knew” but did not “act.” Consumers may read articles like this, but will then go and buy products without leaning on companies to fix the problems. Managers and Corporates will hear the complaints of workers, but dismiss them. Governments will not impose regulations, which is another complicated problem in-and-of itself.

But it’s doable. This isn’t about understanding. It really is about acting. It’s not about intellectual discernment. It’s about collective will.

Regarding the 1% better? I agree that collectively, and objectively one could make that statement of value. However, I would argue that to be human is to never objectify another human being or a community of humans. The idea that a 1% better for the collective whole is all we need to ensure that progress is being paved is shameful to those of us who dismiss the 99% who suffer for the sake of that very progress — a true ethical irony. This is not the way of being human. This is precisely the definition of inhumane. We can, and we must do better.

This is not to say that China’s factories must be up to “American” standards. As was mentioned, our current standards took 100 years to evolve. It is to say that Americans ought to listen very closely to what would fully humanize conditions for Chinese workers, and commit wholeheartedly towards achieving those standards generously and compassionately. Listen. Act. For if technology’s capacity can double every 18 months (according to Moore’s Law), there is no reason that human standards cannot follow the same trajectory. Thought about in this way, 1% better to human flourishing, in a world where 100% better happens every 18 months to machinery, means that the exact opposite of progress is happening in our world.

Imagine what would happen if our human ethics advanced in the same way mechanical capacity advanced. Just imagine.

Searching for Gold

…everything rises and falls on leadership. (vii)

…please understand that… 1. I’m still learning about leadership. 2. Many people have contributed to the leadership gold in this book. 3. What I’m teaching can be learned by nearly anyone. 4. Much of the leadership gold I’m sharing is a result of leadership mistakes I make. 5. Your ability to become a better leader depends on how you respond. (viii-ix)

LEADERSHIP MAKES A DIFFERENCE.

Leadership is the willingness to put oneself at risk.
Leadership is the passion to make a difference with others.
Leadership is being dissatisfied with the current reality.
Leadership is taking responsibility while others are making excuses.
Leadership is seeing the possibilities in a situation while others are seeing the limitations.
Leadership is the readiness to stand out in a crowd.
Leadership is an open mind and an open heart.
Leadership is the ability to submerge your ego for the sake of what is best.
Leadership is evoking in others the capacity to dream.
Leadership is inspiring others with a vision of what they can contribute.
Leadership is the power of one harnessing the power of many.
Leadership is your heart speaking to the hearts of others.
Leadership is the integration of heart, head, and soul.
Leadership is the capacity to care, and in caring, to liberate the ideas, energy, and capacities of others.
Leadership is the dream made reality.
Leadership is, above all, courageous. (xi)

1. If It’s Lonely at the Top, You’re Not Doing Something Right

Loneliness is not a positional issue; it is a personality issue. (2)

If you are leading others and you’re lonely, then you’re not doing it right. Think about it. If you’re all alone, that means nobody is following you. And if nobody is following you, you’re not really leading! | What kind of a leader would leave everyone behind and take the journey alone? A selfish one. Taking people to the top is what good leaders do. Lifting people to a new level is a requirement for effective leadership. (3)

No One Ever Got to the Top Alone.

Making It to the Top Is Essential to Taking Others to the Top. A leader’s credibility begins with personal success. It ends with helping others achieve personal success.

Taking People to the Top Is More Fulfilling Than Arriving Alone. A boss says, “Go.” A Leader says, “Let’s go.” (5)

A great leader never sets himself above his followers except in carrying responsibilities. – Jules Ormont

1. Avoid Positional Thinking. Leadership is relational as much as it is positional. An individual who takes a relational approach to leadership will never be lonely. (6)

2. Realize the Downsides of Success and Failure.

3. Understand That You Are in the People Business. …good leaders understand that people do not care how much you know until they know how much you care. You must like people or you will never add value to them. And if you become indifferent to people, you may be only a few steps away from manipulating them. No leader should ever do that. (7)

4. Buy Into the Law of Significance. …people don’t work for me. They work with me.

APPLICATION EXERCISES | 1. Are you better at the science or art of leadership? 2. Why do you want to be at the top? 3. How big is your dream?

2. The Toughest Person to Lead Is Always Yourself

Human nature seems to endow us with the ability to size up everybody in the world except ourselves. (12)

We Don’t See Ourselves as We See Others.

We Are Harder on Others Than We Are on Ourselves.

1. Learn Followership.

Civilization is always in danger when those who have never learned to obey are given the right to command. – Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

2. Develop Self-Discipline.

3. Practice Patience. When we are foolish, we want to conquer the world. When we are wise, we want to conquer ourselves. (15)

4. Seek Accountability.

When you see a good man, think of emulating him; when you see a bad man, examine your heart. – Chinese proverb

Nothing so conclusively proves a man’s ability to lead others, as what he does from day to day to lead himself. – Thomas J. Watson

When the leader doesn’t inspect himself, the people don’t respect him. (17)

APPLICATION EXERCISES

1. How clearly do you see yourself?

2. Where do you need to grow?

3. How well do you take advice? Ask five to ten friends, colleagues, and family members to evaluate you using the levels mentioned in the chapter. Each of the following is worth the number beside it:

1. You don’t want advice.
2. You don’t object to advice.
3. You welcome advice.
4. You actively seek advice.
5. You often follow the advice given to you.

3. Defining Moments Define Your Leadership

1. Defining Moments Show Us Who We Really Are. The choices we make in critical moments help to form us and to inform others about who we are. (21)

2. Defining Moments Declare to Others Who We Are. Defining moments put the spotlight on us…Our character isn’t made during these times — it is displayed! (22)

3. Defining Moment Determine Who We Will Become.

Defining moments are intersections that give us an opportunity to turn, change direction, and seek a new destination. (23)

Leaders become better leaders when they experience a defining moment and respond to it correctly. (26)

APPLICATION EXERCISES

1. What is your track record? What kind of defining moments have you experienced in the past? Write down as many as you can remember. For each, note: the situation, your decision or response, and the result. (29)

2. How are you managing your decisions? Using the following list as an example, create a list of choices you will make based on your values and priorities.

Attitude: I will choose and display the right attitudes daily.
Priorities: I will determine and act upon important priorities daily.
Health: I will know and follow healthy guidelines daily.
Family: I will communicate with and care for my family daily.
Thinking: I will practice and develop good thinking daily.
Commitment: I will make and keep proper commitments daily.
Finances: I will deepen and live out my faith daily.
Faith: I will deepen and live out my faith daily.
Relationships: I will initiate and invest in solid relationships daily.
Generosity: I will plan for and model generosity daily.
Value: I will embrace and practice good values daily.
Growth: I will desire and experience improvements daily.

3. How prepared are you for future defining moments? As you face each day, try to be alert to the kinds of defining moments leaders typically face:

• Ground Breakers — opportunities to do something new
• Heart Breakers — opportunities to reevaluate priorities
• Cloud Breakers — opportunities for a clear vision
• Chart Breakers — opportunities to go to a new level

4. When You Get Kicked in the Rear, You Know You’re out in Front

One of the prices of leadership is criticism. (32)

HOW TO HOLD UP UNDER CRITICISM

1. Know Yourself — This Is a Reality Issue

Criticism is something you can avoid easily — by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing. – Aristotle

I have…realized that what I need to hear most is what I want to hear last. (35)

2. Change Yourself — This Is a Responsibility Issue.

Some leaders are like seagulls. When something goes wrong, they fly in, make a lot of noise, and crap all over everything. – Ken Blanchard

People with that kind of attitude not only refuse to take responsibility for their contribution to the problem, but they also make conditions terrible for the people who work with them. (36)

3. Accept Yourself — This Is a Maturity Issue

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad. – Aldous Huxley

First people will tell you that you are wrong. Then they will tell you that you are right, but what you’re doing really isn’t important. Finally, thy will admit that you are right and that what you are doing is very important; but after all, they knew it all the time. – Jonas Salk

The easiest thing to be in the world is you. The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don’t let them put you in that position. – Leo Buscaglia

4. Forget Yourself — This Is a Security Issue

Being who you really are is the first step in becoming better than you are. (38)

5. Never Work a Day in Your Life

I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun! – Thomas Edison

Following your passion is the key to finding your potential. (41)

Don’t put live eggs under dead chickens. – Howard Hendricks

When a person doesn’t have passion, life can become pretty monotonous. Everything is a “have to” and nothing is a “want to.” (43)

When I think back on my career, I recognize that passion has enabled me to do the following:

• Believe things I would no have believed
• Feel things I would not have felt
• Attempt things I would not have attempted
• Accomplish things I would not have accomplished
• Meet people I would not have met
• Motivate people I would not have motivated
• Lead people I would not have led

The world will belong to passionate, driven leaders…people who not only have enormous amounts of energy, but who can energize those whom they lead. – Jack Welch

FORGET THE MONEY — FOLLOW YOUR PASSION

6. The Best Leaders Are Listeners

The average person suffers from three delusions: (1) that he is a good drive, (2) that he has a good sense of humor, and (3) that he is a good listener. – Steven Sample in The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership

I once read about a study that stated that we hear half of what is being said, listen to half of what we hear, understand half of it, believe half of that, and remember only half of that. (50)

WHY LISTENERS ARE MORE EFFECTIVE LEADERS

1. Understanding People Precedes Leading Them. Leadership finds its source in understanding.

2. Leadership Is the Best Way to Learn.

3. Listening Can Keep Problems from Escalating.

Listen to the whispers and you won’t have to hear the screams. – Cherokee proverb

4. Listening Establishes Trust. “…the foundation of all lasting relationships.” – Brian Tracy

5. Listening Can Improve the Organization.

Minds are of three kinds. One is capable of thinking for itself; another is able to understand the thinking of others; and a third can neither think for itself nor understand the thinking of others. The first is of the highest excellence, the second is excellent, and the third is worthless.” – Niccolo Machiavelli

One of the greatest gifts you can give anyone is the gift of attention. – Jim Rohn

It is possible to be a leader without listening. It’s not possible to be a good leader without listening. (54)

APPLICATION EXERCISES

1. Give yourself a listening audit. If you’re not spending at least 80 percent of the time listening, you need to improve.

2. Who doesn’t feel listened to?

3. What people have you neglected to seek out? If you haven’t heard from some of your key people recently, seek them out and give them your ear. (55)

7. Get in the Zone and Stay There

People’s purpose in life is always connected to their giftedness. (59)

1. Ask, “What Am I Doing Well?”

2. Get Specific.

The great mystery isn’t that people do things badly but that they occasionally do a few things well. The only thing that is universal is incompetence. Strength is always specific! Nobody ever commented, for example, that the great violinist Jascha Heifetz probably couldn’t play the trumpet well. -  Peter Drucker

3. Listen for What Others Praise. …and start developing it.

4. Check Out the Competition.

Discover your uniqueness, then discipline yourself to develop it. – Jim Sundberg

Organizations exist to make people’s strengths effective an their weaknesses irrelevant. And this is the work of effective leaders. – Frances Hesselbein

8. A Leader’s First Responsibility Is to Define Reality

Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye and deny it. – Garrison Keillor

Truthfully, my aversion to being realistic and my occasional reluctance to embrace the fact that it is a leader’s responsibility to define reality has cost me greatly. (66)

YOU CAN’T DEFINE WHAT YOU DON’T SEE. I have often taught that people change only when they hurt enough that they have to, learn enough that they want to, or receive enough that they are able to. (66)

Six rules for successful leadership (by Jack Welch in Jack: Straight from the Gut):

1. Control your destiny, or someone else will.
2. Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it were.
3. Be candid with everyone.
4. Don’t manage, lead.
5. Change before you have to.
6. If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.

GUARDING AGAINST UNREALISTIC THINKING

1. Admit My Weakness. You can’t define reality if you won’t face reality.

2. Embrace Realistic People. An effective leadership team has members who complement one another. (70)

3. Ask for Honesty from Others. All leaders need to have a group of people around them who will tell them what they really think. (70)

4. Invite “Fresh eyes” to Check Me Out. Good leaders who lead great companies face reality and make changes accordingly. …Never forget, the way you define reality determines where and how you lead. And where and how you lead determines where your followers end up. In other words, a lot is depending on it. (71)

9. To See How the Leader Is Doing, Look at the People

Wherever you have a good leader, the team gets better, the organization gets better, the department or division gets better. And wherever you have a bad leader, everyone that leader impacts has a tougher time. Leadership makes every endeavor either better or worse. (74)

THE LEADER IS RESPONSIBLE

The signs of outstanding leadership appear primarily among the followers. – Max Depree

When leaders are healthy, the people they lead tend to be healthy. When leaders are unhealthy, so are their followers. People may teach what they know, but they reproduce what they are. (76)

Question #1: Are the people following? All leaders have two common characteristics: first, they are going somewhere; second, they are able to persuade other people to go with them.

You can buy a man’s time; you can buy his physical presence at a given place; you can even buy a measured number of his skilled muscular motions per hour. But you can not buy enthusiasm…you can not buy loyalty…you can not buy the devotion of hearts, minds or souls. You must earn these. – Clarence Francis

Question #2: Are the people changing? Good leaders inspire their followers to have confidence in them. But great leaders inspire their followers to have confidence in themselves. (78)

Question #3: Are the people growing?

The growth and development of people is the highest calling of a leader. – Dale Galloway

As a leader, my success in developing others will depend upon the following:

• My high valuation of people — this is an attitude issue.
• My high commitment to people — this is a time issue.
• My high integrity with people — this is a character issue.
• My high standard for people — this is a goal-setting issue.
• My high influence over people — this is a leadership issue.

Question #4: Are the people succeeding? Leaders may impress others when they succeed, but they impact others when their followers succeed. (80)

Leadership is the lifting of a man’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a man’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a man’s personality beyond its normal imitations. – Peter Drucker

10. Don’t Send Your Ducks to Eagle School

WHY SOME DON’T SOAR. Experience has taught me a valuable lesson: no matter what I do or how hard I try to help people, not everyone will respond in the same way. Some people will attend a conference and their lives will start to turn around. Others will come and tune out everything I say. Some will change; some won’t. (86)

1. If You Send Ducks to Eagle School, You Will Frustrate the Ducks. Leadership is all about placing people in the right place so they can be successful. (88)

2. If You Send Ducks to Eagle School, You Will Frustrate the Eagles. As a leader, you should always challenge people to move out of their comfort zone, but never out of their strength zone. (89)

3. If You Send Ducks to Eagle School, You Will Frustrate Yourself.

11. Keep Your Mind on the Main Thing

The business schools reward difficult, complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective. – Warren Buffett

1. I Determined Not to Know Everything. Taking myself out of the middle of everything lessens my personal importance to many people in my organization, but it allows me to do that which is personally important to me. It also means that assignments are not always done “my way.” But I have discovered that most things can be accomplished effectively in many ways. (99)

2. I Determined Not to Know Everything First. For leaders, it’s better to know the most important things than to know everything. (99)

3. I Determined to Let Someone Represent Me.

How do you decide if someone else can be your representative, even when the pressure is on and the stakes are high? First, you must know their heart well enough to trust their character. Second, you must have enough shared history so that they know your heart and mind. And third, you must believe in their competence. If they can do the job 80 percent as well as you would, then they’re ready. (101)

4. I Determined to Stay with My Strengths and Not Work on My Weaknesses. Half of being smart is knowing what you are dumb at. (100)

5. I Determined to Take Charge of What Took My Time and Attention.

Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple – C.W. Ceran

12. Your Biggest Mistake Is Not Asking What Mistake You’re Making

To get maximum attention, make a big mistake. To cause maximum damage, fail to admit it! (106)

When it comes to success, it’s not the number of mistakes you make; it’s the number of times you make the same mistake. (107)

Whenever I could not get the results I wanted, I swallowed my temper and turned inward to see if I was part of the problem. I asked myself three questions: Did I clearly articulate the goals? Did I give people enough time and resources to accomplish the task? Did I give them enough training? I discovered that 90 percent of the time, I was at least as much a part of the problem as my people were. – Michael Abrashoff, It’s Your Ship

The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top – Joyce Brothers

As if screwing up on the field in front of millions of TV viewers wasn’t enough, the Monday after every game I got to relive my mistakes — over and over again, in slow motion and with commentary from the coaches! Even when we won, we always took time to review our mistakes. When you’re forced to confront your mistakes that often, you learn not to take your failures so personally. I learned to fail fast, learn from my mistakes and move on. Why beat yourself up about it? Just do better next time. – Joe Montana

Good people are good because they have come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success. – William Saroyan

If a person will begin with certainties, he will end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he will end in certainties. – Sir Francis Bacon

13. Don’t Manage Your Time — Manage Your Life

…there really is no such thing as “time management.” The term is an oxymoron. Time cannot be managed. It cannot be controlled in any way. It marches on no matter what you do, the way the meter in a taxi keeps running, whether you are moving forward or standing still. (115)

Nothing else distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time. – Peter Drucker

So what can you do? Manage yourself! Nothing separates successful people from unsuccessful people more than how they use their time. Successful people understand that time is the most precious commodity on earth. (115)

GOOD LEADERS CANNOT BE BAD SELF-MANAGERS

Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you. – Carl Sandburg

The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is not training them and keeping them. – Zig Ziglar

Life management begins with an awareness of time and of the choices we should make to be a good steward of it. Those who do well at it do things that

• Advance their overall purpose in life — this helps them grow.
• Underscore their values — this brings them fulfillment.
• Maximize their strengths — this makes them effective.
• Increase their happiness — this gives them better health.
• Equip and coach others — this compounds their productivity.
• Add value to others — this increases their influence.

14. Keep Learning to Keep Leading

…if you don’t have a plan for personal growth, then don’t expect to grow! (125)

1. Invest in Yourself First. If you want to lead, you must learn. If you want to continue to lead, you must continue to learn. (126)

The greatest obstacle to discovery isn’t ignorance or lack of intelligence. It’s the illusion of knowledge. (127)

What kind of attitude do you have when it comes to learning? I’ve observed that people fall into one of these categories. They live in one of three zones:

• The Challenge Zone: “I attempt to do what I haven’t done before.”
• The Comfort Zone: “I do what I already know I can do.”
• The Coasting Zone: “I don’t even do what I’ve done before.”

Over the years I have developed a highly disciplined growth regimen:

I read daily to grow in my personal life.
I listen daily to broaden my perspective.
I think daily to apply what I learn.
I file daily to preserve what I learn. [VIA: Thank you "Evernote!"]

Leadership and learning are indispensable of each other. – John F. Kennedy

The road to success is uphill all the way, and most people are not willing to pay the price. Many people would rather deal with old problems than find new solutions. to be a lifelong learner, I had to get out of a stagnant environment and distance myself from people who had no desire to grow. I sought out places where growth was valued and people were growing. It helped me to change and grow — especially in the beginning of my journey. (129)

What does a growth environment look like? I believe it has ten characteristics. It is a place where the following things occur:

• Others are ahead of you.
• You are continually challenged.
• Your focus is forward.
• The atmosphere is affirming.
• You are often out of your comfort zone.
• You wake up excited.
• Failure is not your enemy.
• Others are growing.
• People desire change.
• Growth is modeled and expected.

APPLICATION EXERCISES

1. Do you have destination disease? If you think you have arrived (or can someday arrive) by achieving a certain position, acquiring a particular degree or credential, or earning a certain level of income, then you are in danger of finding yourself in either the comfort or coasting zone. (132)

15. Leaders Distinguish Themselves During Tough Times

As a young leader, I was very quick to embrace the perks of leadership. I was much slower to pay the price of leadership. (135)

I can’t lead people if I need people. …Of course leaders need people. The purpose of leadership is to take people where they couldn’t go on their own, inspire and equip them to do what they thought they couldn’t do, and accomplish what can only be done by a group working together. To do that, leaders should love their people and be close to them. However, there are times when a leader must move forward, taking a courageous step an not waiting for others’ approval. It is not healthy for a leader to need people’s approval. As a leader, if I try to please everybody, eventually I will alienate everybody. (136)

When the right person is the leader, he does even better during tough times. – Rudy Giuliani

16. People Quit People, Not Companies

Some cause happiness wherever they go. Some cause happiness whenever they go. – Oscar Wilde

1. People Quit People Who Devalue Them. It is impossible to add value to someone we devalue!

2. People Quit People Who Are Untrustworthy. Manchester Consulting indicates that trust in the workplace is on the decline. They discovered that the five quickest ways that leaders lost the trust of their people in the work place were:

• Acting inconsistently in what they say and do
• Seeking personal gain above shared gain
• Withholding information
• Lying or telling half-truths
• Being closed-minded

In contrast, the survey found that the best way for leaders to build trust were to:

• Maintain integrity
• Openly communicate their vision and values
• Show respect for fellow employees as equal partners
• Focus on shared goals more than their personal agendas
• Do the right thing regardless of personal risk

3. People Quit People Who Are Incompetent. Leaders need to inspire confidence, and they do that, not with charisma, but with competence. (148)

4. People Quit People Who Are Insecure. People want to work for leaders who fire them up, not who put out their fire. (149)

RECIPE FOR RETENTION

1. I take responsibility for my relationships with others. When a relationship goes bad, I initiate action to try to make the relationship better.

2. When people leave me, I do an exit interview. The purpose of the interview is to discover if I am the reason they are leaving. If so, I apologize and take the high road with them.

3. I put a high value on those who work with me. It’s wonderful when the people believe in their leader. It’s more wonderful when the leader believes in the people.

4. I put credibility at the top of my leadership list. I may not always be competent; there are times when every leader finds himself in over his head. However, I can always be trustworthy.

5. I recognize that my positive emotional health creates a secure environment for people. Therefore I will think positively, practice right behavior toward others, and follow the golden rue.

6. I maintain a teachable spirit and nurture my passion for personal growth. I will keep learning so I can continue leading. If I keep growing, I will never become the “lid” on the potential of my people. (149-150)

17. Experience Is Not the Best Teacher

Experience teachings nothing, but evaluated experience teaches everything. (155)

1. We All Experience More Than We Understand.

2. Our Attitude Toward Unplanned and Unpleasant Experiences Determines Our Growth. The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure. (157)

3. Lack of Experience Is Costly. The acquisition of experience can be costly. But it’s not as costly as not gaining experience. (158)

I know a man who grabbed a cat by the tail and he learned 40 percent more about cats than the man who didn’t. – Mark Twain

5. Not Evaluating and Learning from Experience Is More Costly.

Don’t just learn something from every experience. Learn something positive. – Allen Neuharth

6. Evaluated Experience Lifts a Person Above the Crowd.

18. The Secret to a Good Meeting Is the Meeting Before the Meeting

Anyone who has spent a lot of time in meetings knows that a meeting may take minutes, but it usually wastes hours. And anytime the outcome of a meeting is to have another meeting, you know you’re in trouble. (165)

Certainly you never want to have meetings simply for the sake of having meetings, but there are times when you need to meet with people. In those times, the point of meeting is to get something accomplished. To be a good leader, you have to learn to make your meetings effective. (165)

THE SECRET TO A GOOD MEETING. Olan Hendrix explained that meetings usually fail for two main reasons:

1. The leader doesn’t have a clear agenda.
2. Other people in the meting have their own agendas.

Most people have the wrong idea about the purpose of a meeting. I think a lot of us think of them as time savers. …That’s the wrong way to think about a meeting. meetings are for getting things done! To do that, you must often have a meeting before the meeting to prepare people for the meeting. Here’s why:

The Meeting Before the Meeting Helps You to Receive Buy-In. Most people are down on what they’re not up on.

The Meeting Before the Meeting Helps Followers to Gain Perspective. What people see is determined by where they sit.

The Meeting Before the Meeting Helps to Increase Your Influence. Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. How do you gain influence with people? You invest in them. How do you invest in them? It starts with giving them time. (167)

The Meeting Before the Meeting Helps You Develop Trust.

The Meeting Before the Meeting Helps You Avoid Being Blindsided.

Three categories for an agenda:

• Information Items: …spend a few minutes communicating what has happened in the organization since the last official meeting.
• Study Items: …items to be discussed openly and honestly.
• Action Items: …

Good planning always costs less than good reacting. – Wayne Schmidt

A leader never has to recover from a good start. (171)

19. Be a Connector, Not Just a Climber

Leadership is relational as much as positional. (175)

Climbers Think Vertical — Connectors Think Horizontal.

Climbers Focus on Position — Connectors Focus on Relationships. Positional people desire to climb the ladder; relational people are more focused on building bridges. (177)

Climbers Value Competition — Connectors Value Cooperation. They see working together as a win. (177)

Climbers Seek Power — Connectors Seek Partnerships.

Climbers Build Their Image — Connectors Build Consensus. Connectors are more concerned with getting everyone on the same page so that they can work together. (178)

Climbers Want to Stand Apart — Connectors Want to Stand Together. Connectors,…find ways to get closer to other people, to find common ground that they can stand on together. (178)

If you climb without connecting, you may gain authority, but you won’t have many friends. (178)

Five qualities you may find will assist you to connect with others:

• Appreciation allows for differences in people and considers them interesting.
• Sensitivity knows about personal feelings and quickly adjusts to the moods of others.
• Consistency has the quality of being “real,” not phony, and gives only sincere compliments.
• Security doesn’t’ try to be “top dog”; it knows it isn’t an automatic loss when others win.
• Humor laughs at itself; it is not oversensitive.

If you connect well but possess little desire to climb, you may end up with many friends, but not much authority to actually accomplish anything. (179)

20. The Choices Your Make, Make You

Successful people make right decisions early and manage those decisions daily. (184)

There is a choice you have to make in everything you do. So keep in mind that in the end, the choice you make, makes you. – John Wooden

It is or choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. – J.K. Rowling

1. My Choices Have Shown Me Myself

2. Many Choices Were Not Easy

3. The Choices I Made Changed Who I Was

Every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you — the part that chooses — into something a little different than what it was before. Taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature. – C.S. Lewis

CHOOSING YOUR CHOICES

Choice #1: My Standards for Myself Will Be Higher Than What Others Might Set for Me

Choice #2: Helping People Is More Important Than Making Them Happy

Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better. – Pat Riley

Leadership is among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it…short-term pain for long-term gain. – George F. Will

Choice #3: My Focus Will Be on the Present

To be a successful leader, you need to know what you stand for and what you will stand up to. The key choices you make regarding how you will conduct yourself and lead others not only indicate what kind of leader you are, they determine what kind of leader you will become. Choose wisely. (190)

21. Influence Should Be Loaned but Never Given

I am more afraid of any army of one hundred sheep led by a lion than an army of one hundred lions led by a sheep. – Count Talleyrand

1. Influence Exists to Speak Up for Those Who Don’t Have Influence.

2. Influence Exists to Speak to Those Who Do Have Influence.

3. Influence Exists to be Passed On to Others

People started asking me to extend my influence for them. Because my motivation as a leader was to help people, I gladly gave my influence to whoever asked for it — with no strings attached. Bad decision. I soon discovered that people were taking advantage of me. Here’s what I mean:

They Failed to Establish Their Own Leadership Using My Influence. If leaders can’t eventually lead on their own, then they are of little value to the organization. (196)

They Took My Influence for Granted.

They Were Unable to Build the Organization by Passing on Influence to Others. People who have no influence of their own cannot pass on influence to others. You cannot give what you do not have. (197)

LET’S CALL THIS A LOAN

Not Everyone Will Receive the Loan of My Influence.

Those Who Receive the Loan of My Influence Will Be Accountable. …it is my business as the influencer to know their business and make sure my investment is wise. (198)

I Expect a Good Return on My Loan. I want to see their growth accelerate. I want to know their influence has increased. (198)

22. For Everything You Gain, You Give Up Something

The greatest detriment to tomorrow’s success, is today’s success. – Rick Warren

By avoiding risk, we really risk what is most important in life — reaching toward growth, our potential and a true contribution to a common goal. – Max DePree

WHAT WILL YOU TRADE?

1. Trade Affirmation for Accomplishment. I decided that I would prefer to actually get something done than to just make myself look good.

2. Trade Security for Significance. Success does not mean simply being busy.

3. Trade Financial Gain for Future Potential. If you are willing to sacrifice financially on the front end for the possibility for greater potential, you are almost always given greater chances for higher rewards — including financially. (206)

4. Trade Immediate Pleasure for Personal Growth.

5. Trade Exploration for Focus. Once you have found what you were created to do, stick with it. (207)

6. Trade Quantity of Life for Quality of Life.

7. Trade Acceptable for Excellent. If something is worth doing, give it your best — or don’t do it at all.

8. Trade Addition for Multiplication. Leaders who gather followers add to what they can accomplish. Leaders who develop leaders multiply their ability. (208)

9. Trade the First Half for the Second Half.

10. Trade Your Work for God for a Walk with God.

To be an excellent leader, I think you have to learn to travel light. You must learn to off-load before trying to reload. (209)

23. Those Who Start the Journey with You Seldom Finish with You

Anytime you ignore reality for the sake of the relationship, you will have problems. (215)

Not Everyone Will Take the Journey with You

Not Everyone Should Take the Journey with You

Not Everyone Can Take the Journey with You

Make no mistake, to some degree, you choose who you lose. If you keep and reward uncommitted or unproductive people, eventually your team will be comprised of uncommitted and unproductive people. What gets rewarded is what gets done. All organizations have turnover. People come and people go. The question is not, are people leaving? The question is, who is leaving? (217)

In the end, what I have discovered is that leaders cannot think of themselves as the owners of their teams — even if they happen to be the owner of the organization they lead. Good leaders understand that they are stewards. (219)

24. Few Leaders Are Successful Unless a Lot of People Want Them to Be

Without a lot of people working together, there would be no successful leaders. (224)

If you want to be a successful leader, you will need the support of many people. And if you are wise, you will appreciate and acknowledge their contribution to your success. (225)

Behind an able man are always other able men and women. – Chinese proverb

People appreciate working for someone who appreciates them. (228)

25. You Only Get Answers to the Questions You Ask

Confidence can be defined as that uplifting, energizing, positive feeling that you possess — before you truly understand your situation. (232)

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask is a fool forever. – Chinese proverb

Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why. – Bernard Baruch

Quality questions create a quality life. Successful people ask better questions and as a result, they get better answers. – Anthony Robbins

1. Am I Investing in Myself? — This Is a Personal Growth Question

2. Am I Genuinely Interested in Others? — This Is a Motive Question

3. Am I Doing What I Love and Loving What I Do? — This Is a Passion Question. It is very easy to move from being a serving leader to being a self-serving one.

4. Am I Investing My Time with the Right People? — This Is a Relationship Question

5. Am I Staying in My Strength Zone? — This Is an Effectiveness Question

6. Am I Taking Others to a Higher Level? — This Is a Mission Question

7. Am I Taking Care of Today? — This Is a Success Question. You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. (238)

8. Am I Taking Time to Think? — This Is a Strategic Leadership Question

9. Am I Developing Other Leaders? — This Is a Legacy Question

10. Am I Pleasing God? — This Is a Faith Question

Some people see questions as a sign of ignorance. I see them as a sign of engagement, curiosity, and the desire to improve — assuming that the questions are thoughtful and the questioner doesn’t keep asking the same questions over and over again. If you’re not asking, you’re not advancing. If you’re not listening, you’re not learning. (It’s said that small people monopolize the talking and big people monopolize the listening.) If you don’t ask questions, you won’t get answers. And know this: if you are no longer asking questions as a leader, then you might as well buy a rocking chair, put it on your front porch, and call it a day, because you’ve already retired. (240)

26. People Will Summarize Your Life in One Sentence — Pick It Now

What will my legacy be?

Life is like a parachute jump, you’ve got to get it right the first time. – Eleanor Roosevelt

The average man does not know what to do with his life, yet wants another one which will last forever. – Anatole France

Most people don’t lead their lives; they just accept them. – John Kotter

Most people don’t get to choose when or how they’re going to die. But they can decide how they’re going to live. (248)

We have made at least a start in discovering the meaning in human life when we plant shade trees under which we know full well we will never sit. – D. Elton Trueblood

Home: khanacademy.org

Twitter: @khanacademy

The Khan Academy is most known for its collection of videos, so before I go any further, let me show you a little bit of a montage.

SK: We now have on the order of 2,200 videos covering everything from basic arithmetic all the way to vector calculus and some of the stuff you saw there. We have a million students a month using the site, watching on the order of 100 to 200,000 videos a day. But what we’re going to talk about in this is how we’re going to the next level. But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about really just how I got started. And some of you all might know, about five years ago I was an analyst at a hedge fund, and I was in Boston, and I was tutoring my cousins in New Orleans, remotely. And I started putting the first YouTube videos up really just as a kind of nice-to-have, just a supplement for my cousins — something that might give them a refresher or something.

And as soon as I put those first YouTube videos up, something interesting happened — actually a bunch of interesting things happened. The first was the feedback from my cousins. They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person. (Laughter) And once you get over the backhanded nature of that, there was actually something very profound there. They were saying that they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin. At first, it’s very unintuitive, but when you actually think about it from their point of view, it makes a ton of sense. You have this situation where now they can pause and repeat their cousin, without feeling like they’re wasting my time. If they have to review something that they should have learned a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of years ago, they don’t have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin. They can just watch those videos. If they’re bored, they can go ahead. They can watch it at their own time, at their own pace. And probably the least appreciated aspect of this is the notion that the very first time, the very first time that you’re trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, “Do you understand this?” And that’s what was happening with the interaction with my cousins before, and now they can just do it in the intimacy of their own room.

The other thing that happened is — I put them on YouTube just — I saw no reason to make it private, so I let other people watch it, and then people started stumbling on it, and I started getting some comments and some letters and all sorts of feedback from random people from around the world. And these are just a few. This is actually from one of the original calculus videos. And someone wrote just on YouTube — it was a YouTube comment: “First time I smiled doing a derivative.” (Laughter) And let’s pause here. This person did a derivative and then they smiled. And then in a response to that same comment — this is on the thread. You can go on YouTube and look at these comments — someone else wrote: “Same thing here. I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day. Since I remember seeing all of this matrix text in class, and here I’m all like, ‘I know kung fu.’”

And we get a lot of feedback all along those lines. This clearly was helping people. But then, as the viewership kept growing and kept growing, I started getting letters from people, and it was starting to become clear that it was actually more than just a nice-to-have. This is just an excerpt from one of those letters. “My 12 year-old son has autism and has had a terrible time with math. We have tried everything, viewed everything, bought everything. We stumbled on your video on decimals and it got through. Then we went on to the dreaded fractions. Again, he got it. We could not believe it. He is so excited.” And so you can imagine, here I was an analyst at a hedge fund. It was very strange for me to do something of social value.

But I was excited, so I kept going. And then a few other things started to dawn on me. That, not only would it help my cousins right now, or these people who are sending letters, but that this content will never go old, that it could help their kids or their grandkids. If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus, I wouldn’t have to. Assuming he was good. We don’t know.

The other thing that happened — and even at this point, I said, “Okay, maybe it’s a good supplement. It’s good for motivated students. It’s good for maybe home schoolers.” But I didn’t think it would be something that would somehow penetrate the classroom. But then I started getting letters from teachers. And the teachers would write, saying, “We’ve used your videos to flip the classroom. You’ve given the lectures, so now what we do … ” — and this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow — ” … what I do is I assign the lectures for homework, and what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom.”

And I want to pause here for a second, because there’s a couple of interesting things. One, when those teachers are doing that, there’s the obvious benefit — the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did. They can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. But the more interesting thing is — and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom — by removing the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience — 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other. A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one-size-fits-all lecture to 30 students — blank faces, slightly antagonistic — and now it’s a human experience. Now they’re actually interacting with each other.

So once the Khan Academy — I quit my job and we turned into a real organization — we’re a not-for-profit — the question is, how do we take this to the next level? How do we take what those teachers are doing to their natural conclusion? And so what I’m showing you over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. The ones I started were much more primitive. This is a more competent version of it. But the paradigm here is, we’ll generate as many questions as you need until you get that concept, until you get 10 in a row. And the Khan Academy videos are there. You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don’t know how to do it. But the paradigm here, it seems like a very simple thing: 10 in a row, you move on. But it’s fundamentally different than what’s happening in classrooms right now.

In a traditional classroom, you have a couple of homework, homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent, a 90 percent or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic. And even that 95 percent student, what was the five percent they didn’t know? Maybe they didn’t know what happens when you raise something to the zero power. And then you go build on that in the next concept. That’s analogous to imagine learning to ride a bicycle, and maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time, and I give you that bicycle for two weeks. And then I come back after two weeks, and I say, “Well, let’s see. You’re having trouble taking left turns. You can’t quite stop. You’re an 80 percent bicyclist.” So I put a big C stamp on your forehead and then I say, “Here’s a unicycle.” But as ridiculous as that sounds, that’s exactly what’s happening in our classrooms right now. And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of a sudden and start failing calculus all of a sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers, and it’s usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. So our model is learn math the way you’d learn anything, like the way you would learn a bicycle. Stay on that bicycle. Fall off that bicycle. Do it as long as necessary until you have mastery. The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to failure. But we do expect mastery.

This is just another one of the modules. This is trigonometry. This is shifting and reflecting functions. And they all fit together. We have about 90 of these right now. And you can go to the site right now. It’s all free. Not trying to sell anything. But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map. That top node right there, that’s literally single digit addition. It’s like one plus one is equal to two. And the paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that, it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules. So if you keep further down the knowledge map, we’re getting into more advanced arithmetic. Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra. Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two, a little bit of precalculus. And the idea is, from this we can actually teach everything — well, everything that can be taught in this type of a framework. So you can imagine — and this is what we are working on — is from this knowledge map you have logic, you have computer programming, you have grammar, you have genetics, all based off of that core of, if you know this and that, now you’re ready for this next concept. Now that can work well for an individual learner, and I encourage, one, for you to do it with your kids, but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself. It’ll change what happens at the dinner table.

But what we want to do is to use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers had emailed me about. And so what I’m showing you here, this is actually data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district, where they took two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes and completely gutted their old math curriculum. These kids aren’t using textbooks, they’re not getting one-size-fits-all lectures. They’re doing Khan Academy, they’re doing that software, for roughly half of their math class. And I want to make it clear, we don’t view this as the complete math education. What it does is — and this is what’s happening in Los Altos — it frees up time. This is the blocking and tackling, making sure you know how to move through a system of equations, and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games, for the mechanics, for the robot building, for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow.

And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace — and this is actually a live dashboard from Los Altos school district — and they look at this dashboard. Every row is a student. Every column is one of those concepts. Green means the student’s already proficient. Blue means they’re working on it — no need to worry. Red means they’re stuck. And what the teacher does is literally just say, “Let me intervene on the red kids.” Or even better, “Let me get one of the green kids who are already proficient in that concept to be the first line of attack and actually tutor their peer.”

Now I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don’t want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: “Oh, what do you not understand?” or “What do you do understand?” and all of the rest. So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible — really data that, in almost any other field, is expected, if you’re in finance or marketing or manufacturing — and so the teachers can actually diagnose what’s wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible. So now the teachers know exactly what the students have been up to, how long they have been spending every day, what videos have they been watching, when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching, what exercises are they using, what have they been focused on? The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on. The inner circle shows the videos they’re focused on. And the data gets pretty granular so you can see the exact problems that the student got right or wrong. Red is wrong, blue is right. The leftmost question is the first question that the student attempted. They watched the video right over there. And then you can see, eventually, they were able to get 10 in a row. It’s almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems. They also got faster. The height is how long it took them.

So when you talk about self-paced learning, it makes sense for everyone — in education-speak, differentiated learning — but it’s kind of crazy when you see it in a classroom. Because every time we’ve done this, in every classroom we’ve done, over and over again, if you go five days into it, there’s a group of kids who’ve raced ahead and there’s a group of kids who are a little bit slower. And in a traditional model, if you did a snapshot assessment, you say, “These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. Maybe they should be tracked differently. Maybe we should put them in different classes.” But when you let every student work at their own pace — and we see it over and over and over again — you see students who took a little bit [of] extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we’re seeing it over and over and over again. And it makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefited from were really just due to a coincidence of time.

Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what’s happening in education. And actually, that kind of brings an interesting point. A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios. In our mind, the relevant metric is student-to-valuable-human-time-with-the-teacher ratio. So in a traditional model, most of the teacher’s time is spent doing lectures and grading and whatnot. Maybe five percent of their time is actually sitting next to students and actually working with them. Now 100 percent of their time is. So once again, using technology, not just flipping the classroom, you’re humanizing the classroom, I’d argue, by a factor of five or 10.

And as valuable as that is in Los Altos, imagine what that does to the adult learner who’s embarrassed to go back and learn stuff that they should have before, before going back to college. Imagine what it does to a street kid in Calcutta who has to help his family during the day, and that’s the reason why he or she can’t go to school. Now they can spend two hours a day and remediate, or get up to speed and not feel embarrassed about what they do or don’t know. Now imagine what happens where — we talked about the peers teaching each other inside of a classroom. But this is all one system. There’s no reason why you can’t have that peer-to-peer tutoring beyond that one classroom. Imagine what happens if that student in Calcutta all of a sudden can tutor your son, or your son can tutor that kid in Calcutta? And I think what you’ll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom. And that’s essentially what we’re trying to build.

Thank you.

[INTERVIEW]

Bill Gates: I’ve seen some things you’re doing in the system that have to do with motivation and feedback — energy points, merit badges. Tell me what you’re thinking there.

SK: Oh yeah. No, we have an awesome team working on it. And I have to make it clear, it’s not just me anymore. I’m still doing all the videos, but we have a rockstar team doing the software. Yeah, we’ve put a bunch of game mechanics in there where you get these badges, we’re going to start having leader boards by area, and you get points. It’s actually been pretty interesting. Just the wording of the badging or how many points you get for doing something, we see on a system-wide basis, like tens of thousands of fifth graders or sixth graders going one direction or another, depending what badge you give them.

BG: And the collaboration you’re doing with Los Altos, how did that come about?

SK: Los Altos, it was kind of crazy. Once again, I didn’t expect it to be used in classrooms. Someone from their board came and said, “What would you do if you had carte blanche in a classroom?” And I said, “Well, I would just, every student work at their own pace on something like this and we’d give a dashboard.” And they said, “Oh, this is kind of radical. We have to think about it.” And me and the rest of the team were like, “They’re never going to want to do this.” But literally the next day they were like, “Can you start in two weeks?”

BG: So fifth grade math is where that’s going on right now?

SK: It’s two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes. And they’re doing it at the district level. I think what they’re excited about is they can now follow these kids. It’s not an only-in-school thing. We’ve even, on Christmas, we saw some of the kids were doing it. And we can track everything. So they can actually track them as they go through the entire district. Through the summers, as they go from one teacher to the next, you have this continuity of data that even at the district level they can see.

BG: So some of those views we saw were for the teacher to go in and track actually what’s going on with those kids. So you’re getting feedback on those teacher views to see what they think they mean?

SK: Oh yeah. Most of those were specs by the teachers. We made some of those for students so they could see their data, but we have a very tight design loop with the teachers themselves. And they’re literally saying, “Hey, this is nice, but … ” Like that focus graph, a lot of the teachers said, “I have a feeling that a lot of the kids are jumping around and not focusing on one topic.” So we made that focus diagram. So it’s all been teacher-driven. It’s been pretty crazy.

BG: Is this ready for prime time? Do you think a lot of classes next school year should try this thing out?

SK: Yeah, it’s ready. We’ve got a million people on the site already, so we can handle a few more. No, no reason why it really can’t happen in every classroom in America tomorrow.

BG: And the vision of the tutoring thing. The idea there is, if I’m confused about a topic, somehow right in the user interface I’d find people who are volunteering, maybe see their reputation, and I could schedule and connect up with those people?

SK: Absolutely. And this is something that I recommend everyone in this audience to do. Those dashboards the teachers have, you can go log in right now and you can essentially become a coach for your kids, or nephews, or cousins, or maybe some kids at the Boys and Girls Club. And yeah, you can start becoming a mentor, a tutor, really immediately. But yeah, it’s all there.

BG: Well, it’s amazing. I think you just got a glimpse of the future of education. Thank you.

SK: Thank you.

— VIA —

Ah, brilliant. In summary, “humanize the classroom.”

This path has led me to believe that the essence of leadership can be found in this ultimate crucible of human endeavor. I am convinced that by understanding the things that work when survival is at stake — when financial incentives or promotions become irrelevant, and when fear and self-interest surface — we can understand how to lead under other conditions. By studying The Edge, we can learn the things needed to lead organizations to their full potential, and we can remember these principles when we ourselves are stretched, stressed, and challenged. (xvii)

The underlying ingredients of triumph are expressed in these ten strategies:

1. Never lose sight of the ultimate goal, and focus energy on short-term objectives.
2. Set a personal example with visible, memorable symbols and behaviors.
3. Instill optimism and self-confidence, but stay grounded in reality.
4. Take care of yourself: Maintain your stamina and let go of guilt.
5. Reinforce the team message constantly: “We are one — we live or die together.”
6. Minimize status differences and insist on courtesy and mutual respect.
7. Master conflict — deal with anger in small doses, engage dissidents, and avoid needless power struggles.
8. Find something to celebrate and something to laugh about.
9. Be willing to take the Big Risk.
10. Never give up — there’s always another move.

Part One: Ten Strategies for Leading at The Edge

1. Vision and Quick Victories:

Never lose sight of the ultimate goal, and focus energy on short-term objectives.

Be Willing to Find a “New Mark” | This means that, as a leader, you need to be willing to shift both long- and short-term goals without clinging to the past. Additionally, you must be able to commit to these new goals with as much passion and energy as you did to the original mark. (16)

Do Something! | …do something concrete, …take decisive action. (17) Discover the importance of sustaining psychological momentum. (18) Leading at The Edge means seizing every opportunity for decisive action, and refusing to be discouraged when some efforts prove unsuccessful. The very act of doing something concrete creates a sense of momentum, and a series of small victories will lay the foundation for eventual success. (19) [...many are more concerned about the appearance of working hard than about the work's outcome. This focus on activity over results diverts energy from more important asks and is a significant barrier to success.] (20)

Look Beyond Your Own Needs for Action | Maintain a balance between [your own] needs and the needs of the team… (23)

Overcome Uncertainty with Structure | Establishing a critical organization structure — a “matter-of-fact” groove” — can give people the sense of order they need to be productive. (25)

Create Engaging Distractions | Winning leaders cultivate the ability to monitor the condition of each person on the team and to sense when individuals are becoming overwhelmed. They need to direct negative energy toward activities that divert people’s attention from their problems and harness this energy for positive results. (26)

2. Symbolism and Personal Example:

Set a personal example with visible, memorable symbols and behaviors.

Particularly under conditions of stress and discouragement, visible leadership can mean the difference between success and failure. (29)

Give the Right Speech | When the situation is dire, the power of the right words is striking. (30) Establishing strong individual relationships is an important part of leadership. But there are times when the role demands something different, when the energy of the entire group or organization needs to be mobilized. On these occasions, the leader needs to face his or her team and communicate a message to the team as a whole — to make a speech. (31) The right speech needs to be authentic, and it needs to be delivered with sincerity. (32)

Use Vivid Symbols | It is one thing to tell people that a task needs to be done, and it is another to dramatize the challenge with visible, memorable symbols and behaviors. These symbols can be as dramatic as throwing gold sovereigns into the snow, or they can be more prosaic. Whatever the symbol, it needs to be vivid and memorable. (34)

Be Visible: Let People See You Leading | Leaders can be quietly competent, but they must be visible. (37)

3. Optimism and Reality:

Instill optimism and self-confidence, but stay grounded in reality.

It is the capacity to look at odds that are impossible, to believe that it is still possible to win, and to convince others that you are right. (40)

Cultivate Optimism in Yourself | Before you can instill optimism in others, you first need to find it in yourself. (41) Optimism may not be a natural act for everyone, but there is reason to believe that it is an ability that can be learned and greatly improved. The key lies in the inner dialogue that goes on, often unnoticed, almost all the time for all of us. (42)

The reality is that this “self-talk” is part of human nature, and the first step in cultivating optimism is to pay close attention to what you say to yourself. If you are aware of this inner dialogue, especially during times of adversity or setback, you will be conscious of the messages you are sending yourself about failure or success. The right messages are energizing, and the wrong ones are deflating. | The way to develop a feeling of optimism is to consistently send positive messages that override voices of discouragement and pessimism. Some of the mechanics of sending these positive messages may sound hokey or contrived. I agree; They may seem contrived — but they often work. (42)

Spread the Spirit of Optimism | Leaders who are successful at The Edge are able to instill in others the belief that the organization will achieve its goals. But just how does a leader radiate optimism? How does a leader spread “the spirit” when survival is not at stake? (45)

Just how candid should leaders be in sharing their uncensored doubts and inner feelings when faced with adversity? | There are those who believe that personal authenticity demands complete openness, and that leaders should reveal the depths of their emotional inner life. They argue that anything other than this level of disclosure is patronizing — and that openness creates space for others to be similarly revealing. | My perspective is different. I believe there are times in which leaders need to maintain their composure, despite the natural inclination to express feelings of discouragement, fear, or even despair. This is not to say that they should shield others from reality or withhold basic information about the situation. Rather, it is to say that there are times at The Edge in which the perceived attitude of the leader is a powerful force that can create energy and optimism or fear and pessimism: It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. | When fears and doubts are expressed openly, it may be difficult or impossible to rekindle the optimism that is so important for success. Therefore, I believe the role of the leader demands that personal fears are best controlled or dampened until negative information is digested. Then a discussion of concerns can be coupled with potential solutions and a positive message of hope for the future. (46)

Build the Right Team “Optimism Quotient” | When selecting people for key roles, it is natural to think about the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed for top performance. Other personal qualities, such as the ability to work with others, and values, such as integrity, are often considered carefully. But it is less obvious that an individual’s characteristic tendency toward optimism or pessimism may be an important — in some cases, the most important — factor in a particular role. | This is not to suggest that everyone take a personality test as part of the selection process. But it does argue for looking carefully at the way individuals respond to adversity and for explicitly including those with optimistic attitudes in difficult team assignments. (49)

Know How to Reframe a Tough Situation | I had read that the Chinese character for crisis, Weigee, incorporates two figures: The upper character represents “danger,” the lower one “opportunity.” (51) [VIA: Note, this may be fallacious. Character interpretation can be complicated.]

Stay Grounded in Reality |

There’s something in the nature of CEO’s–pride, vanity, a primal need for control, an obsession with success, good old-fashion idealism–that makes many smart, well-regarded chief executives into idiots when the world turns against them. They rationalize. They justify. They circle their wagons, build bunkers, mollify their troops. They claim themselves “victims” of their “situations.” In these trying times for executives, denial is more popular than ever.

Patricia Sellers, “CEOs in Denial,” Fortune, Vol. 139, No. 12 (June 21, 1999), p.80

Optimism is an important leadership quality, but denial is deadly. (54) The lesson is clear. Resist the temptation to exclude contrary ideas; stay in touch with reality. Find people who will tell you the truth, and reward them for doing so. (54)

4. Stamina:

Take care of yourself: Maintain your stamina and let go of guilt.

Look Out for Yourself as Well as Your Crew | At The Edge, leaders need to demonstrate concern for others and monitor the health of those who work for them. They also need to extend this awareness to themselves and to recognize that event he most energetic individual has limits. (61)

Beware of “Summit Fever” | In work situations, the emotional fever to meet deadlines, complete projects, or accomplish business goals can be dangerously analogous to that experienced by mountain climbers and pilots. Leaders need to be aware of this threat and build in safeguards to ensure that they maintain a sense of perspective and recognize when it is time to make camp, turn around, or pull out of a dive. (62)

Find Outlets for Your Own Feelings |

• Talk to friends
• Keep a journal
• Write letters home
• See a counselor or coach

Let Go of Guilt (But Learn from Mistakes) |

5. The Team Message:

Reinforce the team message constantly: “We are one–we live or die together.”

Establish a Shared Identity | Value statements, for example, can be used effectively to create a common culture and identity. (73)

Maintain the Bonds of Communication | Few organizational challenges are as emotionally demanding as coordinating an aircraft rescue or maintaining team integrity in a prisoner of war camp. But the need for frequent communication is always important in maintaining a sense of team unity. (77)

Keep Everyone Informed, Involved, and Thinking About Solutions | A unified team is one in which every member understands the task to be done and feels a sense of deep personal responsibility for the success of the group’s efforts. For this to happen, each person must have a clear picture of the challenges faced by the team. This implies the open sharing of information, options, and potential consequences of choices. (79) Information really is power. It can be shared openly or it can be closely held and doled out reluctantly. But I have never seen a cohesive team when vital information is hoarded or restricted to a few key decision makers. (80)

Leverage Everyone’s Talents — And Deal with Performance Problems Constructively | Probably no leadership task is more difficult than dealing with poor performers while, at the same time, maintaining sensitivity to individual feelings and team unity. Leading at The Edge involves dealing with that complicated mix, however, and team cohesiveness is never advanced by overlooking individuals who fail to pull their weight. | When it comes to performance problems, I have seldom, if ever heard a leader say, “I acted too quickly to deal with the issue.” The tendency is to do just the opposite — wait until performance has deteriorated to the point that there is no possibility of recovery or until others have been alienated by being let down by the poor performer. An unwillingness to deal with performance detracts from, rather than supports, team integrity. (83) The best leaders are sensitive to individual needs and skills, and they find ways of using diverse talents. When corrective action needs to be taken, it is done in a way that avoids isolating or scapegoating people. Successful leaders continually drive home the team message: “We are one: We live or die together.” (84)

6. Core Team Values:

Minimize status differences and insist on courtesy and mutual respect.

This egalitarian spirit had two critical benefits. First, it ensured that every member of the expedition would do his utmost to accomplish whatever work needed to be done. Second, it served to minimize the resentments that inevitably rise when, under conditions of stress, hardship, and deprivation, there is a perception that some are more equal than others. (90)

The degree of rigid stratification is hardly conducive to teamwork at The Edge. Hierarchy itself, however, is not the problem. People understand the need for legitimate authority and for differences in salaries, roles, and titles. What fragments a group is the perception of an elite “upper class” — a sense of superiority conferred on a chosen few. Thus, the critical leadership challenge is to create an environment in which each person experiences a basic sense of respect regardless of his or her role in the organization. (92)

Insist on Mutual Respect and Courtesy |  It is not possible to force one human being to have genuine feelings of concern about another. But it is possible to create an environment in which taking care of others becomes a normative behavior and — over time — these caring behaviors help forge emotional bonds. (93)

Two of the party at least were very close to death. Indeed, it might be said that [Shackleton] kept a finger on each man’s pulse. Whenever he noticed that a man seemed extra cold and shivered, he would immediately order another hot drink of milk to be prepared and served to all. He never let the man know that it was on his account, lest he become nervous about himself and, while we all participated, it was the coldest, naturally, who got the greatest advantage.

Leaders who want team members to care about each other need to model that behavior themselves. It is not something that can be delegated, and it cannot be feigned. If it is modeled and reinforced, though, over time it will become part of the culture of the team. (96)

7. Conflict:

Master conflict — deal with anger in small doses, engage dissidents, and void needless power struggles.

Conflict: The very mention of the word can raise feelings of anxiety. Competent executives who fearlessly enter the competitive marketplace often go to great lengths to avoid interpersonal friction. Yet conflict is a predictable component in the volatile mix of attitudes and emotions found in organizations at The Edge. It comes in many forms: direct arguments, disagreements, sabotage, and passive aggression. | If handled ineptly or suppressed, unresolved tension can be incredibly destructive. At the Survival Edge, it can result in loss o life, either through physical attack or breakdowns in teamwork. For organizations in which physical survival is not the issue, conflict can mean decreased productivity, increased stress, wasted energy, and diminished problem-solving ability. It can also result in an unhappy workplace, loss of revenue, vulnerability to competition, and ultimately, organizational death. (98-99)

Deal with Anger in Small Doses | Perhaps the first step in promoting healthy conflict is to understand — and really to internalize — that conflict and caring are not mutually exclusive. …The second step in dealing with conflict is to create an effective process that encourages team members to surface their differences and to identify those lurking problems that need to be addressed. (104)

Engage Dissidents | In difficult leadership situations, we are often tempted to ignore or isolate individuals whose personalities rub us the wrong way or who have a knack for stirring up trouble. While this is an understandable reaction, it is the wrong one. It only creates space for further problems, and rejecting dissidents is ultimately detrimental to the organization. A more productive response — however counterintuitive it may seem — requires doing just the opposite: (109)

• Identify those individuals or groups that may be undermining your leadership.
• Be proactive and keep troublemakers close by.
• Find ways to minimize the negative impact of their behaviors.
• Make sure these people are engaged, in some way, in the decision-making process.
• Treat everyone, including dissidents, with respect, even when they are antagonistic.
• Be willing to set limits, and make it clear that this works both ways. Inappropriate, rude or bullying behavior cannot be tolerated.
• Avoid the temptation to denigrate malcontents and keep your personal opinions about people to yourself — and your closest advisers.

Avoid Needless Power Struggles |

8. Lighten Up!

Find something to celebrate and something to laugh about.

The multipurpose nature of humor makes it a sort of leadership Swiss Army knife. (123)

The “Southwest Way to a Sense of Humor” includes these guidelines:

• Think funny. Look for the flip side of situations, and make outrageous thoughts fun.
• Adopt a playful attitude. Stay open to silly or nonconformist thoughts and behaviors.
• Be the first to laugh. Try to be the first to find humor in stressful situations.
• Laugh with, not at. Promote healthy, constructive humor.
• Laugh at yourself. take work seriously, but not yourself.

9. Risk:

Be willing to take the Big Risk.

Risk taking for its on sake, however, is not the subject of this chapter. Needless risk taking is a form of bravado that endangers organizational stability, or even lives. (125)

Never Take an Unnecessary Chance |

When a Risk is Justified, Do Not Hesitate |

“…a man sits as many risks as he runs. – Henry David Thoreau

Clearly, leaders at The Edge need to be comfortable with the discomfort of risk. Unnecessary risks should be avoided, but there are times for bold moves. Understand the risks you face and evaluate them carefully. Then balance risk and return, and have the courage to step up to those calculated risks that are worth taking. (137)

10. Tenacious Creativity:

Never give up — there’s always another move.

Finding creative solutions to daunting problems is a difficult task under the best of circumstances. It is even more challenging at The Edge. Fear, physical exhaustion, and psychological weariness are integral parts of the journey faced by those at the limits of survival — or by organizations striving to achieve the highest possible levels of performance. Yet it is precisely in these stressful situations that the ability to solve problems becomes most critical and that the need for innovation is the greatest. This chapter explores tactics for approaching this formidable challenge. (139)

Encourage Relentless Creativity at The Edge | Rather than expecting things to go right, successful leaders under these conditions should be prepared for things to go wrong. In fact, when at The Edge, a realistic expectation is that things will go wrong with greater frequency and magnitude than ever before. Once this reality is accepted, daunting problems become a normal part of the journey. Then the leadership challenge becomes one of mobilizing the collective creativity of the team to find a solution. (148) | Tenacious creativity…demands flexibility, and it requires recognizing what works and what doesn’t. When a strategy fails, acknowledge it and find another one. When the obvious moves are exhausted, keep looking for new ones. Do not dismiss any idea, no matter how farfetched, without thoroughly considering it. Think the unthinkable, and encourage others to do so as well. The unshakable belief that there is always another move will give you the energy to search for solutions, and creativity will give you the ability to find them. (149)

Part Two: Case Studies in Leading at The Edge

11. Introduction to the Case Studies
12. Business Communication Systems (AT&T/Lucent Technologies): Back to the Future
13. Rice Health Systems: Healing a Sick Organization
14. Weyerhaeuser Company: Transforming a Culture
15. Malden Mills: Rising from the Ashes

Part Three: Continuing Your Expedition

16. Learning to Lead at The Edge

Cultivate Poised Incompetence | You have to be willing to be incompetent in order to learn. Just because you don’t know what you are doing doesn’t mean you have to be embarrassed or upset or convinced something’s wrong with you. (217)

Learn to Love the Plateau | …the level place in the learning process. (218) | Whether you are learning a martial art or learning to be a leader, you need to develop the capacity to stay in that frustrating place when there are no immediate signs of progress. (218)

Come to Terms with Fear |

Find an Environment That Supports Learning | If you want to realize your full potential as a leader, look at the culture of the organization where you work. (221)

Practice the Art of Thriving | The art of thriving focuses on sustaining career achievement and personal well-being throughout the life cycle. I believe that people who do this successfully are able to integrate the five components of the life structure shown in Figure 16-1.

Work |  Are you using your unique strengths and distinctive abilities in your work? Are you enjoying what you are doing? Are you having fun? Are you intrinsically interested in the work you are doing? Do you find the substance of the work engaging? Is your work a creative expression of who you are?

Relationships | Where are you sources of support and nurturance? Who are the people in your life who care about you as a person, rather than simply as a representation of a job title? Do you have a sense of belonging in some group or community other than work? Are you making time to nurture the relationships that are important in your life?

Physical Health |  Are you getting enough sleep, and are you resting well when you fall asleep? Are you eating a balanced diet? Are you using caffeine as a substitute for sleep or exercise? Are you getting enough exercise? Are you setting aside time — at least fifteen minutes a day — for concentrated relaxation and “decompression”?

Renewal |  Is there space in your life for you to engage in “regenerative” activities? Are there times when you can forget the needs of others and lose yourself in nonwork activities that are absorbing and renewing?

Sense of Purpose | How do you feel about the direction your life is taking? What are the deeper values that guide your work? Are the other parts of your life — work, relationships, physical health, and renewal — consistent with this sense of purpose?

17. Epilogue: A Perspective on Success and Failure

Depending on the yardstick used to measure success, Shackleton can be seen as a success or a failure, or a little of both. I believe that the more important question raised by Shackleton’s adventure, and by the other accounts in this book, is a much more personal one: How do you measure your own success as a leader? What are the standards by which you assess your own performance? (228)

Part Four: Resources for Leading at The Edge

Critical Leadership Skills Survey

Critical Leadership Skills Survey (.pdf) Critical Leadership Skills Survey (.doc)

Your Leadership Expedition: A Personal Development Plan

Assessment

1. What are your strengths as a leader — the skills, knowledge, and personal qualities that contribute to your ability to lead at the Edge?
2. What are your developmental needs — the areas which, if developed, would increase your effectiveness as a leader?
3. What are the activities that you find energizing — activities that stimulate you and that you find intrinsically enjoyable?
4. What are your core values about leadership — the deep beliefs that provide guidance and meaning?

Vision

1. Imagine that it is some time in the future. You have realized your full potential as a leader and are able to lead others to the limits of their performance.
2. Write a detailed, vivid description of who you are and what you will be doing. What is at typical day like for you? What will you be thinking and feeling? Try to capture that image in as much detail as possible.
3. Write a one-sentence, “high concept” statement that captures the essence of your vision.
4. Is there a concrete image that symbolizes your vision?

Overcoming Barriers

1. What are the barriers that stand between you and your vision? These obstacles may be external or internal, but they represent the “limiting beliefs” that prevent you from fully using your abilities. List them below, casting each barrier in the form of an “I” statement (e.g., “I can’t be a charismatic leader because I’m too introverted”).
2. Select the barriers that represent the most problematic obstacles, and over which you have some degree of control.
3. Now generate as many ideas as possible for dealing with these obstacles. It is often helpful to get help from friends and colleagues who may see solutions that elude you. Some other strategies for generating ideas are:

• Opportunity framing. What hidden opportunities might be found in the problem?
• Using a metaphor. What concrete images can be used to represent the problem (e.g., a brick wall, a mountain, or an ice pack)? How you would deal with these symbolic barriers may suggest a solution.
• “Chunking down.” Try to break the obstacles down into smaller pieces. Can you now get a toehold or a “lead in the ice”?

Action

1. Now that you have developed a vision and set of strategies for overcoming obstacles, you can create a set of goals for moving toward your vision. To be most effective, these goals should be:
   • Specific. For example, your goal may be to “take the conflict resolution seminar offered by X university,” rather than more generally to “improve my conflict resolution skills.”
   • Positive. Goals should be stated in terms of “doing” rather than “avoiding” or “not doing.”
   • Challenging yet attainable. Stretch yourself, but don’t set unreasonable expectations.
2. It is often helpful to create both a set of long-term (i.e., three to five years) goals and a set of short-term (i.e., six months to one year) goals.

Sustaining

1. What are your external sources of reinforcement? How will you get help and support from others?
2. What is your “backup plan” for dealing with adversity and setbacks?
3. When and how will you take time to reflect on your progress?
4. How will you reward yourself and celebrate success for interim accomplishments?
5. What are the tangible symbols that will help you stay focused on your vision?

Your Leadership Expedition Map

Using a large sheet of paper, construct a flowchart that shows the route of your expedition. The point of departure is your assessment, where you are right now. The destination is your vision. Trace the route that you will follow, showing key milestones with expected completion dates, along with major obstacles and how you will get past them. Feel free to be creative and to use vivid images with strong personal associations.

— NOTES —

I would like to inaugurate a new way of being an atheist.

PREMISE: Of course, there is no God. Of course, there are no deities or supernatural spirits or angels, etc. Now let’s move on; that’s not the end of the story, that’s the very, very beginning.

MAIN POINT: …atheism 2.0 is about both, as I say, a respectful and impious way of going through religions and saying, “What here could we use?” The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly, I would argue. And a thorough study of religion could give us all sorts of insights into areas of life that are not going too well.

Example 1: The Sermon vs. The Lecture. A sermon wants to change your life and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information. And I think we need to get back to that sermon tradition. The tradition of sermonizing is hugely valuable, because we are in need of guidance, morality and consolation — and religions know that.

Example 2: Repetition. Religions are cultures of repetition. They circle the great truths again and again. We associate repetition with boredom.

Example 3: Religions arrange time. A calendar is a way of making sure that across the year you will bump into certain very important ideas. Religious view says we need calendars, we need to structure time, we need to synchronize encounters. This comes across also in the way in which religions set up rituals around important feelings.

Example 4: Speak well. Oratory is absolutely key to religions. What you’re saying needs to be backed up by a really convincing way of saying it.

Example 5: We’re not just brains, we are also bodies. And when they [religions] teach us a lesson, they do it via the body. We don’t tend to do that. Our ideas are in one area and our behavior with our bodies is in another. Religions are fascinating in the way they try and combine the two.

Example 6: Art. The two really bad ideas that are hovering in the modern world that inhibit our capacity to draw strength from art: The first idea is that art should be for art’s sake — a ridiculous idea — an idea that art should live in a hermetic bubble and should not try to do anything with this troubled world. I couldn’t disagree more. The other thing that we believe is that art shouldn’t explain itself, that artists shouldn’t say what they’re up to, because if they said it, it might destroy the spell and we might find it too easy. Religions have a much saner attitude to art. They have no trouble telling us what art is about. Art is about two things in all the major faiths. Firstly, it’s trying to remind you of what there is to love. And secondly, it’s trying to remind you of what there is to fear and hate. Art is a visceral encounter with the most important ideas of your faith. Essentially it’s propaganda. Propaganda is a manner of being didactic in honor of something. And if that thing is good, there’s no problem with it at all. Art should be didactic.

So religions are the foremost example of an institution that is fighting for the things of the mind. Now we may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they’re doing it.

Really what I want to say is for many of you who are operating in a range of different field, there is something to learn from the example of religion — even if you don’t believe any of it. Look at how religions are spreading ideas. You may not agree with the ideas, but my goodness, they’re highly effective mechanisms for doing so.

You may not agree with religion, but at the end of the day, religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways, that they’re not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone. They’re for all of us.

— THE INTERVIEW —

Chris Anderson: Now this is actually a courageous talk, because you’re kind of setting up yourself in some ways to be ridiculed in some quarters.

AB: You can get shot by both sides. You can get shot by the hard-headed atheists, and you can get shot by those who fully believe.

CA: Incoming missiles from North Oxford at any moment.

AB: Indeed.

CA: But you left out one aspect of religion that a lot of people might say your agenda could borrow from, which is this sense — that’s actually probably the most important thing to anyone who’s religious — of spiritual experience, of some kind of connection with something that’s bigger than you are. Is there any room for that experience in Atheism 2.0?

AB: Absolutely. I, like many of you, meet people who say things like, “But isn’t there something bigger than us, something else?” And I say, “Of course.” And they say, “So aren’t you sort of religious?” And I go, “No.” Why does that sense of mystery, that sense of the dizzying scale of the universe, need to be accompanied by a mystical feeling? Science and just observation gives us that feeling without it, so I don’t feel the need. The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. So one can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.

CA: Actually, let me just ask a question. How many people here would say that religion is important to them? Is there an equivalent process by which there’s a sort of bridge between what you’re talking about and what you would say to them?

AB: I would say that there are many, many gaps in secular life and these can be plugged. It’s not as though, as I try to suggest, it’s not as though either you have religion and then you have to accept all sorts of things, or you don’t have religion and then you’re cut off from all these very good things. It’s so sad that we constantly say, “I don’t believe so I can’t have community, so I’m cut off from morality, so I can’t go on a pilgrimage.” One wants to say, “Nonsense. Why not?” And that’s really the spirit of my talk. There’s so much we can absorb. Atheism shouldn’t cut itself off from the rich sources of religion.

CA: It seems to me that there’s plenty of people in the TED community who are atheists. But probably most people in the community certainly don’t think that religion is going away any time soon and want to find the language to have a constructive dialogue and to feel like we can actually talk to each other and at least share some things in common. Are we foolish to be optimistic about the possibility of a world where, instead of religion being the great rallying cry of divide and war, that there could be bridging?

AB: No, we need to be polite about differences. Politeness is a much-overlooked virtue. It’s seen as hypocrisy. But we need to get to a stage when you’re an atheist and someone says, “Well you know, I did pray the other day,” you politely ignore it. You move on. Because you’ve agreed on 90 percent of things, because you have a shared view on so many things, and you politely differ. And I think that’s what the religious wars of late have ignored. They’ve ignored the possibility of harmonious disagreement.

CA: And finally, does this new thing that you’re proposing that’s not a religion but something else, does it need a leader, and are you volunteering to be the pope?

(Laughter)

AB: Well, one thing that we’re all very suspicious of is individual leaders. It doesn’t need it. What I’ve tried to lay out is a framework and I’m hoping that people can just fill it in. I’ve sketched a sort of broad framework. But wherever you are, as I say, if you’re in the travel industry, do that travel bit. If you’re in the communal industry, look at religion and do the communal bit. So it’s a wiki project.

(Laughter)

CA: Alain, thank you for sparking many conversations later.

(Applause)

— VIA —

I appreciate greatly the harmonious tone, and the virtue of politeness that is platformed here, a virtue that a priori disregarded in the discussion where polarization has been the dominant foundation. In fact, what deBotton here is doing, is not just suggesting a new way of being atheist, but I would suggest that he is subversively and subtly suggesting a new way of being religious. If atheists and secularists are to learn from religions, religions must therefore also contend with the reality that there is more shared common ground, an idea that will be difficult to embrace by both sides as is understood from the “missiles” comment above in the interview. Perhaps this Atheism 2.0 is really not about “atheism” alone, but about the evolution of all ideas, secularist and religious. (Now, must I dodge missiles too?)

There are some inherent weaknesses in his talk, however, that must be pointed out.

First, his approach to this harmony and learning is solely utilitarian. Utility, however, is only an expression of religion, not the core essence of it. Religion goes much deeper, and should there be true harmony, there must be an engagement with the commonalities that reach to the human soul and experience, a point that was duly addressed by Anderson in the interview.

Second, he makes a statement about “replacing scripture with culture,” which I would argue is a fallacious argument; a false dichotomy. Now, I think I understand the gist of what he is trying to communicate — that religious texts with divine authority ought not have pride of place for dictatorial demands and information on how to life — but fundamentally, Shakespeare, Plato, novels, etc., are scriptures in and of themselves, especially by the definitions he is using and the ethic that he is proposing. In other words, the written word is culture, just as much as art, language, traditions, social constructs, etc. I think it more honest to say that he really is not wanting to replace scripture with culture, but one kind of writing for another kind of writing, both kinds contributing positively to the culture. Now, from a religious standpoint, religious people would do well in learning from this. What is subtly suggested by deBotton may be exactly what the writers of “the Scriptures” would want us to embrace; that their writings ought not be conflated with ethereal and esoteric doctrines of divine imposition (inerrancy, infallibility, etc.), but rather be seen for the kinds of writings they were written to be (epistles, poems, gospels, etc.). We must see all writings, religious or secular, (or both) on their own terms. This approach allows for the secularist to embrace the “holy scriptures” rather than dismiss them (as deBotton suggests), and challenges religious people to see the texts for what they truly are without some sort of doctrinal or denominational mandate. I think this would go further in “harmonization” than what deBotton suggests.

Lastly — and this is a bit unfair as deBotton doesn’t dive into the philosophical ramifications of his talk — this talk, taken even at face value, ought to challenge secularists and atheists to reconsider the actual validity and truth claims religions make. Once again, mystery, experience (phenomenology), awe, a connection with something bigger, and other phenomena that we lack language for, is often summed up in the word “spiritual.” That phenomenology ought to inform philosophy, epistemology, cosmology, etc., and it is too easily dismissed, here, and in secularist camps. If reason and rationale dominate the ethic of secularism and atheism, then it is reasonable to close the door very slowly on the truth of spirituality.

On that last point, regarding “morality,” secularists and atheist continually tout that we don’t “need” religion to gain morality for it is something we can all attain to. deBotton goes a step further in this talk saying that we all “need” morality, a point that is virtually universally accepted. I would argue, however, that this is not a dismissal of the ridiculousness of religion or its anti-necessity, it is an argument for the premises of religion THAT morality is important.

— VIA —

Full disclosure: I did not actually finish “reading” the book (a term I use to communicate that I have actually digested a book’s full content).

Coogan does in this book what any author of a short survey of the Bible needs to do. He writes presumptively and selectively with surface regard for historical or cultural context, two critical (and I mean critical) elements for appropriate interpretation. I will try and elucidate a couple examples below.

This does not mean that the entire book is not worth reading. Those unfamiliar with the various euphemisms, characters, and dramas of the Biblical text may be enlightened to read about the variegated content regarding sex and gender in the Bible. However, I would suggest that any reader consider carefully the statements that assume various ways in which the Biblical world lived and acted. Much of the content is summations of the Biblical text/narrative with editorialized commentary thrown in-between, and little actual “insight.” This makes the subtitle quite apropos because this book really is about what the Bible really says (a re-statement of the stories). In other words, just pick up a Bible and start reading. You’ll get more out of that.

— Notes & Review —

For example, right in the introduction, Coogan mentions that in the Ten Commandments, “Yahweh declares that he punishes sons for the sins of their fathers to the third and fourth generation.” (Exodus 20:5; Deuteronomy 5:9) He suggests this is “inconsistent” with a later passage; “A son shall not suffer for a father’s iniquity, nor shall a father suffer for a son’s iniquity;…” (Ezekiel 18:20) He states, “Inconsistencies like these require first that the readers of the Bible who consider it authoritative read all of it, not blithely picking only passages that coincide with their own views.” (xiv-xv) While I concur, Coogan himself seems to dismiss that very principle in this example. The key words that he is comparing (underlined above) are a) different Hebrew words, and b) have different interpretations and meanings. Just like you cannot “blithely pick” only passages that “coincide with [your] own views,” neither can you “blithely” compare passages and conclude inconsistencies without taking into account language, culture, and historical context.

First, the word “punish” in the Ten Commandments passage above is “פקד” a word that has a whole host of meanings, e.g. “account for,” “visit,” “heed,” “regard,” “muster,” “attend to,” etc. One plausible interpretation is that God will visit or account for the sins of the previous generation to the third and fourth, meaning, that while sins carry through to offspring (just think of any dysfunctional family), God will “attend” to that sin as it is carried through to the next generations. It’s redemptive, and in many ways Fatherly, in the sense of caring for those who suffer because of their parents.

Second, even if the word was interpreted as “punish,” there’s a literary technique employed that draws comparison and contrast. The very next line in both Exodus and Deuteronomy is, “and making lovingkindness/mercy/everlasting faithfulness to a thousand [generations] who love me and guard/keep my commandments.” (my translation) It is a way of communicating God’s greatness by using a comparison/contrast technique. When God “hates” Esau, but “loves” Jacob, God doesn’t literally hate. It’s a Hebraism to declare that God’s love for Jacob is extremely great, so much that it may appear to be hate of Esau. (Malachi 1:3; Romans 9:13)

Third, the word in Ezekiel is “ישא” which can mean “carry,” (and “suffer”) which means that the two passages very plausibly are actually saying the exact same thing.

Coogan gives none of this as possibility, though again, neither can he in a book like this. However, this is an example of the several times in which other perspectives are completely disregarded, and his agenda (or penchant) for pointing out “flaws” in the Bible ruins the integrity of his scholarship, and thus, the content of this book. Coogan’s lens through which he reads the Bible appears quite influenced by this notion of “inconsistent” and “contradictory,” a note to be understood when reading.

In “TO KNOW IN THE BIBLICAL SENSE,” Coogan is right to point out the many euphemisms that the Bible uses (“to know,” “to eat,” “to go into,” “feet/legs,” “flesh,” “hand,” “remembrance,” “playing,” and of course, the metaphors used in Song of Songs), a fact that is often missed (or rather, ignored) by contemporary readers who wish to sanitize or moralize the Scriptures. I concur, that sex is celebrated, and not just for reproduction.

However, we slip right back into suspicious interpretation in Chapter 2 when Coogan talks about the “status of women.” Agreed, the culture then was patriarchal, and the bet-av (בית ־ אב) was the milieu at the time. However, to call this subjugation of women “divinely ordained” (22) again misses the redemptive movements of the entire story. We also ought not be surprised that, with the exception of one or two examples, every culture and religion of the ancient world was male-dominated. So, not only should we not be surprised, we ought to read the Bible through that lens to see if more is going on in the text than mere reporting or sanctioning of such activity.

In the Hebrew Bible, virginity is an attribute only of women. (33)

Again, in a male-dominated society, this ought not surprise us, and we should not a priori suggest that this is the agenda of the Bible.

Every morning, observant Jewish men say this prayer: “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who has not made me a women.” This reflects a correct understanding of biblical views of the superiority of men to women, as does Paul’s paraphrase of the creation story, that the woman was created for the sake of the man, and therefore the husband is the head of the wife. (1 Corinthians 11:3, 9) If there were women who achieved positions of authority, that was exceptional rather than usual. (59)

There are many different ways of understanding this Jewish prayer. “Perspective” and “function” are most likely the most appropriate, rather than disdain. In other words, the Jewish prayer reflects upon the joy and calling of having responsibility (thus praying in the negative “that I am not…”) and the function of being devoted to the mitzvaot (the commandments). In addition, if you understand compare/contrast — as mentioned above — this is not about misogyny. This is about dedication. Especially since women have their own prayer, “Thank you for making me according to your will,” a prayer that is every bit as orthodox as the previous.

And in regards to Paul and women, the topic is too large to sum up here. I simply refer you to other research and study.

I appreciated Coogan’s attention to the David and Jonathan story, appropriately pointing out that kissing did not mean then what it means today, thus we can infer no interpretation regarding homosexuality from this relationship. Coogan also points out that the Sodom and Gomorrah story has more to do with pride, hospitality, etc., than it does with sodomy. And, Coogan’s treatment of the New Testament is decently fair, pointing out that “none of these passages elaborate on their condemnation of homoeroticism.” (138)

Coogan provocatively suggests that “The cumulative evidence…is continuous and undeniable: Yahweh is envisioned as a sexual being.” (178) We find this in archaeology as well, and is something that deserves scholastic attention. I don’t think Coogan’s book is the appropriate avenue (for reasons already stated), however, if it is a springboard for further study, then we would do well to jump.

Right before the conclusion, Coogan writes the following, a good summary of his agenda:

In any case, whether metaphor or myth, the biblical depictions of Yahweh as an insanely jealous and abusive husband are problematic. Can an individual believer or a community of believers, for whom the Bible is authoritative, dismiss these passages out of hand? Are only some parts of the Bible authoritative? If so, what criteria do such individuals and communities use to decide which ones? These questions have been asked repeatedly over the centuries, and they are especially urgent today, when the Bible is appealed to in support of all sorts of “family values,” often in contradictory ways. Before addressing these questions, we must begin by reading the Bible on its own terms — what it meant to its original writers and audiences. That also means reading the entire Bible, in all its grandeur and complexity and horror, not privileging only those parts that say what we think it should say or what we want it to say. We should not use it just as an anthology of proof texts to be cherry-picked for scriptural support for preconceived conclusions.

YES! And now if he could go back and re-write God And Sex with that ethic in mind! It would not just be a longer book, but one that is more beneficial to the discussions, both scholarly and popularly.

Time U.S. Q&A

Editor of The New Oxford Annotated Bible Michael Coogan recently applied his thorough knowledge of Scripture to a universal and eternally relevant topic: sex. In God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says, he discusses everything from marriage and prostitution to “fire” in God’s own loins (yeah, you may want to reread the Book of Ezekiel). Coogan puts the Bible, which is often inconsistent on such hot topics, in perspective, and you may find yourself surprised by what the ancient texts have to say. (See 10 surprising facts about the world’s oldest Bible.)

Your book begins with a discussion of the erotic Song of Solomon. Does its inclusion in the Bible mean there was a positive attitude toward sex back then?
I think there was a positive attitude toward sex in general, because reproduction was essential. Anything that led to reproduction was certainly viewed positively, and the idea of refraining from sex for religious reasons was something that was fairly unusual in Judaism in most periods. In many passages it’s a highly erotic text, and it was a text that rabbinic literature tells us used to be sung in taverns. Yet when I was in seminary many decades ago, it was razored out of many of the Bibles that we had. (See pictures of religion in the ruins of Katrina.)

Is there any word in the Bible that isn’t a euphemism for genitals? There’s feet, hand, knees, flesh.
The word for testicles is stones. There aren’t what we would call precise anatomical terms. As with any literature, passages in the Bible can have more than one level of meaning. And sometimes there may be a kind of sexual innuendo or double entendre there that is implicit. (Read “The Case for Teaching the Bible.”)

Even laughing has a sexual connotation.
That’s a great one, and you don’t see it until you get to the story about Isaac telling the foreign king that his wife Rebecca is his sister, and then the king sees Isaac making Rebecca laugh, and he says, “She’s not your sister, she’s your wife!” Usually the translation itself is not literal; the translations will say fondling, caressing, or something like that. But the Hebrew word actually means to make laugh. It’s the same word that’s used in other contexts, as in the story of the golden calf, so there’s a hint of an orgy there, which complicates the offense.

How important is it to read the Bible in its original languages?
It’s essential for some of us to do it, if for no other reason so that translations can be made that are as accurate as possible. Often translators reflect their own views and their own biases just as much as the biblical writers do. I was interested recently in this case that the Supreme Court had in the Westboro Baptist Church. I looked at their website, and he lists all the passages that he says the Bible talks about sodomy. Well, in most of them sodomy isn’t discussed at all. The term sodomy is a translator’s term to translate Hebrew words that never mean sodomy in the sense of anal intercourse between males. (Read “Should the Highest Court Protect the Ugliest Speech?”)

Given all the examples of polygamy, where in the Bible is marriage sanctioned as a union only between one man and one woman?
There is no unequivocal statement in the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible, that says that monogamy should be the norm. For the most part, biblical characters we know well, if they could afford it, had many wives. Solomon, the greatest lover of them all — maybe why he’s attributed with writing the Song of Songs — had 300 wives. So the fundamentalist Mormons who insist that polygamy is biblical are right, in a sense. If you’re going to be a strict literalist, there’s nothing wrong with polygamy. (See the 25 most influential evangelicals in America.)

We never know if Adam and Eve are married, right?
That’s right. There’s no marriage ceremony described. Here’s another case where the issue of translation comes up. The same Hebrew word can be translated either as woman or wife. So when it says that the man knew his wife, and she got pregnant — that’s another euphemism, to know in the biblical sense — it could also be the man knew his woman and she got pregnant.

You devote a chapter to the status of women. Is the reason there are so many misconceptions about the Bible and sex the fact that we often forget how patriarchal those societies were?
The status of women is important as background, but it’s also another example of how we have, for the most part, while accepting the Bible as authoritative, moved beyond it and in some ways rejected some of its main points of view. If we can do that for things like slavery or the subordinate status of women, then we can do it on other issues as well, like same-sex marriage. We have to ask the question, How is it that we’ll take some parts of the Bible and say they are absolutely and eternally binding, and other parts can simply be ignored?

As for abortion, the Bible doesn’t say much.
It doesn’t say anything. That’s one of the things I find most interesting, because both sides of the contemporary debate about abortion will quote the Bible in support of their position. They have to quote verses that don’t really talk about abortion.

Addressing the sexuality of God, you write, “Yahweh is envisioned as a sexual being,” according to certain passages.
He is described as a sexual being, but the language is both mythical and metaphorical. (See pictures of John 3:16 in pop culture.)

Those descriptions, in Ezekiel, for example, even if they’re allegories, are pretty explicit.
They’re very explicit. They’ve in fact been called pornographic.

Were people in biblical times less prudish than we are today?
I think in some ways they were, even though they used a lot of euphemisms. When they were thinking about their god, they thought of him in ways not that different from the way other people thought about their gods. If you could describe God as a king or a shepherd or a warrior, then you can also describe him as a husband, and doing the sorts of things that husbands do. In the Greco-Roman world in which Christianity arose, the idea that a deity would come down to earth and have sex with a mortal would have been not surprising at all.

Reviewed by Phyllis Trible

http://www.bib-arch.org/reviews/review-god-and-sex.asp

God and Sex. Who would not be intrigued by so expansive and seductive a title coming from a secular and boutique press? But the subtitle narrows the scope: What the Bible Really Says. If that phrase suggests either a prudish or salacious bent, the identity of the author assures us differently. A scholar of ancient Near Eastern and Biblical studies, Michael Coogan writes from head and heart—and both are in the right place.

For him, the paradigm of male dominance and female subordination governs gender relationships in the Bible. “Your desire will be for your man,” says Yahweh to the woman in the story of Eden, “and he will rule over you” (Genesis 3:16). “That decree,” says Coogan, “illustrates the bleakness of the overall Biblical picture for feminists who would claim the Bible as an authority.” Yes, the paradigm heralds bleakness. Whether that bleakness also harbors blessing, readers must decide.

In declaring Genesis 3:16 a divine “decree” and, later, a “curse,” Coogan misreads. (He is in good company, from the apostle Paul and his successors through millennia.) These words of Yahweh to the woman do not characterize her status in creation but rather her life after disobedience. They do not “decree” patriarchy; they describe it. They announce judgment; they do not prescribe punishment, which comes later in expulsion from Eden. Further, Yahweh never “curses” the woman. This word the deity reserves for the serpent and the earth (via the man). In numerous ways, literary analysis disqualifies Genesis 3:16 as the paradigmatic proof text for endorsing patriarchy.

Nonetheless, Coogan’s overall assessment is right. For some 40 years (a fitting Biblical time frame), second-wave feminists have wrestled with patriarchy and the Bible. They, too, have cautioned that the Bible belongs to the foreign country of antiquity. Despite its ubiquitous presence in the news and its canonical standing in communities of faith, it remains distant, even alien, in time, languages, mentality and geography. For diverse reasons—scant evidence, contradictory data, discrepancies among genres and historically locked views—what the Bible really says (or really does not say) about matters such as abortion, marriage, divorce, adultery, rape, prostitution and same-sex relationships does not readily transfer (for better or worse) to our world. Tensions between “original meanings” and contemporary applications persist—tensions that Coogan compares to interpreting the U.S. Constitution.

But what about competing evidence within the Bible? What about women characters, for example, who don’t seem to fit patriarchal strictures? In ancient Israel, the prophet Miriam was never linked to a husband. Leader in victory at the crossing of the sea and questioner of authority in the wilderness, she survived censure to endure in prophetic tradition as the equal of her brothers Aaron and Moses (Micah 6:4). The prophet Deborah, identified perhaps as “woman of fire,” exercised authority as judge and military leader in the settlement of the land (Judges 4 and 5). In the reign of King Josiah, the prophet Huldah (without her husband) authorized the beginnings of the Bible (2 Kings 22:14). And the prophet Noadiah, identified by neither father nor husband, opposed the policies of Nehemiah (Nehemiah 6:14). In the New Testament, the prophet Anna, a widow apparently living an independent life, blessed the child Jesus who had been brought to the Temple (Luke 2:36–38). Four unmarried daughters of Philip the evangelist also held the gift of prophecy (Acts 21:9). To these prophets we add wise women (of Tekoa and Abel), queens (Jezebel and Vashti), widows (Naomi and Judith) and disciples (Mary, Mary Magdalene, Joanna).

Throughout the Bible various women, by their actions, words or status, challenge the patriarchal paradigm, at least indirectly. Although Coogan reports on these public figures, he fails to stress their potentially subversive presence. What did such women represent? Tokens? Exceptions? An alternative narrative? A lost history? A saving remnant within the bleakness of patriarchy?

Despite this book’s title, God takes center stage only in the last chapter. There Coogan argues that the Biblical deity is a male, indeed a sexual being who engages in reproductive activities in a polytheistic environment. The archaeological find at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud depicts two figures with the inscription “Yahweh and his Asherah” (eighth century B.C.E.). Within the Bible, more evidence surfaces: Ezekiel’s description of the divine loins (1:27); the pairing of Yahweh in the Temple with Asherah; metaphors of Yahweh as Israel’s husband and father; the goddess Wisdom alongside Yahweh; and the Christian formula for the parentage of Jesus: son of God, born of a virgin.

Believers cannot neglect these threatening descriptions, says Coogan. But to what extent have believers neglected them? Even though polytheism and a female consort may not be acceptable, the basic idea that God is male has endured for centuries, sometimes as unofficial dogma. After all, Jesus called God “Father.” Missing among many believers are sustained critiques of this idea.

Female images of God, in contrast to a female consort, call for attention. The metaphor connecting divine mercy (rahamim) to the vehicle of the womb (rehem) permeates the Bible. One small witness describes the God who “writhed in labor pains” giving birth to Israel (Deuteronomy 32:18). Sexual overtones in these portrayals are not male. Although early in his prophecy (chapter 3) Hosea depicts Yahweh as the abusive husband beating his wife Israel, later Yahweh repudiates both male identity and violence. “For I am God (‘el) and not male (‘is), the Holy One (qadosh) in your midst, and I do not come to destroy” (Hosea 11:9). Is this the pattern of the abusive husband—to feign goodness and mercy? Or does the declaration of holiness testify to God beyond (male) sex, gender and attendant consequences? In keeping with his passionate plea that we read “the entire Bible” and not “cherry-pick” for “preconceived conclusions,” Coogan might have explored these and other counter-texts.

On one occasion, God set before ancient Israel life and death and then commanded the people to decide the difference. “Choose life that you may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19). Likewise recognizing that authority derives from the community, Coogan admirably concludes that what the Bible really says (this time, its “underlying ideals”) moves “toward the goal of full freedom and equality for all persons.” That rhetorical flourish awaits development beyond the provocative subject of God and Sex.

[Distinguished feminist Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible is professor of Biblical studies at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in North Carolina. From 1981 until her “retirement” in 1998, she taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York. She served as president of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1994, only the second woman to serve in that capacity since the organization was founded in 1880.]

http://www.homeword.com/teenology-raising-great-teenagers-p-60.html

PART ONE: PARENTING TEENS TO BECOME RESPONSIBLE ADULTS

1. Who Is That Stranger in Your House

It has been said that raising kids is part joy and part guerrilla warfare. (17)

A dog trainer once told us that training your dog is 66 percent human training and 33 percent actual dog training. I think the same rings true for raising teenagers. (19)

One of the deepest cries of adolescence is FREEDOM, and it’s the parents’ job to help their teen become a responsible adult. We can only do that when we move our parenting role from controlling to consulting and from micromanaging to mentoring. (19)

There is more stress in this generation of American families than in any previous generation, and it is playing havoc on the emotional health of parents. Raising kids was not meant to be this difficult. (21)

The first step is making sure we have a realistic view of healthy teenagers and their parents. (22)

Walt Mueller … described adolescence as a transitional stage in which your child is “an adult trying to happen.” (23)

…part of normal healthy teenage development is

• finding a healthy self identity
• establishing healthy relationships
• making good decisions
• developing a relationship with God

No teen will become a responsible adult if their parents carry the load for them. (27)

A child-focused lifestyle isn’t healthy, and frankly, it’s not fair to the kids if you expect to be a healthy role model. (28)

2. Correcting Behavior Without Crushing Character

Micromanaging parents never get the results they hope for, and most often they end up disappointed. The most effective parents are those who surrender the control they really don’t have and offer choices for their teens to make. That is the way to teach responsibility and respect. (33)

The most valuable lessons in life often come as consequences from making a mistake. Before freedom often comes pain. (34)

I’m afraid too many parents have indulged and enabled their children to such an extent that they have helped create irresponsible and even narcissistic kids. (37)

Discipline is fundamentally a matter of leadership. (37)

Parents should not agonize over what a child fails to do or does, if the child is perfectly capable of agonizing over it themself [sic]. – John Rosemond

Foster Cline, in his excellent book Parenting Teens with Love and Logic, offers four steps toward responsibility:

1. Give your teen responsibility
2. Trust that your child will carry it out and at the same time hope and pray that they will blow it. (They will learn from their misstep.
3. When she does blow it, stand back and allow consequences to occur while expressing empathy.
4. Turn right back around and give him the same responsibility all over again, because that sends a powerful implied message: “You’re so smart that you can learn. People do learn from their mistakes, and you’re no different.”

Let reality be the teacher. (41)

Shame-based parenting never works in the long haul. (43)

By and large, most teens do want to succeed and, believe it or not, please their parents. (43)

3. Learning the Developmental Stages of Adolescence

The word that might describe the teen years best is change. (49)

Kids socialize in what is called friendship clusters, and I vote for using almost any way to get to know the people in your teen’s cluster of influence without becoming a snoop. (52)

On this roller coaster of emotional ups and downs, you can be your teen’s solid ground. (54)

Parents must avoid smothering their kids with their own faith. …Allow and even affirm the difficult questions. A healthy faith has no room for questions. And whenever possible, empower them to put their faith in action. (55)

As kids shift their way of thinking and acting, so must parents. Parents have to shift their parenting style to keep up with what is going on in the life of their child. (57)

4. Creating a Media-Safe Home

Since we can’t keep our children from all media, we will have to teach them to learn to discern what is influencing them. (64)

1. Evaluate everything you see and hear.
2. Examine your own behavior.
3. Enter into dialog, not monolog.
4. Develop usage agreements for music, media, and the Internet.

Perhaps the two most prevalent approaches parents take toward media use don’t work: ignoring the dangers and being too strict. (68) It’s ultimate up to you to set and enforce those boundaries, but they will work best if you and your teen create them together. (69)

5. Teaching the Purity Code

The Purity Code Pledge

In honor of God, my family, and my future spouse, I commit to sexual purity. This involves:

• Honoring God with my body
• Renewing my mind for the good
• Turning my eyes from worthless things
• Guarding my heart above all else

Many parents ask me about the right age to have “the talk” with their kids. I always give the same response: “Never.” The one-time birds-and-bees talk doesn’t work. (81)

6. Communication Is Key

Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them. – Donald Miller

Prize above all else those who love you and wish you well. – Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

The deepest principle in the human nature is the craving to be appreciated. – William James

Children need more models of healthy behavior than criticism. (97)

If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don’t be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning ‘Good morning’ at total strangers.” – Maya Angelou

When a family is overcommitted [sic], it quickly becomes under connected. (98)

A.W.E.: affection, warmth, and encouragement. (100)

I have yet to find the man, however great or exalted in his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than he would ever do under a spirit of criticism. – Charles Schwab

You have to take the lead with your attitude. You can’t expect your teens to go someplace with their attitude that you haven’t gone yourself. Emotionally unhealthy parents produce emotionally unhealthy kids. (103)

An apology is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of strength and healthy authority. (105)

Four Things You Can’t Recover

The stone…after the throw
The word…after it is said
The occasion…after it is missed
The time…after it is gone

7. The Spiritual Life of a Teenager

Most teenagers and their parents may not realize it, but a lot of research in the sociology of religion suggests that the most important social influence in shaping young people’s religious lives is the religious life modeled and taught by their parents. – Christian Smith

A spiritual life without discipline is impossible. Discipline is the other side of discipleship. – Henri Nouwen

Commitment is what transforms a promise into a reality. It is the words that speak boldly of your intentions, and the actions which speak louder than your words. It is making the time when there is none. Coming through time after time after time, year after year. Commitment is the stuff character is made of, the power to change the face of things. It is the daily triumph of integrity over skepticism. – Abraham Lincoln

8. Dealing With a Troubled Teen

If you have a troubled teen, let me shout from the rooftop: THERE IS HOPE! (127)

Stay as calm as you possibly can, get on the same page with your spouse, and get as emotionally, spiritually, and physically healthy as you possibly can. (129)

Persevere and Seek God’s Help | Find Support | Get on the Same Page With Your Spouse | Develop a Contract for Behavior | Seek Counsel From an Expert

9. Your Marriage and Raising Teens

It’s a common surprise: Parents think that once their children get past the exhausting toddler years and become more independent, life will slow down and the couple will have more time to connect spiritually. For many, the opposite occurs. (148)

A successful marriage is not a gift, it is more like an achievement. (150)

10. The Changing Culture

Set Parental Standards | Teach Your Kids to Learn to Discern | Use Experiential Learning to Help Change Their Lives | Encourage Positive Peer Influence | Foster Spiritual Growth

PART TWO: COMMON PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

Eating Disorders, Drug and Alcohol Use and Abuse, Tattoos and Body Piercing, Coping With Tragedy, Cyberbullying, Driving, Choosing a College, Depression, Dinnertime, Overweight Teens, Self-Injury, Sleep, Sexual Abuse, Suicide, Homework Hassles

APPENDIX: SAMPLE FAMILY CONTRACTS AND AGREEMENTS

SAMPLE INTERNET USAGE CONTRACT

The average amount of time I will spend online will be no more than __ hours per day. I will limit my Web surfing to educational, Christian, or other family-friendly sites only. Unsolicited e-mails and forwards with attachments will be deleted unopened. Internet filters will be used at all times.

SAMPLE MUSIC AGREEMENT

The number of hours music can be played in the home is __ per day/week. ___ are the only acceptable styles of music to be listened to anywhere (home, car, school, friend’s house). I may not attend any concerts where __ (names of groups) are playing.

SAMPLE TV/MOVIE VIEWING CONTRACT

The average amount of time the TV can be on in our home is __ hours per day/week. Television programs with ratings of __ are not acceptable in our home. __ are not acceptable TV programs in our home. The only movie ratings that are available for each family member to view are __. The family agreement about MTV (or VH1 or other channels) is __. An example of a TV program that could be a fun family weekly date is __. A movie that supports the biblical standards of our family is __.

— VIA —

I have appreciated Jim’s work over the years, and consider him to be a gift to the Christian community. His work on youth and family is one of the most accessible I have ever seen, and this book exemplifies it well. The first two chapters of this book are worth the price of admission, and I would highly commend this to any parent of a pre-teen so that they can get some foundations under them before puberty begins to set in. Reading this book is like sitting in his office and having a friend walk you through the various obstacles of raising teenagers. The standards, stories, and scripts (contracts) will all prove helpful to many!

However, I had a few difficulties. Here are the top three.

Regarding learning about the adolescent stages and being immersed in the media culture, I simply do not know any parent outside of a parent who is also a professional youth worker or academician that can do what this demands. Now, I’m all for being educated, reading, engaging in the conversation, and doing everything you can to be well informed. Information can be very powerful, encouraging, etc. But the vast majority of parents I know simply will feel discouraged and overwhelmed at the amount of research, reading, etc, they’ll have to do in order to be marginally informed.

I am a “professional youth worker” (whatever that really means) myself, and I have been, for all my years of doing this, behind in understanding youth development and youth culture. Just this last month, I got introduced to two new up-and-coming bands, and these things called “spirit hoods!?” Yeah, I would have never seen that coming. And my kids, they’re totally wanting to be a part of the “tribe!” I’m also reading new research (Teen 2.0) and some old (Piaget) that is challenging my thinking all over again. Good stuff…I really enjoy it. But I question how reasonable it is for parents to even grasp the cliff notes of all this.

To be fair, Burns does not suggest that this level of research is required. And, he includes summaries in this book that are really accessible to the reader (again, why I do like this book). I would, however, suggest that listening and relating closely to your kids more than the culture around them and what experts say about adolescent development, is, in my opinion, far more doable, and far more effective. If you can learn the skill of simply “paying attention” well, you can learn much about development and culture through your kids. By the way, that’s how I can now tell you about those Spirit Hoods!

Regarding his segment on media, McLuhan, Hipps, Postman, and Kelly would suggest, contrary to what Burns has written, that technology is not neutral. I do concur with the boundaries, the goals, and the content care that Burns suggests we attend to. I simply think that it’s inaccurate and unwise to say that “technology is neutral.” Putting an iPad in their hands, a phone with internet at their fingertips, or a TV in their room, regardless of content is transforming your family. Understanding the effects of that technology is important for parents (e.g. “individualism,” “isolationism,” “ownership” “entitlement,” etc., are all effects of the technology).

Lastly, on page 103 (and I believe in other areas), Burns talks about emotionally healthy parents and the affect that has on emotionally healthy kids. There is almost a direct correlation. I completely concur, which is why much of the book is to be commended. However, in Part Two of the book in dealing with the common problems and solutions, many of the issues listed fall directly into that category of emotional health, yet he does not direct the parents themselves to be introspective about their influence on their child, nor does he ask them to seek healing themselves. I realize that pointing this out may be unfair, as Burns’ purpose is simply to give some quick handholds on the solutions and outlines of the particular issues. However, I’m simply persuaded that this corollary between parents and kids is a point that cannot be talked about too much, nor directed at too firmly. I have become persuaded that kids are a reflection, for the most part, of the world we have created for them. Too much of the youth development “corrective” philosophies that exist out there focus on the kids, as if they’re the problem. I think this needs to radically change, as the adults who are creating those environments and experiences for our kids ought to be more introspective and mature in their personal evaluations. Again, the first two chapters of Teenology does this well. I suppose I wish it had pushed harder on this.

Regardless of the above, I still commend the book for, as I mentioned, its accessibility, its honesty, its simplicity, and its information. I hope my comments and evaluation above were read in love and respect to the author.

My blog is really not for blogging, but more for study, and many posts are in the Greek vein. This post is in the Hebrew vein with a prophetic nod to the modern.

Thanks to my wife for starting our date night out with this song, and to Josh Garrels for his intimate concert at Vintage Faith a few weeks back.

Oh great mammon of form and function | Careless consumerist consumption
Dangerous dysfunction disguised as expensive taste

I’m a people disgraced by what I claim I need | And what I want to waste
I take no account for nothing if it’s not mine

It’s a misappropriation of funds | Protect my ninety percent with my guns
Whose side am I on? Well, who’s winning?

My kingdom’s built with the blood of slaves | Orphans, widows, and homeless graves
I sold their souls just to build my private mansion

Some people say that my time is coming | Kingdom come is the justice running
Down, down, down on me

‘Cause I’m a poor child, I’m a lost son | I refuse to give my love to anyone
Fight for the truth, or help the weaker ones
Because I love my Babylon

I am a slave, I was never free | I betrayed you for blood money
Oh I bought the world, all is vanity
When, oh my Lord I’m your enemy

Come to me, and find your life
Children sing, Zion’s in sight

I said don’t trade your name for a serial number
Priceless lives were born from under graves where I found you

Say, my name ain’t yours and yours is not mine | Mine is the Lord, and yours is my child
That’s how it’s always been

Now it’s time to make a change | Leave your homes, give to the poor all that you own
Lose your life, so that you could find it

First to be last when the true world comes | Livin’ like a humble fool to overcome
This upside-down wisdom of a dying world

Zion’s not built with hands and in this place God will dwell with man
Sick be healed and cripples stand
Sing Hallelu

My kingdom’s built with the blood of my son | Selfless sacrifice for everyone
Faith, hope, love, and harmony

I said let this world know me by your love
By your love

Oh my child, daughters and sons | I made you in love to overcome
Free as a bird, my flowers in the sun
On your way to Mount Zion

All you slaves, be set free
Come on out child and come on home to me

We will dance, we will rejoice
If you can hear me then follow my voice

— VIA —

One of my heroes. This collection is simple, straightforward, frequently a gentle reminder, occasionally a poignant insight, and always kind, and loving; an expression of the very best of what humanity has to offer.

Below are simply my favorite highlights:

FOREWORD BY Joanne Rogers

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much, who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men, and the love of little children, who has filled his niche and accomplished his task, who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul, who has never lacked appreciation of Earth’s beauty or failed to express it, who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had, whose life was an inspiration, whose memory a benediction. – Bessie Anderson Stanley

The outside world may have thought his qualities of wisdom and strength came naturally to him, but those close to him knew that he was constantly striving to be the best that he could be. He was as human as the rest of us. (loc.40)

There isn’t anyone you couldn’t love once you’ve heard their story. – Mary Lou Kownacki

The Courage to Be Yourself (loc.106)

Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime’s work, but it’s worth the effort. (loc.107)

It’s not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life that ultimately nourish our souls. It’s the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is firm. (loc.147)

You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are. (loc.161)

I must be an emotional archaeologist because I keep looking for the roots of things, particularly the roots of behavior and why I feel certain ways about certain things. (loc.190)

Little by little we human beings are confronted with situations that give us more and more clues that we aren’t perfect. (loc.205)

The child is in me still . . . and sometimes not so still. (loc.207)

Understanding Love (loc.208)

Deep within us—no matter who we are—there lives a feeling of wanting to be lovable, of wanting to be the kind of person that others like to be with. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving. (loc.211)

Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. (loc.213)

If the day ever came when we were able to accept ourselves and our children exactly as we and they are, then, I believe, we would have come very close to an ultimate understanding of what “good” parenting means. It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance—and often far short. But one of the most important gifts a parent can give a child is the gift of accepting that child’s uniqueness. (loc. 223)

There is only one thing evil cannot stand and that is forgiveness. – William F. Orr

There are many kinds of competition, to be sure. But I think that love does have something to do with them all. In fact, I believe that if we’ve ever wanted someone’s love, then we’ve known what competition really means. (250)

Actor David Carradine, son of John Carradine, said in gratitude of his father’s accomplishments, “I could stand on his shoulders and feel twice as tall.” That each generation could stand on the shoulders of the last and feel twice as tall is a poetic hope for all our families. (loc.274)

You bring all you ever were and are to any relationship you have today. (loc.323)

When we love a person, we accept him or her exactly as is: the lovely with the unlovely, the strong along with the fearful, the true mixed in with the facade, and of course, the only way we can do it is by accepting ourselves that way. (loc.340)

The Challenges of Inner Discipline (loc.343)

What makes the difference between wishing and realizing our wishes? Lots of things, of course, but the main one, I think, is whether we link our wishes to our active work. It may take months or years, but it’s far more likely to happen when we care so much that we’ll work as hard as we can to make it happen. (347)

How great it is when we come to know that times of disappointment can be followed by times of fulfillment; that sorrow can be followed by joy; that guilt over falling short of our ideals can be replaced by pride in doing all that we can; and that anger can be channeled into creative achievements . . . and into dreams that we can make come true! (loc.364)

Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart, and learn to love the questions themselves. – Rainer Maria Rilke

I now know that the space between a person doing his or her best to deliver a message of good news and the needy listener is holy ground. (loc.441)

We Are All Neighbors (loc.457)

When I was very young, most of my childhood heroes wore capes, flew through the air, or picked up buildings with one arm. They were spectacular and got a lot of attention. But as I grew, my heroes changed, so that now I can honestly say that anyone who does anything to help a child is a hero to me. (loc.501)

Erik Erikson, a psychologist whose insight into human development has been an important foundation of our work here in the Neighborhood, said that “tradition is to human beings what instinct is to animals.” Imagine the chaos if animals lost their instincts. So would it be if human beings were to lose all their traditions. The study of history helps keep traditions alive. When we study how our ancestors dealt with challenges, we can (hopefully) learn from their successes and failures, and fashion our responses to challenges in even more naturally human ways. (loc.526)

Fred Rogers’ Acceptance Speech Television Hall of Fame February, 1999

Fame is a four-letter word; and like tape or zoom or face or pain or life or love, what ultimately matters is what we do with it.

I feel that those of us in television are chosen to be servants. It doesn’t matter what our particular job, we are chosen to help meet the deeper needs of those who watch and listen—day and night!

The conductor of the orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl grew up in a family that had little interest in music, but he often tells people he found his early inspiration from the fine musicians on television.

Last month a thirteen-year-old boy abducted an eight-year-old girl; and when people asked him why, he said he learned about it on TV. “Something different to try,” he said. “Life’s cheap; what does it matter?”

Well, life isn’t cheap. It’s the greatest mystery of any millennium, and television needs to do all it can to broadcast that . . . to show and tell what the good in life is all about.

But how do we make goodness attractive? By doing whatever we can do to bring courage to those whose lives move near our own—by treating our “neighbor” at least as well as we treat ourselves and allowing that to inform everything that we produce.

Who in your life has been such a servant to you . . . who has helped you love the good that grows within you? Let’s just take ten seconds to think of some of those people who have loved us and wanted what was best for us in life—those who have encouraged us to become who we are tonight—just ten seconds of silence.

No matter where they are—either here or in heaven—imagine how pleased those people must be to know that you thought of them right now.

We all have only one life to live on earth. And through television, we have the choice of encouraging others to demean this life or to cherish it in creative, imaginative ways.

On behalf of all of us at Family Communications and the Public Broadcasting Service, I thank you for all the good that you do in this unique enterprise . . . and for wanting our Neighborhood to be part of this celebration. Thank you very much.

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing things historians usually record—while, on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happens on the banks. – Will Durant

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if God and neighbor are somehow One. “Loving God, Loving neighbor”—the same thing? For me, coming to recognize that God loves every neighbor is the ultimate appreciation! (loc.570)

Please think of the children first. If you ever have anything to do with their entertainment, their food, their toys, their custody, their day or night care, their health care, their education—listen to the children, learn about them, learn from them. Think of the children first. (loc.583)

What matters isn’t how a person’s inner life finally puts together the alphabet and numbers of his outer life. What really matters is whether he uses the alphabet for the declaration of a war or the description of a sunrise—his numbers for the final count at Buchenwald or the specifics of a brand-new bridge. (loc.621)

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” (loc.645)

…every innovation is an amputation as well as an extension. – Brian McLaren (from the Forward)

INTRODUCTION

This is not a book intended to argue that the church needs to engage culture. Rather, it assumes cultural engagement is well underway. It presupposes that there are changes already happening in churches and that people are wrestling with difficult questions about the true message of the gospel, the balance between cultural relevancy and faithfulness to the gospel, and what it means to be the church in our electronic consumer culture. This book seeks to explore these issues and provide some insight into the often unintended consequences — both good and bad — of how we go about living as the church. (14)

Why are we seeing such drastic changes in our philosophy and cultural topography? Why is postmodernity gaining a foothold in the church? Why do many Christians increasingly see conversion to the Christian faith as a process rather than as an event? Why are congregations showing a preference for nonlinear experiences and mystery over propositions and reason? (16)

I propose that the answer to the question of why these changes have come about can be found in part by exploring the nature and effects of media and technology on culture. (17)

Behind everything that follows is a conviction that within the forms of media and technology, regardless of their content, are extremely powerful forces that cause changes in our faith, theology, culture, and ultimately the church. (17)

PART I: NEW WAYS TO PERCEIVE

CHAPTER ONE: SEEING BUT NOT PERCEIVING

Is twentieth-century man one who runs down the street shouting, “I’ve got the answers. What are the questions?” – McLuhan

The forms of media and technology — regardless of their content — cause profound changes in the church and culture. (23)

I find Mr. No Depth Perception to be an appropriate metaphor for the church’s relationship to media and technology. We are able to see, but we have great difficulty perceiving. (25)

To perceive media and technology with both eyes open, we cannot simply list the various benefits and liabilities of all new and existing media in hopes of understanding their power and meaning. Instead, the task before us requires an entirely different approach to analyzing media, recognizing them not simply as conduits or pipelines (i.e., neutral purveyors of information), but rather as dynamic forces with power to shape us, regardless of content. Such an approach invites us to ask different questions, better questions, and moves us beyond the oversimplified but common belief that media forms can be deemed good or bad based on how they are used. This perspective is deeply entrenched in the assumption that a medium can be considered “redeemable” if it dispenses the gospel or educational information, but “evil” if it distributes sex and violence. It is imperative we move beyond this paradigm and realize that our forms of media and technology are primary forces that cause changes in our philosophy, technology, culture, and ultimately the way we do church. (27)

CHAPTER TWO: PERCEIVING THE POWERS THAT SHAPE US

The medium is the message. – McLuhan

Whenever methods or media change, the message automatically changes along with them. (30)

Christianity — in a centralized, administrative, bureaucratic form — is certainly irrelevant. – McLuhan

In the same way we are invited to step back and perceive the power of our media, not in an effort to stop them but, for the purpose of navigating them. (34)

Every medium is an extension of our humanity. This is the starting point for his approach to media and the doorway to understanding their power and meaning. | All forms of media (i.e., any human invention or technology) extend or amplify some part of ourselves. (34)

In McLuhan’s view the chief error of Narcissus was not that he fell in love with himself but rather that he failed to recognize himself in the fountain’s reflection. …As proof of this interpretation, McLuhan points out that the name Narcissus is derived from the Greek word narcosis, which means “numbness.” | When we fail to perceive media as extensions of ourselves, they take on godlike characteristics, and we become their servants. (36)

When we become aware of the specific ways in which technology and media serve as extensions of ourselves, much of their power is dispelled. We are returned to being owners of technology rather than those who are owned by it. (37)

…media are much more than neutral purveyors of information. They have the power to shape us regardless of content and thus cannot be evaluated solely upon their use. (38)

In truth, the content of a given form of media actually distracts us from detecting the effects of its form. …We are oblivious to the ways the medium, regardless of its content, reduces our capacity for abstract thought, makes us prefer intuition and experience over logic and reasoning, and revives tribal experiences in an individualistic culture. (38)

The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. – McLuhan

THE ECOLOGY OF MEDIA. The principle of ecology refers to the ways in which environments change and adapt. For example, imagine two adjacent rooms separated by a wall. In one room the temperature is 20 degrees; in the adjacent room the temperature is 90 degrees. If the dividing wall is removed, the two temperatures are blended to form a completely new climate. In the same way, communication media often serve to remove the walls of time and distance. As a result, formerly separate worlds collide, creating entirely new cultural ecologies. (40)

Under these conditions, the world undergoes a kind of implosion; the barriers of time and space are abolished, greatly diminishing the scale of our world — which leads to the phenomenon of the Global Village. (40) [VIA: Would Roman roads also be considered a "medium?" I think yes.]

What does the medium extend? You’ll recall that McLuhan believed every new medium enhances, amplifies, or extends some human capacity. Determining which part of ourselves — and this might be a body part (the camera is an extension of the eye, a previous medium (the telephone is an extension of the telegraph), or even an emotion (smoke detectors extend our sense of smell as well as our feeling of security) — is extended is essential to understanding the ways in which that medium impacts society.

What does the medium make obsolete? Every new medium makes an older technology obsolete. In this case the word obsolete does not necessarily mean the technology has disappeared but that the function of that previous medium has changed. For example, the automobile made the horse and buggy obsolete. This means the horse and buggy went from being used for transportation to being used for quaint entertainment and romance.

What does the medium reverse into? This is the law where we discover the dangers of media. When pushed to its extreme, every medium will reverse into its opposite intention. For example, when pushed to the extreme, the automobile — a medium intended to increase the speed of transportation — reverses into traffic jams and fatal accidents. This law of reversal can often be the most difficult to predict or anticipate. But sometimes the answer to the following question sheds light on this effect.

What does the medium retrieve? Every new medium retrieves some ancient experience or medium from the past. In other words, there is no such thing as a completely new technology. When we discover which medium is retrieved, we can study its effects in hindsight in an effort to anticipate the future of the new medium. For example, the medium of e-mail retrieves the telegraph. If we want to understand the future effects of e-mail, we would be wise to study the cultural effects of the telegraph in the 1800s. [VIA: What does the telegraph retrieve? Smoke signals? Drum beats?]

CHAPTER THREE: PRINTING: THE ARCHITECT OF THE MODERN CHURCH

The printed book added much to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became possible and literacy conferred the power of detachment, noninvolvement. – McLuhan

The broad introduction of literacy into an entire culture completely alters the way that culture thinks. …our thinking patterns begin to mirror the specific form of media we use to communicate. (47)

A QUANTUM LEAP: THE PHONETIC ALPHABET. While a phonetic alphabet is linear, sequential, and abstract, ideographic writing is nonlinear, holistic, and intuitive. (49)

These two media have very different forms that contribute to the fundamental differences between Eastern and Western approaches to philosophy. Ever since the Greeks perfected the phonetic alphabet, Western philosophy has been centered on linear, fragmented, and sequential forms of logic called syllogisms that perfectly mirror the form of our writing system. In contrast the nonlinear, holistic nature of Eastern philosophy can be summarized by a single symbol, the yin-yang, which mirrors ideographic writing. (49)

We need to understand what happens to Western culture when we begin to communicate using images and logos rather than phonetic words, as in the case of Nike. (50)

By creating the first uniformly repeatable commodity, print became the first assembly line for mass production. This linear, sequential form of visual organization was the basis for the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent methods of mass production used to make everything from cars to fast food. (53)

PRINT MADE US MORE INDIVIDUALISTIC. In a predominantly oral culture, one in which communication is based on face-to-face oral speech, there is no means for storing information or knowledge outside of the mind. As a result, once knowledge is obtained, the culture depends upon the community to both retain and repeat that knowledge. With the introduction of writing, people are afforded the luxury to learn and think in isolation without the threat of losing those thoughts. As writing becomes the dominant communication system, people no longer need the community to retain teachings, traditions, or identity. As a result, they spend greater amounts of time reflecting in private. This increased isolation creates a new emphasis on individualism. Prior to the written word, a person’s identity was completely bound to the tribe; the notion of the individual didn’t exist. Because writing introduced the notion of the autonomous self, printing obliterated tribal bonds and profoundly amplified individualism. (53)

The modern age conceived of a gospel that matters primarily for the individual. The gospel was reduced to forgiveness as a transaction, a concern for personal morality, and the intellectual pursuit of doctrinal precision. In this view the Bible became little more than an individual’s handbook for moral living and right thinking. As a result, printing had a tendency to erode the communal nature of faith. (54)

In this case these highly individualistic disciplines were placed above everything else as the primary means to discipleship. …Faith then moves from being personal to being private, a shift that is antithetical to the biblical understanding of what it means to live as God’s people. (55)

PRINT INTRODUCED THE NOTION OF OBJECTIVITY. For the first time people were able to stand outside their ideas and observe them on a printed page. This detachment had a profound effect, as it introduced the belief that we can stand outside something and judge it. (55)

PRINT MADE US THINK MORE ABSTRACTLY. Prior to the rise of printing, worship was centered on the concrete practices of the sacraments, like baptism or communion. But with the new capacity and enthusiasm for abstract thought due to printing, the pulpit began to displace the altar and sacraments… (57)

Another effect of this emphasis on abstraction was that Protestants became preoccupied with getting their doctrine straight. (57)

PRINT INTENSIFIES LINEAR, RATIONAL THINKING. This led to a belief that the gospel could be established and received only through reason an facts. (59)

CHAPTER FOUR: ELECTRONIC MEDIA: PLANTING THE SEEDS OF THE EMERGING CHURCH

The age of print, which held sway from approximately 1500 to 1900, had its obituary tapped out by the telegraph, the first of the new electric media. – McLuhan

Today we experience in reverse what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing. – McLuhan

We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us. – McLuhan

Electronic culture presents us with a disorienting hall of mirrors where media are embedded in other media. (64)

I’m suggesting the easiest way to get our bearings is to focus our attention on a few basic inventions. …It is my contention that the most significant inventions of the electronic age include the telegraph, the radio, and the photograph. (65)

Invention comes from the root word inventus, which means to start from scratch and discover something new. Innovation’s root word is nova. nova means to make new again, to take something that already exists and make it fresh or to put it into practice or to combine it with something else so that something happens. – Leonard Sweet

TELEGRAPH: THE VICTORIAN INTERNET. Morse’s invention did something that dramatically altered the nature of information: it broke the connection between communication and transportation for the first time in history. (67)

Prior to the telegraph, information tended to be local, rooted in a context, and wrapped in history to provide meaning and coherence. …With the telegraph, information was instantly rent from its local and historical setting. It was presented as a mosaic of unrelated data points with no apparent connection, causes, or meaning. Prior to the telegraph, information was gathered for the purpose of deepening our understanding and wisdom. But with the telegraph, information became a commodity in itself, something that could be bought and sold. (67)

The principal strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it, or analyze it. – Neil Postman

As a result, information itself changed to the point where “there is no sense of proportion to be discerned in the world. Events are entirely idiosyncratic; history is irrelevant; there is no rational basis for valuing one thing over another.” [Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood, 106] (67)

As always, our worldview and thinking patterns mirror our media — we become what we behold. (68)

In one sense, I wasn’t trying to convert him to Christ; I was trying to convert him to a modern worldview — a futile exercise for those of you who haven’t tried it. (70)

RADIO: THE TRIBAL DRUM BEATS AGAIN. This shift from private to corporate ways of knowing has provided a positive corrective to the print age bias toward individualism. …our culture is neither tribal nor individual. Instead, we are a paradoxical hybrid — a tribe of individuals. (72)

THE GRAPHIC REVOLUTION: DERAILING MODERNITY. The rise of image-based communication in our culture weakened our preference for abstract and linear thought patterns in favor of more concrete, holistic, and nonlinear approaches to the world. The establishment of black-and-white categories resulting from typography gave way to a preference for grayscale gradations of mystery and ambiguity that resulted from communication through images. (72)

Regardless of what is being depicted in a photograph, the form itself evokes in us a particular pattern of intuitive, holistic thinking and emotion — the exact opposite of the patterns evoked by the printed word. (73)

As image-based communication becomes the dominant symbol system in our culture, it not only changes the way we think but also determines what we think about. (75)

THE WEST MOVES EAST. As images become major elements of the culture, critical reasoning gives way to a preference for the experiential and intuitive. (76)

…our adoption of images in worship is not merely an imitative practice; it is also generative. (77)

We may be in danger of undoing some of the most valuable aspects of modernity’s influence on Christian faith, such as our dependence on the medium of Scripture or the development of leaders who are well-versed in our sacred texts. (78)

CONVERSION IN THE ELECTRONIC ERA. In the modern age, there was a great deal of emphasis on conversion as an event. …However, in the postmodern age, …an unfolding experience of discovery and growth. (79)

As images displace the written word for communication, our thinking patterns and preferences change. A photograph cannot create categories; it just provides an impression of reality. An image shows us the world as it is — an array of ambiguity and mystery. It does not explain or organize the world the way language can. As a result, we become increasingly tolerant of ambiguity and mystery — the very things images can best depict. As printing wanes, so also does our preoccupation with creating categories. (80)

Evidence of this shift can be seen in the metaphors. (80)

In an emerging context, it is assumed that both Christians and non-Christians are in need of ongoing conversion experiences. …The categories of believer and nonbeliever still have significance, but they are beginning to serve a different purpose. They are no longer used to define a target for evangelism. Rather, these categories inform the starting point and tone of our conversations with one another. (81)

PART II: ALTERNATIVE WAYS TO PRACTICE

CHAPTER FIVE: EVOLVING THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSAGE

Media are ‘make happen’ agents, not ‘make aware’ agents. – McLuhan

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. – McLuhan

Too often we want to determine whether something is good or bad before we understand it. (88)

THE EVER-CHANGING MESSAGE. Like it or not, our theology and interpretation of Scripture have a long history of mirroring our forms of media, a fact most easily seen in the way modern approaches to faith mirror the linear, rational, and abstract attributes of the printed word. …I believe some of our methods, and thus our message, should change and evolve — this is part of God’s ongoing creation and relationship to God’s people. (88)

Throughout Scripture the message changes. (89)

When we claim the gospel message is unchanging, we risk boasting a kind of omniscience in which we presume to know the totality of God’s inexhaustible mysteries. …In this view, the gospel story (if there is one) is of no consequence; all that matters is a static proposition. | Instead of presuming to know the unchanging, universal gospel message, our posture toward the gospel should be one of humility and discovery. Throughout Scripture God invites us to remain open to the dynamic and unpredictable breath of the Holy Spirit as we seek to be God’s people. Remaining faithful to Scripture does not mean holding on to some fixed and permanent idea of right doctrine until our knuckles turn white. Faithfulness means developing a communal sense of patience to discover the gospel, courage to name it, and humility to hold it with an open hand in order to allow it to be touched by God’s voice in Scripture and the Spirit’s movement in our midst. (91)

We must have the freedom to allow both our methods and our message to change as we continue to discover God’s voice in each new context. (91)

GOD’S CHOSEN MEDIUM. In Christ, God’s medium and message are perfectly united. (92)

If the medium is the message, the message of the gospel is profoundly shaped by the way the church lives in the world. | We are the message… (92)

Our goal as the church is not perfection …Instead, we might seek by God’s grace to become communities of humility, repentance, and authentic hope. (93)

…our faithfulness to God’s agenda demands we recover a theology of the church as a body sent as a foretaste of God’s kingdom. (100)

CHAPTER SIX: COMMUNITY IN ELECTRONIC CULTURE

The immediate prospect for literate, fragmented Western man encountering the electronic implosion…is his…rapid transformation into a complex…person emotionally aware of his total interdependence with the rest of human society. – McLuhan

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. – McLuhan

…mobile technology…has a remarkable capacity to bring those far away much closer while at the same time making those near us much farther away. …This paradox is at the heart of the challenges we face in forming community in an electronic age. (105)

A TRIBE OF INDIVIDUALS. If the oral world was primarily tribal or communal in nature, and the print age was individualistic, then electronic culture has turned us into a tribe of individuals. (105)

My belief is that despite the retribalizing force of electronic media, our culture remains intensely individualistic. (108)

America is the only country in history to be argued into existence via the printed word. (109)

ELECTRONIC NOMADS: FROM INDIVIDUALISM TO ISOLATION. If tribal culture is intensely connected or empathetic and print culture is more distant, then our electronic experience creates empathy at a distance. …The experience of empathy at a distance doesn’t always motivate us to act. (110)

We must develop an awareness of our unconscious tendency to be seduced by our virtual communities so we can use them more intentionally rather than be used by them. (112)

To be human is to be in conflict, to offend and to be offended. To be human in light of the gospel is to face conflict in redemptive dialogue. – John Howard Yoder

CHAPTER SEVEN: LEADERSHIP IN ELECTRONIC CULTURE

Christianity — in a centralized, administrative, bureaucratic form — is certainly irrelevant. – McLuhan

We must get rid of the hierarchy [in the church] if we want participation. But we don’t have to wish for it. It’s happening. – McLuhan

Authority is often derived from information control. (127)

Unlike the printed book or typed telegraph message, radio and TV have no “access codes.” (129)

No child or adult becomes better at watching television by doing more of it. What skills are required are so elemental that we have yet to hear of a television viewing disability. – Neil Postman

This means even very young children have access to the same information that adults have, undermining the monopolies of information. (129)

In many emerging churches the pulpit is no longer the only seat for authority. Power is now dispersed among the pews. (130)

LOSING TOUCH WITH SCRIPTURE. The rules of logic that govern the printed word are neither intuitive nor innate to us; they require learning. It takes years to build up the intellectual capacity and patience necessary to understand arguments, unpack rhetoric, test “truth claims,” debate meanings, and refute or appreciate conclusions. …In contrast, electronic media with their images and acoustic information require no time, skill, or energy to comprehend. (131)

The Bible comes to us from another time and place. Its ancient context is assumed by its authors and thus never explained. …As long as we practice a religion dependent on a book, people of faith need the left brain capacities and knowledge necessary for accessing and interpreting Scripture faithfully. (132)

…the loss for the church and the challenge for leaders is a subtle one. Our culture’s voracious appetite for practical application is displacing our capacity and concern for meaningful theological reflection and study. …The culture of unbridled pragmatism is our reality… (134)

Praxis refers to a way of living in which our reflection and study are informed by our action and engagement, while our action and engagement are informed by our study. (134) This is about mutual interpretation. (135)

I believe a more faithful and relevant approach is to invert this pattern, making collaborative and egalitarian structures our default with a limited use of top-down authority. (136)

CHAPTER EIGHT: WORSHIP IN ELECTRONIC CULTURE

The new preference for depth participation has prompted in the young a strong drive towards religious experience with rich liturgical overtones. The liturgical revival of the electronic age affects even the most austere protestant sects. – McLuhan

Spectacle creates publics, not communities. (149)

…the weekend attractions that are so successful in drawing crowds comprise the very force that works against the creation of missional community. …The point is not that they are invalid; rather, they are insufficient. (150)

VIDEO VENUES: THE SPECTACLE OF CELEBRITY. The medium itself nurtures an elite priestly class in which the preacher is set apart from the people. With video venues we can say goodbye to the priesthood of all believers and hello to the papacy of celebrity. (152)

The problem comes from a lack of awareness for how media shapes our message in worship. (152)

ACCIDENTAL CHANGES IN OUR THINKING. …the very forms of emerging worship actually undermine modern approaches to theology. …In this way, emerging forms of worship are creating more Eastern and medieval approaches to church and theology. (153)

THE ILLUSION OF RELEVANCE. Relevance does not come simply from imitating culture or mirroring the techniques of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. It does not depend upon the adoption of electronic hardware in worship. Relevance is derived from experimenting with authentic and indigenous practices that emerge from the gift mix of a particular congregation for a local community. (154)

Our approach simply cannot be one of cultural imitation. (155)

THE INEVITABILITY OF IRRELEVANCE. The danger in pursuing the holy grail of relevance is that we become chameleons, morphing into whatever colors our culture puts before us. (157)

Without lament, praise is little more than shallow sentimentality and a denial of life’s struggles and sin. Without praise, lament is a denial of hope and grace, both of which are central to our life of faith and to God’s promises. To value one over the other is like suggesting that breathing in is more important than breathing out. (160)

RECOVERING THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST. For McLuhan, the artist plays a central role in our culture — that of prophet. He writes, “The role of the artist is to create an anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment. Without an anti-environment all environments are invisible.” The artist is the antenna for the future, always probing and finding truths few of us are willing to utter. McLuhan believed the artist would be our best source for revealing the hidden power of our media to shape us. Artists create counterenvironments to help us see the water we swim in, something which is largely invisible to most of us. In one sense it is the role of the artist to focus our gaze on the things we refuse to see or simply cannot see. Like the biblical prophets, artists have often been shunned as unwelcome voices in both the church and broader culture. (162)

AN ECOLOGY OF WORSHIP. First, we must probe our media and methods with the right questions. …Second, our invitation is to remember the ecology of the brain. (163)

Rather than assuming one medium is categorically better than another, we are better served by considering the ways in which each medium shapes our message and our minds. (164)

— VIA —

It takes courage to write down — for public consumption — observations and theories such as these. While Hipps makes no affirmative attack on theology and religious practice in any era, it is inevitable that readers understanding this “medium/message” reality will naturally inquire. “So, are you telling me, that what I believe is more a reflection of the technology and media than it is of the ‘truth’?” Hipps does a good job ensuring that that is not the case, ultimately, and that this foundational understanding of the connections between technology and epistemology are not mere critiques of truth, but rather a critical key to understanding the truth.

Admittedly, Hipps’ disclaimer is that he raises more questions than he answers. I appreciate that statement as I am truly left yearning for further and deeper understandings. So, here are the questions that are raised for me as I understand these connections further:

If the message truly does change with the medium, then does that mean there can never be any “orthodoxy?”

There seems to be some disconnect in this theory. Writing is ubiquitous in both Western and Eastern cultures, yet not all cultures have necessarily adopted the same understandings of authority, commodity, community, and epistemology. I opine that there are other factors at play that are even more subliminal behind the technology itself. I don’t yet know what I’m thinking, I’m simply intuiting that this medium/message observation is incomplete.

What was originally lost, then, when the first-century followers of Jesus began writing this stuff down, and how did the message change from its original inception? Is there any way to truly know (back to another historical and epistemological question)?

How long has this individualism been around? If print drives individualism, then is there Phonecian and/or Sumerian individualism? Is there a message change from pottery to parchment and from parchment to paper and ultimately to pixels?

Understanding this medium/message reality seems and appears to me narcissistic, in the conventional sense. That is, in his discussion on Emerging Church worship, theology, authority, etc., there seems to be an underlying “justification” of their practices in the explanation of medium/messaging. Is, then, technology and media and the acquiescence to its existence another totem, a collective representation of our traits and values that ultimately coerce us into self-worship?

According to Kevin Kelly, all technology builds upon previous technologies, and all concurrent technologies are dependent upon the ones that have come before. According to Hipps/McLuhan, there is an obsolescence that happens to previous forms of technology (with a clarified definitino of “obsolete”). What is really going on here?

And, if the medium is the message, then can all messages, ethics, values, behaviors, ultimately be tied to a medium?

For more on technology, I commend to you What Technology Wants, as a much more in-depth analysis of technological realities, and it’s ontological influence on humanity (or, vice versa).

The are of difficulty in this book (as it is with so many others), is the continual reference to the Bible with statements that sound absolutist. Phrases like “the Bible clearly teaches…” seem to be contrary to the general thesis of this book. If the medium is the message, and our world is changing in its perceptions of the medium, and new mediums are being discovered (archaeologically) that enhance our historical and cultural understandings of said medium, then how could an absolute phraseology like “clearly” really be used? If we are to take Biblical study seriously, and that vis-a-vis the cultural nuances of mystery, concreteness, and non-linear thinking and logic, then we ought to be consistent with that ethic when it comes to Biblical interpretation. I have written about this elsewhere, and believe this is one of the biggest weaknesses of Christian writing; the inability to apply our own theses to our reading of the Bible.

Regardless, bottom line, this is an important first step in the conversation, and I’m thankful to Hipps for his very accessible contribution.

1. My Question

Should we allow human cloning? Is constant texting making our kids dumb? Do we want automobiles to park themselves? But as my quest evolved, I realized that if we want to find satisfying answers to those questions, we first need to consider technology as a whole. Only by listening to technology’s story, divining its tendencies and biases, and tracing its current direction can we hope to solve our personal puzzles. (6)

Technology could be found everywhere in the ancient world except in the minds of humans. (7)

Mass production was unthinkable to the classical mind, and not just for technical reasons. – Carl Mitcham

The chief glory of the later Middle Ages was not its cathedrals or its epics or its scholasticism: it was the building for the first time in history of a complex civilization which rested not on the backs of sweating slaves or coolies but primarily on non-human power. – Lynn White

Machines were becoming our coolies. (8)

Each new invention requires the viability of previous inventions to keep going. (8)

However you define live, its essence does not reside in material forms like DNA, tissue, or flesh, but in the intangible organization of the energy and information contained in those material forms. And as technology was unveiled from its shroud of atoms, we could see that at its core, it, too, is about ideas and information. Both life and technology seem to be based on immaterial flows of information. (10)

Is technology human or nonhuman? (10)

Even if we acknowledge that technology can exist in disembodied form, such as software, we tend not to include in this category paintings, literature, music, dance, poetry, ad the arts in general. But we should. If a thousand lines of letters in UNIX qualifies as a technology (the computer code for a web page), then a thousand lines of letters in English (Hamlet) must qualify as well. They both can change our behavior, alter the course of events, or enable future inventions. A Shakespeare sonnet and a Back fugue, then, are in the same category as Google’s search engine and the iPod: They are something useful produced by a mind. We can’t separate out the multiple overlapping technologies responsible for a Lord of the Rings movie. The literary rendering of the original novel is as much an invention as the digital rendering of its fantastical creatures. Both are useful works of the human imagination. Both influence audiences powerfully. Both are technological. (11)

…I’ve somewhat reluctantly coined a word to designate the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us. I call it the technium. The technium extends beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. It includes intangibles like software, law, and philosophical concepts. And most important, it includes the generative impulses of our inventions to encourage more tool making, more technology invention, and more self-enhancing connections. (12)

The qualities we hold dearest in the universe are all extremely slippery at the edges. Life, mind, consciousness, order, complexity, free will, and autonomy are all terms that have multiple, paradoxical, and inadequate definitions. No one can agree on exactly where life or mind or consciousness or autonomy begins and where it ends. The best we can agree on is that these states are not binary. They exist on a continuum. (13)

…a small fraction of what the technium communicates originates not from any of its known human-made nodes but from the system at large. The technium is whispering to itself. (14)

Because the technium is an outgrowth of the human mind, it is also an outgrowth of life, and by extension it is also an outgrowth of the physical an chemical self-organization that first led to life. The technium shares a deep common root not only with the human mind, but with ancient life and other self-organized systems as well. And just as a mind must obey not only the principles governing cognition but also the laws governing life and self-organization, so the technium must obey the laws of mind, life, and self-organization — as well as our human minds. Thus out of all the spheres of influence upon the technium the human mind is only one. And this influence may even be the weakest one. (15)

With the technium, want does not mean thoughtful decisions….but rather tendencies. Leanings. Urges. Trajectories. (16)

This book is my report on what technology wants. My hope is that it will help others find their own way to optimize technology’s blessings and minimize its costs. (17)

ORIGINS

2. Inventing Ourselves

What were our lives like without technology? The problem with this line of questioning is that technology predated our humanness. (21)

Humans are animals — no argument. But humans are also not-animals — no argument. This contradictory nature is at the core of our identity. Likewise, technology is unnatural — by definition. And technology is natural — by a wider definition. This contradiction is also core to human identity. (22)

The ability of Sapiens to rapidly improve their tools allowed them to adapt to new ecological niches at a much faster rate than genetic evolution could ever allow. (25) [VIA: KEY]

A number of scientists…think that the “something” that happened 50,000 years ago was the invention of language. …The creation of language was the first singularity for humans. It changed everything. Life after language was unimaginable to those on the far side before it. (26)

Language is a trick that allows the mind to question itself; a magic mirror that reveals to the mind what the mind thinks; a handle that turns a mind into a tool. (26)

If our minds can’t tell stories, we can’t consciously create; we can only create by accident. Until we tame the mind with an organization tool capable of communicating to itself, we have stray thoughts without a narrative. We have a feral mind. We have smartness without a tool. (27)

Grandparents are the conduits of culture, and without them culture stagnates. …Language upended this tight constriction by enabling ideas both to coalesce and to be communicated. (32)

Caspari claims that the most fundamental biological factor that underlies the behavioral innovations of modernity may be the increase in adult survivorship. It is no coincidence that increased longevity is the most measurable consequence of the acquisition of technology. it is also the most consequential. (33)

[VIA: technology = diversity]

A world without technology had enough to sustain survival but not enough to transcend it. only when the mind, liberated by language and enabled by the technium, transcended the constraints of nature 50,000 years ago did greater realms of possibility open up. There was  price to pay for this transcendence, but what we gained by this embrace was civilization and progress. (37)

As fast as we remake our tools, we remake ourselves. We are coevolving with our technology, and so we have become deeply depended upon it. …We are now symbiotic with technology. (37)

The clock divided an unbroken stream of time into measurable units, and once it had a face, time became a tyrant, ordering our lives. (40)

Technology will in the near and in the farther future increasingly turn from problems of intensity, substance, and energy, to problems of structure, organization, information, and control – John von Neumann

No longer a noun, technology was becoming a force — a vital spirit that throws us forward or pushes against us. Not a thing, but a verb. (41)

3. History of the Seventh Kingdom

Technology is not just a human invention; it was also born from life. (43)

The extended human is the technium. …Our technological creations are great extrapolations of the bodies that our genes build. …If technology is an extension of humans, it is not an extension of our genes but of our minds. Technology is therefore the extended body for ideas. (44)

The major transitions in the technium are:

Primate communication → Language
Oral lore → Writing/mathematical notation
Scripts → Printing
Book knowledge → Scientific method
Artisan production → Mass production
Industrial culture → Ubiquitous global communication

No transition in technology has affected our species, or the world at large, more than the first one, the creation of language. Language enabled information to be stored in a memory greater than an individual’s recall. …From a systems point of view, language enabled humans to adapt and transmit learning faster than genes. (47)

The invention of language marks the last major transformation in the natural world and also the first transformation in the manufactured world. Words, ideas, and concepts are the most complex things social animals (like us) make, and also the simplest foundation for any type of technology. Thus language bridges the two sequences of major transitions and unites them into one continuous sequence, so that natural evolution flows into technological evolution. (48)

With very few exceptions, technologies don’t die. In this way they differ from biological species, which in the long term inevitably go extinct. Technologies are idea based, and culture is their memory. They can be resurrected if forgotten, and can be recorded (by increasingly better means) so that they won’t be overlooked. Technologies are forever. They are the enduring edge of the seventh kingdom of life (56)

4. The Rise of Exotropy

Of all the sustainable things in the universe, from a planet to a star, from a daisy to an automobile, from a brain to an eye, the thing that is able to conduct the highest density of power — the most energy flowing through a gram of matter each second — lies at the core of your laptop. …Energywise, a Pentium chip may be better thought of as a very slow nuclear explosion. (59)

It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that in the initial femtoseconds of creation there was only one thing in the universe, one superdense power that ruled all, and this solitary power expanded and cooled into thousands of variations of itself. The history of the cosmos thus proceeds from unity to diversity. (61)

While the rest of the material cosmos slips down to the frozen basement, only a few remarkable few will catch a wave of energy to rise up and dance. This rising flow of sustainable difference is the inversion of entropy. For the sake of this narrative, call it exotropy — a turning outward. …Exotropy can be thought of as a force in its own right that flings forward an unbroken sequence of unlikely existences. | Exotropy is neither wave nor particle, nor pure energy, nor supernatural miracle. It is an immaterial flow that is very much like information. Since exotropy is defined as negative entropy — the reversal of disorder — it is, by definition, an increase in order. …The best we can say is that exotropy resembles, but is not equivalent to, information and that it entails self-organization. (63)

We are steadily substituting intangible design, flexibility, innovation, and smartness for rigid, heavy atoms. In a very real sense our entry into a service- and idea- based economy is a continuation of a trend that began at the big bang. (68)

Despite the technium’s reputation for dumping hardware and material gizmos into our laps, the technium is the most intangible and immaterial process yet unleashed. …The powers of our minds can be only slightly increased by mindful self-reflection; thinking about thoughts will only make us marginally smarter. The power of the technium, however, can be increased indefinitely by reflecting its transforming nature upon itself. (68)

Technology’s dominance ultimately stems not from its birth in human minds but from its origin in the same self-organization that brought galaxies, planets, life, and minds into existence. It is part of a great asymmetrical arc that begins at the big bang and extend into ever more abstract and immaterial forms over time. The arc is the slow yet irreversible liberation from the ancient imperative of matter and energy. [VIA: to freedom? pure mind?]

IMPERATIVES

5. Deep Progress

The steady destruction of good things and people seems relentless. And it is. (73)

But the steady stream of good things is relentless as well. …I think there is evidence that on average and over time, the new solutions outweigh the new problems. (74)

There is more good than evil in the world — but not by much – Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

Unexpectedly, “not much” is all that’s needed when you have the leverage of compound interest at work — which is what the technium is. The world does not need to be perfectly utopian to see progress. …if we create only 1 percent or 2 percent (or even one-tenth of 1 percent) more positive stuff than we destroy, then we have progress. This differential could be so small as to be almost imperceptible, and this may be why progress is not universally acknowledged. When measured against the large-scale imperfections of our society, 1 percent better seems trivial. Yet this tiny, slim, shy discrepancy generates progress when compounded by the ratchet of culture. Over time a few percent “not much better” accumulates into civilization. (74)

I think there are five pools of evidence for this trend.

One is the long-term rise in the longevity, education, health, and wealth of an average person. (74)

[Two] is the obvious wave of positive technological development. (75)

Higher income earners are happier. Citizens in higher-earning countries tend to be more satisfied on average. | My interpretation of this newest research — which also matches our intuitive impressions — is that what money brings is increased choices, rather than merely increased stuff (although more stuff comes with the territory). We don’t find happiness in more gadgets and experiences. We do find happiness in having some control of our time and work, a chance for real leisure, in the escape from the uncertainties of war, poverty, and corruption, and in a chance to pursue individual freedoms — all of which come with increased affluence. (78)

I’ve been to many places in the world, the poorest and the richest spots, the oldest and the newest cities, the fastest and the slowest cultures, and it is my observation that when given a chance, people who walk will buy a bicycle, people who ride a bike will get a scooter, people riding a scooter will upgrade to a car, and those with a car dream of a plane. Farmers everywhere trade their ox plows for tractors, their gourd bowls for tin ones, their sandals for shoes. Always. Insignificantly few ever go back. (78)

[Three] resides in the moral sphere.

If the golden rule of morality and ethics is to “do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” then we are constantly expanding our notion of “others.” This is evidence for moral progress. (80)

[Four is] a large and still expanding body of scientific literature spotlights the immense distance life has traveled in its four-billion-year journey from extremely simple organisms to extremely complex and social animals. (80)

[Five] is the rush toward urbanization.

Cities are technological artifacts, the largest technology we make. (81)

Cities are wealth creators; they have always been. – Stewart Brand

The poor move into the city for the same reason the rich move into the technological future — to head toward possibilities and increased freedoms. (87)

A common misconception about human evolution is that historic tribes and prehistoric clans of early Sapiens achieved a level of egalitarian justice, freedom, liberty, and harmony that has only declined since then. in this view, the human inclination to make tools (and weapons) has only introduced trouble. Each new invention unleashes new power that can be concentrated, wielded asymmetrically, or corrupted, and therefore the history of civilization is one long devolution. By this account, human nature is fixed, unyielding. If that is true, then attempts to alter human nature will only lead to evil. (88)

The reality is the opposite. Human nature is malleable. We use our minds to change our values, expectations, and definition of ourselves. We have changed our nature since our hominin days, and once changed, we will continue to change ourselves even more. (89)

In all cultures prior to the 17th century or so, the quiet, incremental drift of progress was attributed to the gods, or to the one God. It wasn’t until progress was liberated from the divine an assigned to ourselves that it began to feed upon itself. (89) [VIA: ?]

Once you invent science — which allows you to quickly invent many things — you have a grand lever that can propel you forward very quickly. That’s what happened in the West starting approximately in the 17th century. Science catapulted society into a rapid learning. By the 18th century, science had launched the Industrial Revolution, and progress was noticeable in the growing spread of cities, increasing longevity and literacy, and the acceleration of future discoveries. (91)

Outside the reign of science and technology a growing population will collapse upon itself as it meets Malthusian limits. But inside the reign of science a growing population creates a positive feedback loop wherein more people participate in scientific innovation and purchase the results, driving more innovation, which brings better nutrition, more surplus, and more population, which feed the cycle further. (91)

Historian Niall Ferguson believes that on the global scale, the origins of progress lie only in expanding population. According to this theory, in order to elevate populations beyond Malthusian limits you need science, yet it is the increase in the number of humans that ultimately drives science, and then prosperity. In this virtuous circle more human minds invent more things and in turn buy more inventions, including tools, techniques, and methods that will support more humans. Therefore, more human minds equal more progress. (93)

Whether a population growth is the prime cause of progress or only a factor, population growth assists progress growth in two ways. First, a million individual minds applied to a problem are better than one. it’s more likely someone will find a solution. Second, and more important, science is a collective action, and the emergent intelligence of shared knowledge is often superior to even a million individuals. The solitary scientific genius is a myth. Science is both the way we personally know things and the way we collectively know. (93)

The future as unsoiled technological perfection is unattainable; the future as a territory of continuously expanding possibilities is not only attainable but also exactly the road we are on now. (101)

Progress is not some noxious by-product of the terminally optimistic, but simply part of our reality. – Simon Conway Morris

6. Ordained Becoming

We might think of the technium as “evolution accelerated.” (103)

I make the case in this chapter that the course of biological evolution is not a random drift in the cosmos, which is the claim of current textbook orthodoxy. Rather, evolution — and by extension, the technium — has an inherent direction, shaped by the nature of matter and energy. This direction introduces inevitabilities into the shape of life. (103)

But does the six-time independent self-assembly of the camera eye signal a supreme degree of improbability, sort of like tossing six million pennies in a row heads? Or does the multiple invention mean that the eye is a natural funnel that attracts evolution, like water in a well at the bottom of a valley? (104)

…it seems that life, at least as we know it on this planet, is almost indecently eager to evolve eyes …There are only so many ways to make an eye, and life as we know it may well have found them all. – Richard Dawkins

Are there certain forms — natural states — that evolution tends to gravitate toward? This question has immense bearing on the technium, because if evolution displays an attraction to universal solutions, then so will technology, its accelerated extension. (104)

With some perplexity biologists file in the bottom drawer of their desks an ever-growing list of identical phenomenon that have kept reappearing in life on Earth. They’re not sure what to do with these curious cases. But a few scientists believe these recurring inventions are biological “vortices,” or familiar patterns that emerge from the complex interactions in evolution. …Out of this exhaustive recombination, evolution keeps converging upon similar characteristics in far-flung branches in the tree of life. This attraction to recurring forms is called convergent evolution. (105)

The evolution of the ichthyosaur or porpoise morphology is not trivial. It can be correctly described as nothing less than astonishing that a group of land-dwelling tetrapods, complete with four legs and a tail, could devolve their appendages and their tails back into fins like those of a fish. Highly unlikely, if not impossible? Yet it happened twice, convergently in the reptiles and the mammals, two groups of animals that are not closely related. We have to go back in time as far as the Carboniferous to find a common ancestor for them; thus, their genetic legacies are very, very different. Nonetheless, the ichthyosaur and the porpoise both have independently re-evolved fins. – George McGhee in “Convergent Evolution”

If the same protein, or “contingent” form, is evolved twice, it is obvious that every step of the way cannot be random. The prime guidance for these parallel journeys is their common environment. (109)

…but why, then, doesn’t every similar desert in the world produce a kangaroo rat, or jerboa, and why aren’t all desert rodents some version of kangaroo rats? The orthodox answer is that evolution is a highly contingent process, where random events and pure luck change the course, so that even within parallel environments it is very rare to arrive at the same morphological solution. Contingency and luck are so strong in evolution that the marvel is that convergence ever happens. (110)

But a hundred, or a thousand, cases of isolated significant convergent evolution suggest something else at work. Some other force pushes the self-organization of evolution toward recurring solutions. A different dynamic besides the lottery of natural selection steers the course of evolution so that it can reach an unlikely remote destination more than once. It is not a supernatural force but a fundamental dynamic as simple at its core as evolution itself. And it is the same force that funnels convergence in technology and culture. | Evolution is driven toward certain recurring and inevitable forms by two pressures:

1. The negative constraints cast by the laws of geometry and physics, which limit the scope of life’s possibilities.
2. The positive constraints produced by the self-organizing complexity of interlinked genes and metabolic pathways, which generate a few repeating new possibilities. (11)

If we acknowledge no supernatural force working outside evolution, then all these structures — and more — must in some sense be contained within the structure of DNA. Where else could they come from? The details of all oak lineages and future species of oak are resident, in some fashion, in the original acorn of DNA. And if we acknowledge no supernatural force working outside evolution, then our minds — which all descended from the same original first cell — must also have been encoded implicitly in DNA. And if our minds, then what about the technium? (114)

Again and again evolution returns to a few solutions that work. (118)

The constraints of physics, chemistry, and geometry have governed life from its origins onward — and even into the technium …Life, rather than being boundless and unlimited in every direction, is bounded and limited in many directions by the nature of matter itself. | I will argue that the same constraints bind technology. (118)

In the old view, the internal (the source of mutation) created change, while the external ( the environmental source of adaptation) selected or directed it; in the new view, the external (physical and chemical constraints) creates forms, while the internal (self-organization) selects or directs them. (120)

…the creative engine of evolution stands on three legs: the adaptive (the classic agent), plus the contingent and the inevitable. (120)

It is almost as if life has an imperative. It “wants” to materialize certain patterns. Even the physical world seems biased in that direction. (125)

…the laws of nature are rigged in favor of life. …life emerges froma soup in the same dependable way that a crystal emerges from a saturated solution, with its final from [sic] (form?) predetermined by the interatomic forces. – Paul Davies

there are inherent properties in the atoms and molecules which seem to direct the synthesis [toward life] – Cyril Ponnamperuma

…not we the accidental but we the expected. The evolution of life, if it is based on a derivable physical principle, must be considered an inevitable process. – Manfred Eigen

Life is the product of deterministic forces. Life was bound to arise under the prevailing conditions, and it will arise similarly wherever and whenever the same conditions obtain … Life and mind emerge not as the result of freakish accidents, but as natural manifestations of matter, written into the fabric of the univers. – Christian de Duve

Instead of getting novelty each time, you get what one scientific paper calls “the convergence of multiple evolving lines on similar phenotypes.” (127)

Evolution can and does repeat itself at the levels of structures and patterns, as well as of individual genes … This repetition overthrows the notion that if we rewound and replayed this history of life, all outcomes would be different. – Sean Carroll

We can rewind the tape of life, and when we do in a constant environment, it often turns out roughly the same. (127)

The incredible complexity of life disguises its singularity. There is only one life. All life today is descended along an unbroken line of duplication from one ancient molecule that worked inside one primeval cell that worked. (127)

In this way, life is an inevitable improbability. And most of life’s archetypal forms and stages are also inevitable improbabilities, or, we might say, improbable inevitabilities. | This means that something like a human mind is also the improbable inevitability of evolution.

Homo sapiens is a tendency, not an entity.

Humanity is a process. Always was, always will be. Every living organism is on its way to becoming. And the human organism even more so, because among all living beings (that we know about) we are the most open-ended. We have just started our evolution as Homo spiens. As both parent and child of the technium — evolution accelerated — we are nothing more and nothing less than an evolutionary ordained becoming. (128)

The technium is a tendency, not an entity. The technium and its constituent technologies are more like a grand process than a grand artifact. Nothing is complete, all is in flux, and the only thing that counts is the direction of movement. So if the technium has a direction, where is it pointed? If the greater forms of technologies are inevitable, what is next? (128)

7. Convergence

not an electrical invention of any importance has been made but that the honor of its origin has been claimed by more than one person – Park Benjamin, “The Age of Electricity”

The whole history of inventions is one endless chain of parallel instances – Alfred Kroeber

While many people claim to believe the notion of technological determinism is wrong (in either sense of that word) they don’t act that way. No matter what they rationally think about inevitability, in my experience all inventors and creators act as if their own invention and discovery is imminently simultaneous. Every creator, inventor, and discoverer that I have known is rushing their ideas into distribution before someone else does, or they are in a mad hurry to patent before their competition does, or they are dashing to finish their masterpiece before something similar shows up. (140)

Because a lot of money swirls around Harry Potter we have discovered that, strange as it sounds, stories of boy wizards in magical schools with pet owls who enter their otherworlds through railway station platforms are inevitable at this point in Western culture. | Just as in technology, the abstract core of an art form will crystallize into any culture when the solvent is ready. (146)

Without a reliable time machine, there’ll be no indisputable proof, but we do have three types of evidence strongly suggesting that the paths of technologies are inevitable:

1. In all times we find that most inventions and discoveries have been made independently by more than one person.
2. In ancient times we find independent timelines of technology on different continents converging upon a set order.
3. In modern times we find sequences of improvement that are difficult to stop, derail, or alter.

As technology invariably does, one invention prepares the ground for the next, and every corner of the technium evolves in a seemingly predetermined sequence. | In essence, the direction of technological development is the same anytime it happens. (151)

We can conclude that in historic times as well as in prehistory, technologies with globally distinct origins converge along the same developmental path. Independent of the different cultures that host it, or the diverse political systems that rule it, or the different reserves of natural resources that feed it, the technium develops along a universal path. The large-scale outlines of technology’s course are predetermined. (152)

Inventions are culturally determined – Alfred Kroeber

It means only that when all the required conditions generated by previous technologies are in place, the next technology can arise. (152)

Discoveries become virtually inevitable when prerequisite kinds of knowledge and tools accumulate – Robert Merton

The birth of any species depends on an ecosystem of other species in place to support, divert, and goad its metamorphosis. We call it coevolution because of the reciprocal influence of one species upon another. In the technium many discoveries await the invention of another technological species: the proper tool or platform. (153)

In addition to instruments and tools, a discovery needs the proper beliefs, expectations, vocabulary, explanation, know-how, resources, funds, and appreciation to appear. But these, too, are fueled by new technologies. | An invention or discovery that is too far ahead of its time is worthless; no one can follow. Ideally, an innovation opens up only the next adjacent step from what is known and invites the culture to move forward one hope. (153)

The technium’s inherent sequence makes leapfrogging ahead very difficult. (153)

Most of our brain’s activity is spent on primitive processes — like walking — that we can’t even perceive consciously. Instead, we are aware of only a thin, newly evolved layer of cognition that sits on and depends upon the reliable workings of older processes. you can’t do calculus unless you do counting. Likewise, you can’t do cell phones unless you do wires. You can’t do digital infrastructure unless you do industrial. (154)

Countries that failed to adopt old technologies are at a disadvantage when it comes to new ones. – The Economist

Just like the predominance of lower functions in our brains, industrial processes predominate in the technium, even though they are gilded with informational veneers. …As the technium progresses, it embeds information in materials, in the same way that information and order is embedded in the atoms of a DNA molecule. Advanced high technology is the seamless fusion of bits and atoms. It is adding intelligence to industry, rather than removing industry and leaving only information. | Technologies are like organisms that require a sequence of developments to reach a particular stage. …The progression of inventions is in many ways the march toward forms dictated by physics and chemistry in a sequence determined by the rules of complexity. We might call this technology’s imperative. (155)

8. Listen to the Technology

Moore’s Law has come to represent the principle of an accelerating future that underpins our expectations of the technium. (161)

Moore’s Law is really about economics. …[it] is really about people’s belief system, it’s not a law of physics, it’s about human belief, and when people believe in something, they’ll put energy behind it to make it come to pass. – Carver Mead

An unobserved constant operating in five distinct paradigms of technology for over a century must be more than an industry road map. It suggests that the nature of these ratios is baked deep into the fabric of the technium (165)

Whether Moore’s Law — as the count of transistor density — has one, two, or three decades left to zoom and drive our economy, we can be sure it will peter out as other past trends have by being sublimated into another rising trend. (169)

The slow demise of the more-transistors-per-chip trend is inevitable. But on average, digital technologies will roughly double in performance every two years for the foreseeable future. That means our most culturally important devices and systems will get faster, cheaper, better by 50 percent every year. Imagine if you got half again smarter every year or could remember 50 percent more this year than last. Embedded deep in the technium (as we now know it) is the remarkable capacity of half-again annual improvement. The optimism of our age rests on the reliable advance of Moore’s promise: that stuff will get significantly, seriously, desirably better and cheaper tomorrow. If the things we make will get better the next time, that means that the golden age is ahead of us, and not in the past. (171)

9. Choosing the Inevitable

Does any technology lurch forward on its own inertia as “a self-propelling, self-sustaining, ineluctable flow,” in the words of technology critic Langdon Winner, or do we have clear free-will choice in the sequence of technological change, a stance that makes us (individually or corporately) responsible for each step? (177)

…these two factors are cofactors in the strongest sense of the word — they determine each other. Your environment (like what you eat) can affect your genetic code, and your code will steer you into certain environments — making untangling the two influences a conundrum. (178)

So every new development in the technium is contingent upon the historical antecedents of previous technologies. In biology this effect is called coevolution… (179)

It is no coincidence that the triadic nature of the technium is the same as the triadic nature of biological evolution. (182)

But in the technium the adaptive function is not unconscious, as it is in natural selection. Instead it is open to human free will and choice. …In biological evolution there is no designer, but in the technium there is an intelligent designer — Sapiens. And of course, this conscious open design (shown as the top corner) is why the technium has become the most powerful force in the world. (183)

Humans are both master and slave to the technium, and our fate is to remain in this uncomfortable dual role. Therefore, we will always be conflicted about technology and find making our choices difficult. (187)

But our concern should not be about whether to embrace it. We are beyond embrace; we are already symbiotic with it. At a macroscale, the technium is following its inevitable progression. Yet at the microscale, volition rules. Our choice is to align ourselves with this direction, to expand choice and possibilities for everyone and everything, and to play out the details with grace and beauty. Or we can choose (unwisely, I believe0 to resist our second self. | The conflict that the technium triggers in our hearts is due to our refusal to accept our nature — the truth is that we are continuous with the machines we create. We are self-made humans, our own best invention. When we reject technology as a whole, it is a brand of self-hatred. (188)

We trust in nature, but we hope in technology – Brian Arthur

That hope lies in embracing our own natures. By aligning ourselves with the imperative of the technium, we can be more prepared to steer it where we can and more aware of where we are going. By following what technology wants, we can be more ready to capture its full gifts. (188)

CHOICES

10. The Unabomber Was Right

…the aeroplane will help peace in more ways than one — in particular I think it will have a tendency to make war impossible. – Orville Wright, 1917

My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions – Alfred Nobel

Radio will serve to make the concept of Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men a reality. – General James Harbord, 1925

Someday we will build up a world telephone system, making necessary to all peoples the use of a common language or common understanding of languages, which will join all the people of the Earth into one brotherhood. There will be heard throughout the Earth a great voice coming out of the ether which will proclaim, “Peace on Earth, good will towards men.” – John J. Carty

Each new form of communication, from the telegraph and telephone to radio, film, television and the internet, has been heralded as the guarantor of free speech and the unfettered movement of ideas. – David Nye

It is not that all these inventions are without benefits — even benefits toward democracy. Rather, it’s the case that each new technology creates more problems than it solves. (192)

Problems are the answers to solutions – Brian Arthur

How much of what we readily identify as “progress” in the urban-industrial society is really the undoing of evils inherited from the last round of technological innovation? – Theodore Roszak

If we embrace technology, we need to confront its costs. (193)

Our ability to impact has expanded beyond our ability to care. (193)

As the most powerful force in the world, technology tends to dominate our thinking. Because of its ubiquity, it monopolizes any activity and questions any nontechnological solution as unreliable or impotent. (193)

Once the machine is built we discover, always to our surprise — that it has ideas of its own; that it is quite capable not only of changing our habits but … of changing our habits of mind. – Neil Postman

Since we can detect no limit to how biophilic technology can become, this open-ended horizon indicates to us that the nature of technology is inherently prolife. The technium is, at its most fundamental level, potentially compatible with life. It just needs to grow into that potential. (196)

Insofar as men pour their own life into the apparatus, their own vitality is that much diminished. The transference of human energy and character leaves men empty, although they may never acknowledge the void. – Langdon Winner

As machines take over more of what humans once did, we tend to do less of the familiar. (197)

Duplicating vital human capacities can have one of only two consequences: atrophying the capacities or creating competition between Homo sapiens and machine. Neither of these is savory to self-respecting members of the former. – Eric Brende

Technology chips away at our human dignity, calling into question our role in the world and our own nature. (197)

About 10,000 years ago, humans passed a tipping point where our ability to modify the biosphere exceeded the planet’s ability to modify us. That threshold was the beginning of the technium. We are at a second tipping point where the technium’s ability to alter us exceeds our ability to alter the technium. (197)

…baked into the nature of this vast complex of technological systems are self-serving aspects — technologies that enable more technology, and systems that preserve themselves — as well as inherent biases that lead the technium in certain direction, outside human desire. (198)

As best I understand, the Unabomber’s argument goes like this:

• Personal freedoms are constrained by society, as they must be in any civilization for the sake of order.
• The stronger that technology makes the society, the less individual freedom there is.
• Technology destroys nature, strengthening itself further.
• But because it is destroying nature, the technium will ultimately collapse.
• In the meantime, the ratchet of technological self-amplification is stronger than politics.
• Using technology to try to tame the system only strengthens the technium.
• Because it cannot be tamed, technological civilization must be destroyed rather than reformed.
• Since it cannot be destroyed by technology or politics, humans must push the technium toward its inevitable self-collapse.
• Then we should pounce on it when it is down and kill it before it rises again.

It is easy to sympathize with Kaczynski’s plight as a dissenter. you politely try to escape the squeeze of technological civilization by retreating to its furthest reaches, where you establish a relatively techno-free lifestyle — and then the beast of civilization/development/industrial technology stalks you and destroys your paradise. Is there no escape? The machine is ubiquitous! It is relentless! It must be stopped! (202)

Kaczynski argues that it is impossible to escape the ratcheting clutches of industrial technology for several reasons: one, because if you use any part of the technium, the system demands servitude; two, because technology does not “reverse” itself, never releasing what is in its hold; and three, because we don’t have a choice of what technology to use in the long run. (203)

The problem is that Kaczynski’s most basic premise, the first axiom in his argument, is not true. The Unabomber claims that technology robs people of freedom. But most people of the world find the opposite. They gravitate toward technology because they recognize that they have more freedoms when they are empowered with it. They (that is, we) realistically weigh the fact that yes, indeed, some options are closed off when adopting new technology, but many others are opened, so that the net gain is an increase in freedom, choices, and possibilities. (207)

Kaczynski confused latitude with freedom. (208)

If technology is so rotten, why do we keep grabbing it, even after Ted Kaczynski has exposed its true nature? …One theory: The technium’s rampant materialism outlaws greater meaning in life by focusing our spirits on stuff. (213)

“Needing more to be satisfied less” is one definition of addiction. (213)

Perhaps we are addicted to the dopamine rush of the new. (213) All addictions are fixed by effecting change not in the offending pleasure but in the person addicted. …In the end they are liberated not by changing the nature of television, the internet, gambling machines, or alcohol but by changing their relation to it. Those who overcome addictions do so by assuming power over their powerlessness. If the technium is an addiction, we can’t solve this addiction by trying to change the technium. (214)

A variant of this explanation is that we are addicted but unaware of our addiction. We are bewitched. Hypnotized by glitter. …a consensual hallucination… (214) But by this logic we should expect the least technologically cultured people to be the least duped and to be the most aware of the plainly visible dangers. …On the other hand, it is often the most technologically mediated people, those experts driving Priuses, blogging, and twittering, who “see” or believe in the presence of the technium’s spell. This reversal does not add up for me. (215)

That leaves one remaining theory: We willingly choose technology, with its great defects an obvious detriments, because we unconsciously calculate its virtues. In an entirely wordless calculus, we note the addictions in others, the degradations in the environment, the distractions in our own lives, the confusion about character that various technologies generate, and then we sum these up against the benefits. I don’t believe this is a wholly rational procedure; I think we also tell each other stories about technology, and these are added in with as much weight as the pluses and minuses. But in a real way we do a risk-benefit analysis. …And most of the time, after we’ve weighed downsides and upsides in the balance of our experience, we find that technology offers a great benefit, but not by much. In other words, we freely choose to embrace it — and pay the price. (215)

To improve our chances of making better decisions, we need — I almost hate to say it — more technology. The way to reveal the full costs of technology and deflate its hype is with better information tool and processes. (215)

Finally, a true articulation of each particular technology’s vices will allow us to see that our embrace of the technium is done willingly, and is neither an addiction nor a spell. (216)

11. Lessons of Amish Hackers

…while an “Amish website” sounds like the punch line to a joke, there are actually quite a few of them. (222)

No looming decision is riveting the Amish themselves as much as the question of whether they should accept cell phones. (223)

For people who live off the grid, without TV, internet, or books beyond one Bible, the Amish are perplexingly well informed. (223)

We don’t want to stop progress, we just want to slow it down – one Amish man

1. They are selective. They know how to say no and are not afraid to refuse new things. They ignore more than they adopt.
2. They evaluate new things by experience instead of by theory. They let the early adopters get their jollies by pioneering new stuff under watchful eyes.
3. They have criteria by which to make choices: Technologies must enhance family and community and distance themselves from the outside world.
4. The choices are not individual but communal. The community shapes and enforces technological direction.

In short, the Amish depend on the outside world for the way they currently live. Their choice of minimal technology adoption is a choice — but a choice enabled by the technium. Their lifestyle is within the technium, not outside it. (231)

I highly recommend elective poverty and minimalism as a fantastic education, not least because it will help you sort out your technology priorities. But I have observed that simplicity’s fullest potential requires that one consider minimalism one phase of many (even if a recurring phase, as is meditation or the Sabbath). …The honest truth is that as the technium explodes with new self-made options, we find it harder to find fulfillment. How can we be fulfilled when we don’t know what is being filled? (233)

I believe these two different routes for technological lifestyle — either optimizing contentment or optimizing choices — come down to very different ideas of what humans are to be. (233)

Technology is anything that was invented after you were born. – Alan Kay

We have domesticated our humanity as much as we have domesticated our horses. …We know that genetically our bodies are changing faster now than at any time in the past million years. …We need new jobs in part because we are new people at our core. | We are different physical beings from our ancestors. (235)

The more advanced the technology, on the whole, the more possible it is for a considerable number of human beings to imagine being somebody else. – David Riesman, 1950

Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come. (237)

I owe the Amish hackers a large debt because through their lives I now see the technium’s dilemma very clearly: To maximize our own contentment, we seek the minimum amount of technology in our lives. Yet to maximize the contentment of others, we must maximize the amount of technology in the world. Indeed, we can only find our own minimal tools if others have created a sufficient maximum pool of options we can choose from. The dilemma remains in how we can personally minimize stuff close to us while trying to expand it globally. (238)

12. Seeking Conviviality

So the whole question comes down to this: Can the human mind master what the human mind has made? – Paul Valery

Very few great ideas start out headed toward the greatness they eventually achieve. That means that projecting what harm may come from a technology before it “is” is almost impossible. | With few exceptions technologies don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. (244)

One year after Edison constructed the first phonograph, he was still trying to figure out what his invention might be used for. Edison knew more about this invention than anyone, but his speculations were all over the map. He thought his idea might birth dictation machines or audiobooks for the blind or talking clocks or music boxes or spelling lessons or recording devices for dying words or answering machines. In a list he drew up of possible uses for the phonograph, Edison added at the end, almost as an afterthought, the idea of playing recorded music. | Lasers were developed to industrial strength to shoot missiles down, but they are made in the billions primarily to read bar codes and movie DVDs. Transistors were created to replace vacuum tubes in room-sized computers, but most transistors manufactured today fill the tiny brains in cameras, phones, and communication equipment. Mobile phones began as…well, mobile phones. And for the first few decades that’s what they were. But in its maturity, cell-phone technology is becoming a mobile computing platform for tablets, e-books, and video players. Switching occupations is the norm for technology. (244)

The greater the number of ideas and technologies already in the world, the more possible combinations an secondary reactions there will be when we introduce a new one. Forecasting consequences in a technium where millions of new ideas are introduced each year becomes mathematically intractable. (245)

We make prediction more difficult because our immediate tendency is to imagine the new thing doing an old job better. (245)

Technologies shift as they thrive. They are remade as they are used. They unleash second- and third-order consequences as they disseminate. And almost always, they bring completely unpredicted effects as they near ubiquity. (246)

If we examine technologies honestly, each one has its faults as well as its virtues. There are no technologies without vices and none that are neutral. …The greater the promise of a new technology, the greater its potential for harm as well.  …If a new technology is likely to birth a never-before-seen benefit, it will also likely birth a never-before-seen problem. (246)

The obvious remedy for this dilemma is to expect the worst…the Precautionary Principle. (246) When an innovation appears, we should pause. (247) | Unfortunately, …

The precautionary principle is very, very good for one thing — stopping technological process. – Max More

We must challenge the Precautionary Principle not because it leads in bad directions, but because read for all it is worth, it leads in no direction at all. – Cass R. Sunstein

In general the Precautionary Principle is biased against anything new. (250)

Technology always does more than we intend; we know this so well that it has actually become part of our intentions – Langdon Winner

Technologies are nearly living things. Like all evolving entities, they must be tested in action, by action. (254)

The principle of constant engagement is called the Proactionary Principle. …The five proactions are:

1. Anticipation
2. Continual Assessment
3. Prioritization of Risks, Including Natural Ones
4. Rapid Correction of Harm
5. Not Prohibition but Redirection

We have the choice of how we treat our creations, where we place them, and how we train them with our values. The most helpful metaphor for understanding technology may be to consider humans as the parents of our technological children. (257)

The more autonomy our children (technological as well as biological) have, the more freedom they have to make mistakes. Our children’s ability to create a disaster (or create a masterpiece) may even exceed our own, which is why parenting is both the most frustrating and the most rewarding thing we can do. (258)

As in raising our children, the real question — and disagreement — lies in what values we want to transmit over generations. This is worth discussing, and I suspect that, as in real life, we won’t all agree on the answers. (262)

The message of the technium is that any choice is way better than no choice. That’s why technology tends to tip the scales slightly toward the good, even though it produces so many problems. … It compounds the good in the world because in addition to the direct good it brings, the arc of the technium keeps increasing choices, possibilities, freedom, and free will in the world, and that is an even greater good. (263)

In the end, technology is a type of thinking: a technology is a thought expressed. Not all thoughts or technologies are equal. Clearly, there are silly theories, wrong answers, and dumb ideas. While a military laser and Gandhi’s act of civil disobedience are both useful works of human imagination and thus both technological, there is a difference between the two. Some possibilities restrict future choices, and some possibilities are pregnant with other possibilities. | However, the proper response to a lousy idea is not to stop thinking. It is to come up with a better idea. Indeed, we should prefer a bad idea to no ideas at all, because a bad idea can at least be reformed, while not thinking offers no hope. (263)

Convivial is a great word whose roots mean “compatible with life.” (263)

But I am convinced by my study of the technium’s imperative that conviviality resides not in the nature of a particular technology but in the job assignment, in the context, in the expression we construct for the technology. (264) [VIA: This sounds awesomely parallel to John Walton's work on the "functional ontology" of Genesis.]

DIRECTIONS

13. Technology’s Trajectories

So what does technology want? Technology wants what we want — the same long list of merits we crave. When a technology has found its ideal role in the world, it becomes an active agent in increasing the options, choices, and possibilities of others. (269)

I propose that the greater the number of exotropic traits we observe in a particular expression of technology, the greater its inevitability and its conviviality. (270)

Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:

Increasing efficiency
Increasing opportunity
Increasing emergence
Increasing complexity
Increasing diversity
Increasing specialization
Increasing ubiquity
Increasing freedom
Increasing mutualism
Increasing beauty
Increasing sentience
Increasing structure
Increasing evolvability

It may seem like I am painting a picture of a supernatural force, akin to a pantheistic spirit roaming the universe. But what I am outlining is almost the opposite. Like gravity, this force is embedded in the fabric of matter and energy. It follows the path of physics and obeys the ultimate law of entropy. The force that is waiting to erupt into the technologies of the technium was first pushed by exotropy, built up by self-organization, and gradually thrown from the inert world into life, and from life into minds, and from minds into the creation of our minds. It is an observable force found in the intersection of information, matter, and energy, and it can be repeated and measured, though it has only recently been surveyed. (273)

COMPLEXITY. Creation moves from the ultimate simplicity after the big bang to a slow buildup of molecules in a few hot spots til the first tiny spark of life appears, and then an ever-increasing parade of more complex beings, from single cells to monkeys, and then the rush from simple brains to complex technology. (274)

In other words, complexity preceded biology. (275) [VIA: This sounds metaphysical.]

Nature will sometimes simplify, but it rarely devolves down a level. (277)

The long arc of complexity began before evolution, worked through the four billion years of life, and now continues through the technium. (282)

Technologies have a social dimension beyond their mere mechanical performance. We adopt new technologies largely because of what they do for us, but also in part because of what they mean to us. Often we refuse to adopt technology for the same reason: because of how the avoidance reinforces or shapes our identity. (291)

SPECIALIZATION. As we look into the future, specialization will continue to increase. (294) Technology is born in generality and grows to specificity. (296)

UBIQUITY. From the perspective of the planetary biosphere, the most ubiquitous technology on Earth is agriculture. …The second most plentiful planetary technology is roads and buildings. (297) Usually what happens to a ubiquitous technology is that it disappears. (300)

In addition to a deep embeddedness, ubiquity also breeds certainty. (303) [VIA: I wonder if this has also affected modern philosophical "certitude?"]

In essence, the haves fund the evolution of technology for the have-laters. (305)

The significant threshold of technological development lies at the boundary between commonplace and ubiquity, between the have-laters and the “all have.” (306)

If you want to worry about something, don’t worry about the folks who are currently offline. they’ll stampede on faster than you think. Instead you should worry about what we are going to do when everyone is online. When the internet has six billion people, and they are all e-mailing at once, when no one is disconnected and always on day and night, when everything is digital and nothing offline, when the internet is ubiquitous. That will produce unintended consequences worth worrying about.

FREEDOM. Some theoretical physicists, including Freeman Dyson, argue that free will occurs in atomic particles, and therefore free choice was born in the great fire of the big bang and has been expanding ever since. (307)

The only mathematical or logical option left is free will. The particle simple chooses in a way that is indistinguishable from the tiniest quantum bit of free will. (307)

Where there are free wills there are mistakes. …In other words, technology teaches us how to make innovative kinds of mistakes we could not make before. (309)

MUTUALISM. More than half of the living species on this planet are parasitic. …Parasitism is just a single degree along a wide continuum of mutualism. (311)

1. As life evolves, it becomes increasingly dependent on other life.
2. As life evolves, nature creates more opportunities for dependencies between species.
3. As life evolves, possibilities for cooperation between members of the same species increase.

Human life is immersed in all three mutualisms. First, we are remarkably dependent on other life for survival. We eat plants and other animals. Second, there is no other species on this planet that uses the variety and number of other living species that we do to stay healthy and prosperous. And third, we are famously a social animal, requiring others of our species to raise us, teach us how to survive, and keep us sane. In this way our life is deeply symbiotic; we live inside of other life. (312)

The technium is moving toward increased symbiosis between humans and machines. (313)

Sharing serves as the foundation for the next higher level of communal engagement: cooperation. (315)

Evolution engineers mutualism into biology because its benefits are win-win. Individuals gain and the group gains. (315)

The drift toward mutualism in the technium is moving us toward an old dream: to maximize both individual human autonomy and the power of people working together. (316)

BEAUTY. Most evolved things are beautiful, and the most beautiful are the most highly evolved. (317)

We think with the objects we love, and we love the objects we thing with – Sherry Turkle

Our technophilia is driven by the inherent beauty of the technium. (323)

Technology does not want to remain utilitarian. It wants to become art, to be beautiful and “useless.” (324)

I am willing to bet that in the not-too-distant future the magnificence of certain patches of the technium will rival the splendor of the natural world. We will rhapsodize about this or that technology’s charms and marvel at its subtlety. We will travel to it with children in tow to sit in silence beneath its towers. (325)

SENTIENCE. Technology wants mindfulness. (328)

1. Mind infiltrates matter as ubiquitously as possible.
2. Exotropy continues to organize more complex types of intelligences.
3. Sentience diversifies into as many types of minds as possible.

If the technium continues to prevail, some level of sentience will find its way into everything it creates. (329)

The technium’s job is to invent a million, or a billion, varieties of comprehension. | This is not as mystical as it sounds. Minds are highly evolved ways of structuring the bits of information that form reality. (333)

STRUCTURE. We are accumulating information so rapidly that it is the fastest increasing quantity on this planet. (334)

Despite its own rhetoric, science is not built to increase either the “truthfulness” or the total volume of information. It is designed to increase the order and organization of knowledge we generate about the world. …”Truth” is really only a measure of how well specific facts can be built upon, extended, and interconnected. (335)

We casually talk about the “discovery of America” in 1492 or the “discovery of gorillas” in 1856 or the “discovery of vaccines” in 1796 …These supposed “discoveries” seem imperialistic and condescending — and often are. …They “discovered” previously locally known knowledge by adding it to the growing pool of structured global knowledge. Nowadays we would call that accumulating of structured knowledge science. (335-336)

The reason science absorbs local knowledge and not the other way around is because science is a machine we have invented to connect information. It is built to integrate new knowledge with the web of the old. If a new insight is presented with too many “facts” that don’t fit into what is already known, then the new knowledge is rejected until those facts can be explained. (This is an oversimplification of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of the overthrow of scientific paradigms.) A new theory does not need to have every unexpected detail explained (and rarely does) but it must be woven to some satisfaction into the established order. Every strand of conjecture, assumption, observation is subject to scrutiny, testing, skepticism, and verification. (337)

Each strand of enlightenment enhances not only the facts of gorillas, but also the strength of the whole cloth of human knowledge. The strength of those connections is what we call truth. (337)

Currently science has no way to accept these strands of spiritual information and weave them into the current consilience, and so their truth remains “undiscovered.” (337)

The evolution of knowledge began with relatively simple arrangements of information. the most simple organization was the invention of the fact. Facts, in fact, were invented. Not by science but by the European legal system, in the 1500s. …This complex apparatus for relating new information to old knowledge is what we call science. | The scientific method is not one uniform “method.” It is a collection of scores of techniques and processes that has evolved over centuries (and continues to evolve). Each method is one small step that incrementally increases the unity of knowledge in society. (338)

The achievement of science is to discover new things; the evolution of science is to organize the discoveries in new ways. …The thrust of the technium’s trajectory is to further organize the avalanche of information and tools we are generating and to increase the structure of the made world. (340)

EVOLVABILITY. So evolution generates complexity and diversity and millions of beings to give itself material and room to evolve into a more powerful evolver. | If we think of each living species as an answer to the question “How does something survive in this environment?,” then evolution is a formula that provides concrete answers that are embodied in matter and energy. We might say that evolution is a search method for living solutions; it searches by endlessly trying out possibilities until it finds a design that works. (341-342)

If what minds are good for is learning and adaptation, then learning how to learn will accelerate your learning. So the presence of sentience in life vastly increased its evolvability. | Technology is how human minds explore the pace of possibilities and change the methods of searching for solutions. (342)

This is simply more than simply the most powerful force in the world; the evolution of evolution is the most powerful force in the universe. (344)

14. Playing the Infinite Game

The technium is reinventing us, but does any of this complicated technology make us any better as humans? Are there any manifestations of human thought anywhere than [sic (that?)] can make men better? (348)

How can technology make a person better? Only in this way: by providing each person with chances. A chance to excel at the unique mixture of talents he or she was born with, a chance to excel at the unique mixture of talents he or she was born with, a chance to encounter new ideas and new minds, a chance to be different from his or her parents, a chance to create something his or her own. (348)

Choice works best when it has values to guide it. | …Choices without values yield little, this is true; but values without choices are equally dry. We need the full spectrum of choices won by the technium to unleash our own maximum potential. (348)

Popular culture wrongly fixates on proven star roles as the destiny of anyone successful. In fact, those positions of prominence and stardom can be prisons, straitjackets defined by how someone else excelled. (349)

Ideally, we would find a position of excellence tailored specifically for everyone born. | However, if we fail to enlarge the possibilities for other people, we diminish them, and that is unforgivable. Enlarging the scope of creativity for others, then, is an obligation. We enlarge others by enlarging the possibilities of the technium — by developing more technology and more convivial expressions of it. (349) [VIA: משפט]

Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries – James Carse

If there is a God, the arc of the technium is aimed right at him. (354)

I bring up God here at the end because it seems unfair to speak about autocreation without mentioning God — the paragon of autocreation. The only other alternative to an endless string of creations triggered by previous creation is a creation that emerges from its own self-causation. That prime self-causation, which is not preceded but instead first makes itself before it makes either time or nothingness, is the most logical definition of God. This view of a mutable God does not escape the paradoxes of self-creation that infect all levels of self-organization, but rather it embraces them as necessary paradoxes. God or not, self-creation is a mystery. (355)

What I hope I have shown in this book is that a single thread of self-generation ties the cosmos, the bios, and the technos together into one creation. Life is less a miracle than a necessity for matter and energy. The technium is less an adversary to life than its extension. Humans are not the culmination of this trajectory but an intermediary, smack in the middle between the born and the made. (356)

For several thousand years, humans have looked to the organic world, the world of the living, for clues about the nature of creation and even of a creator. Life was a reflection of the divine. Humans in particular were deemed to be made in the image of God. But if you believe humans are made in the image of God, the autocreator, then we have done well, because we have just birthed our own creation: the technium. (356)

As we turn from the galaxies to the swarming cells of our own being, which toil for something, some entity beyond their grasp, let us remember man, the self-fabricator who came across an ice age to look into the mirrors and magic of science. Surely he did not come to see himself or his wild visage only. He came because he is at heart a listener and a searcher for some transcendent realm beyond himself. – Loren Eiseley

The universe knew we were coming – Freeman Dyson

When we alter the genetics in our veins, will this not reroute our sense of a soul? Can we cross over into the quantum realm, where one bit of matter can be in two places at once, and still not believe in angels? (358)

Look what is coming: Technology is stitching together all the minds of the living, wrapping the planet in a vibrant cloak of electronic nerves, entire continents of machines conversing with one another, the whole aggregation watching itself through a million cameras posted daily. How can this not stir that organ in us that is sensitive to something larger than ourselves?

For as long as the wind has blown and the grass grown, people have sat beneath trees in the wilderness for enlightenment — to see God. They have looked to the natural world for a hint of their origins. In the filigree of fern and feather they find a shadow of an infinite source. Even those who have no use for God study the evolving world of the born for clues to why we are here. For most people, nature is either a happy long-term accident or a very detailed reflection of its creator. For the latter, every species can be read as a four-billion-year-long encounter with God. (358)

Yet we can see more of God in a cell phone than in a tree frog. …Someday we may believe the most convivial technology we can make is not a testament to human ingenuity but a testimony of the holy. (358)

— VIA —

Brilliant. Part cultural anthropology, part philosophy, part history, quite a bit of journalism, …and all brilliant insight into the human condition. There are moments of feeling transcendent when reading this book, and there are moments of pure awe.

No doubt people of faith will have a difficult time with this book, but it is why I add this to my blog. Monotheists, — or people of any belief or sense of the transcendent — need to embrace this book, and the ideas in it as Jacob embraced the angel at Bethel, and refuse to let it go until he received a blessing. And like Jacob, you may ask for its name. You may ask for a way to reduce the technium to an entity you can easily identify, control, and manipulate. And like the angel, the technium will simply ask you why you ask.

And hopefully, as you understand what technology wants, it will radically transform what you want, what you desire, how you perceive the human condition, the soul, and ultimately, how you live.

FOREWORD BY N.T. WRIGHT

The Christian faith is kaleidoscopic, and most of us are color-blind. (11)

We ought to welcome it if a musician plays new parts of the harmony to the tune we thought we knew. (11)

“the gospel” is the story of Jesus of Nazareth told as the climax of the long story of Israel, which in turn is the story of how the one true God is rescuing the world. (12)

I want the full, biblical gospel. – John Stott

But we all urgently need to allow this deeply biblical vision of “the gospel” to challenge the less-than-completely-biblical visions we have cherished for too long, around which we have built a good deal of church life and practice. (13)

FOREWORD BY DALLAS WILLARD

At the root of the many problems that trouble the “church visible” today, there is one simple source: the message that is preached. (15)

Only a life of intelligent discipleship cold bring [the personal and social transformation that is so clearly anticipated in the biblical writers] to pass. Without that we have massive nominal, non-disciple “Christianity.” This leads one to ask, “What was the message that shocked the ancient world into its response to Christ and his apostles?” … Can we identify it and teach and live it today? | The answer to this question is “Yes!” We can today teach what Jesus taught int he manner he taught it, and that is certainly what he commissioned his disciples to do down through the ages. (15)

1971

Most of evangelism today is obsessed with getting someone to make a decision; the apostles, however, were obsessed with making disciples. …the gospel of Jesus wants more from us than a singular decision to get our sins wiped away so we can be safe and secure until heaven comes. (18)

At the most conservative of estimates, we lose at least 50 percent of those who make decisions. … One more point: focusing youth events, retreats, and programs on persuading people to make a decision disarms the gospel, distorts numbers, and diminishes the significance of discipleship. (20)

[VIA: So, as I was reading this introduction, I was struck with a (few) question(s), that is (are) a bit provocative, and perhaps a bit naive. If we're losing 50% of those who make decisions, a) how could that or any rubric be the motivation for change (ought change necessarily come from awareness that we've fallen short in our theology?) and b) what evidence do we have and we can point to that true "King Jesus Gospel" conversions or disciples fairs any better than 50%?]

1. THE BIG QUESTION

What is the gospel?

I believe the gospel has been hijacked by what we believe about “personal salvation,” and the gospel itself has been reshaped to facilitate making “decisions.” (26)

2. GOSPEL CULTURE OR SALVATION CULTURE?

The gospel doesn’t work for spectators; you have to participate for it to work its powers. (28)

Evangelicalism is known for at least two words: gospel and (personal) salvation. …In this book I will be contending firmly that we evangelicals (as a whole) are not really “evangelical” in the sense of the apostolic gospel, but instead we are soterians. Here’s why I say we are more soterian than evangelical: we evangelicals (mistakenly) equate the word gospel with the word salvation. Hence, we are really “salvationists.” (29)

My plea is that we go back to the New Testament to discover all over again what the Jesus gospel is and that by embracing it we become true evangelicals. My prayer for this book is that it will revive a generation of evangelicals to become true evangelicals instead of just soterians. (29)

A salvation culture does not require The Members or The Decided to become The Discipled for salvation. Why not? Because its gospel is a gospel shaped entirely with the “in and out” issue of salvation. Because it’s about making a decision. In this book we want to show that the gospel of Jesus and that of the apostles, both of which created a gospel culture and not simply a salvation culture, was a gospel that carried within it the power, the capacity, and the requirement to summon people who wanted to be “in” to be The Discipled. In other words, it swallowed up a salvation culture into a gospel culture. (33)

3. FROM STORY TO SALVATION

To set the stage for defining the gospel we need to distinguish four big categories, and the themes of this book flow from these four categories:

• The Story of Israel/the Bible,
• The Story of Jesus,
• The Plan of Salvation,
• The Method of Persuasion.

THE STORY OF ISRAEL

What Adam was to do in the Garden — that is, to govern this world redemptively on God’s behalf — is the mission God gives to Israel. Like Adam, Israel failed, and so did its kings. (35)

…the idea of King and a kingdom are connected to the original creation. …Finally, the Story has an aim: the consummation, when God will set it all straight as God establishes his kingdom on earth. (36)

THE STORY OF JESUS

…the fundamental problem the writer had in asking what Jesus as Messiah had to do with the gospel is that his understanding of the “gospel” is that it is a solution to an individual, existential, private sin-problem but not (at the same time) the resolution of a story-problem, namely, Israel’s Story in search of a Messiah-solution. (37)

THE PLAN OF SALVATION

…this Plan of Salvation is not the gospel. The Plan of Salvation emerges from the Story of Israel/Bible and from the Story of Jesus, but the plan and the gospel are not the same big idea. (39)

THE METHOD OF PERSUASION

The Plan of Salvation and the Method of Persuasion have been given so much weight they are crushing and have crushed the Story of Israel and the Story of Jesus. This has massive implications for the gospel itself. (43)

4. THE APOSTOLIC GOSPEL OF PAUL

The best place to begin is the one place in the entire New Testament where someone actually comes close to defining the word gospel. First Corinthians 15 is that place. (46)

THE GOSPEL DEFINED

that Christ died,
that Christ was buried,
that Christ was raised,
and that Christ appeared.

…the word gospel was used in the world of Jews at the time of the apostles to announce something, to declare something as good news — the word euangelion always means good news. “To gospel” is to herald, to proclaim, and to declare something about something. To put this together: the gospel is to announce good news about key events in the life of Jesus Christ. To gospel for Paul was to tell, announce, declare, and shout aloud the Story of Jesus Christ as the saving news of God. (50)

What this means is that the gospel is a whole-life-of-Jesus story, not just a reduction of the life to Good Friday. In my judgment, soterians have a Good-Friday-only gospel. (55)

I am perfectly comfortable with what people normally mean when they say “the gospel.” I just don’t think it is what Paul means. – Tom Wright

SUMMARY

We must now sum up this chapter: the gospel for the apostle Paul is the salvation-unleashing Story of Jesus, Messiah-Lord-Son, that brings to completion the Story of Israel as found in the Scriptures of the Old Testament. To “gospel” is to declare this story, and it is a story that saves people from their sins. That story is the only framing story if we want to be apostolic in how we present the gospel … This story begins at creation and finally only completes itself in the consummation when God is all in all. (61)

This leads to a warning, and it is one that animates much of this book: the Plan of Salvation can be preached apart from the story, and it has been done for five hundred years and two thousand years. When the plan gets separated from the story, the plan almost always becomes abstract, propositional, logical, rational, and philosophical and, most importantly, de-storified and unbiblical. When we separate the Plan of Salvation from the story, we cut ourselves off the story that identifies us and tells our past and tells our future. We separate ourselves from Jesus and turn the Christian faith into a System of Salvation. | There’s more. We are tempted to turn the story of what God is doing in this world through Israel and Jesus Christ into a story about me and my own personal salvation. In other words, the plan has a way of cutting the story from a story about God and God’s Messiah and God’s people into a story about God and one person — me — and in this the story shifts from Christ and community to individualism. (62)

5. HOW DID SALVATION TAKE OVER THE GOSPEL?

…1 Corinthians 15 is the genesis of the great Christian creeds. (64)

…denial of the creeds is tantamount to denying the gospel itself because what the creeds seek to do is bring out what is already in the Bible’s gospel. (65)

All I want to contend for is that the first four centuries were shaped by a gospel culture that derived directly and profoundly from the apostolic gospel tradition. (70)

The singular contribution of the Reformation, in all three direction — Lutheran, Reformed, and Anabaptist — was that the gravity of the gospel was shifted toward human response and personal responsibility and the development of the gospel as speaking into that responsibility. (71)

“Gospels of Sin Management” presume a Christ with no serious work other than redeeming humankind … [and] they foster “vampire Christians,” who only want a little blood for their sins but nothing more to do with Jesus until heaven. – Dallas Willard

6. THE GOSPEL IN THE GOSPELS?

…the four Gospels embody what the apostles remembered and taught about Jesus. (90)

7. JESUS AND THE GOSPEL

“Did Jesus preach himself as the completion of Israel’s Story in such a way that he was the saving story himself?” (92)

The point I want to make now is fivefold, and it is the heart of the answer to our question whether Jesus himself preached the gospel:

Jesus went to the Bible to define who he was and what his mission was.
Jesus believed he was completing scriptural passages.
Jesus predicted and embraced his death and resurrection.
Jesus therefore preached the gospel because he preached himself.
Jesus preached the gospel because he saw himself completing Israel’s Story.

CONCLUSION | Did Jesus preach the gospel? Yes, he preached the gospel because the gospel is the saving Story of Jesus completing Israel’s Story, and Jesus clearly set himself at the center of God’s saving plan for Israel. (111)

8. THE GOSPEL OF PETER

CONCLUSION | This is the fourth leg for our chair: the apostolic gospel tradition, the gospel in the four Gospels, the gospel of Jesus, and now the gospeling sermons in the book of Acts. (131)

9. GOSPELING TODAY

Anyone who can preach the gospel and not make Jesus’ exalted lordship the focal point simply isn’t preaching the apostolic gospel. (134)

Just what the “problem” is that the apostles see resolved in the gospel is worthy of serious reconsideration when one studies the gospeling events of Acts. One can infer from the promises — forgiveness and the gift of the Holy Spirit and the times of refreshing — that the problems were sins and the  absence of God’s power and the need of new creation. (136)

What happens if we begin to rethink the “problem” in light of the fundamental solution? (137)

The so-called fall of Genesis 3 is not just an act of sinning against God’s command, a moral lapse, but a betrayal of our fundamental kingly and priestly roles. …The issue is not just that we were sinners; we were usurpers in the garden. (138)

The question over and over in the Bible is: “Who is the rightful Lord of this cosmic temple?” (141)

When we reduce the gospel to only personal salvation, as soterians are tempted to do, we tear the fabric out of the Story of the Bible and we cease even needing the Bible. I don’t know of any other way to put it. (142)

Nero did not throw Christians to the lions because they confessed that “Jesus is Lord of my heart.” It was rather because they confessed that “Jesus is Lord of all,” meaning that Jesus was Lord even over the realm Caesar claimed as his domain of absolute authority.” – Michael Bird

10. CREATING A GOSPEL CULTURE

the gospel is Jesus’ and the apostles’ interpretation of the story of life. (148)

— VIA —

In short, I concur with McKnight’s evaluation of soterians as distinct from disciples who truly live and preach the “gospel” of Jesus. I concur with the theme of “story” that is so central to his thesis as I agree it is central to the Biblical narrative. And in many of the quotes above, I have new language and expressions that I have now added to my vocabulary, of which I’m very appreciative.

However, I have perceived some problems, a few logical inconsistencies, and some general perplexities with McKnight’s writing that I think are important to wrestle with. I’ll note a few.

First, while McKnight lays out a good description of a Biblical gospel he does so at the disdain of the “traditional” gospel of personal salvation. Yet, at the same time, he recognizes that same “personal salvation” as a part of the whole storied gospel. However, at one point he calls our current definition of that personal salvation gospel “wrong,” and a “pale reflection of the gospel of Jesus and the apostles.” (24) And yet again, quotes N.T. Wright who is perfectly comfortable with the personal salvation definition of gospel (though doesn’t think it means what the Bible says it means). This inconsistency is difficult to read and makes me wonder what McKnight really believes, or how he proposes that all of these definitions and meanings actually work together.

I propose we accept McKnight’s definitions of the “King Jesus Gospel” as distinct from the “soterian” gospel, but to do so without disdaining the meanings that are pervasive in our culture (like Wright’s position). I have personally wrestled with this and have held firmly (paradoxically) to the mystery of God’s work through all of the detrimental definitions, meanings, and cultural understandings of God’s work in the world through “the gospel.”

Second, McKnight makes a plea to the Creeds which seems to me completely antithetical to the storied approach of King Jesus Gospel that he proposes. He is right to suggest that 1 Corinthians 15 is the foundation for those creeds, and I would concur that they (the creeds) preserve an understanding of the gospel as a declaration of Jesus’ resurrection. But to start there, and to even say that the best place to begin is First Corinthians 15 (46) and the following Creeds just does not compute. For at the same time that the creeds solidified a creedal, confessional, theological construct of Jesus, they at the same time strip the gospel of the Story of Israel. This, to me, is simply perplexing how this argument follows.

Lastly, McKnight’s suggestion that “the Gospels” are not “The Gospel” but the “Gospels” actually preach “The Gospel” is a bit, to me, peculiar and odd.

There are a few others perplexities that are minor throughout the book that a reader may simply want to ignore. Regardless, I do believe that McKnight’s contribution, when taken at its heart, will help to challenge modern perceptions of “the gospel,” and prayerfully move the conversation forward, by moving it back.

Prologue

It is regrettable that an account of such beauty has become such a bloodied battle-ground, but that is indeed the case. (5)

In this book I have proposed a reading of Genesis that I believe to be faithful to the context of the original audience and author, and one that preserves and enhances the theological vitality of this text. (5)

Introduction

We like to think of the Bible possessively–my Bible…But it was not written to us. It was written to Israel. It is God’s revelation of himself to Israel and secondarily through Israel to everyone else. (7)

…the language is not the only aspect that needs to be translated. Language assumes a culture, operates in a culture, serves a culture, and is designed to communicate into the framework of a culture. Consequently, when we read a text written in another language and addressed to another culture, we must translate the culture as well as the language if we hope to understand the text fully. (7)

As complicated as translating a foreign language can be, translating a foreign culture is infinitely more difficult. (8)

The minute anyone (professional or amateur) attempts to translate the culture, we run the risk of making the text communicate something it never intended. Rather than translating the culture, then, we need to try to enter the culture. (9)

Truly learning the language requires leaving English behind, entering the world of the text and understanding the language in its Hebrew context without creating English words in their minds. (9)

We should therefore not speak of Israel being influenced by that world–they were part of that world. (12)

Mythology by its nature seeks to explain how the world works and how it came to work that way, and therefore includes a culture’s “theory of origins.” (12)

…it should nevertheless be recognized that Genesis 1 serves the similar function of offering an explanation of origins and how the world operated, not only for Israel, but for people today who put their faith in the Bible (13)

PROPOSITION 1: Genesis 1 Is Ancient Cosmology

Some Christians approach the text of Genesis as if it had modern science embedded in it or it dictates what modern science should look like. This approach … is called “concordism,” as it seeks to give a modern scientific explanation for the details in the text. (14)

We gain nothing by bringing God’s revelation into accordance with today’s science. In contrast, it makes perfect sense that God communicated his revelation to his immediate audience in terms they understood. (15)

Through the entire Bible, there is not a single instance in which God revealed to Israel a science beyond their own culture. no passage offers a scientific perspective that was not common to the Old World science of antiquity. (17)

Instead we strive to identify, truly and accurately, the thinking in the ancient world, the thinking in the world of the Bible, and to take that where it leads us, whether toward solutions or into more problems. (17)

…there is no concept of a “natural” world in ancient Near Eastern thinking. The dichotomy between natural and supernatural is a relatively recent one. …As a result, we should not expect anything int he Bible or int he rest of the ancient Near East to engage in the discussion of how God’s level of creative activity relates to the “natural” world (i.e., what we call naturalistic process or the laws of nature). (18)

We must take the text on its own terms–it is not written to us. God has chosen the agenda of the text, and we must be content with the wisdom of those choices. If we attempt to commandeer the text to address our issues, we distort it in the process. (19)

Sound interpretation proceeds from the belief that the divine and human authors were competent communicators and that we can therefore comprehend their communication. But to do so, we must respect the integrity of the author by refraining from replacing his message with our own. (19)

PROPOSITION 2: Ancient Cosmology is Function Oriented

If we are dealing with an ancient account we must ask questions about the world of that text: What did it mean to someone in the ancient world to say that the world existed? What sort of activity brought the world into that state of existence and meaning? What constituted a creative act?

In this book I propose that the people in the ancient world believed that something existed not by virtue of its material properties, but by virtue of its having a function in an ordered system. (24)

In a functional ontology, all of the above steps (computer: material phase, software, installation, power source, someone knowing how to use it) are important in the definition of existence. Unless people (or gods) are there to benefit from functions, existence is not achieved. Unless something is integrated into a working, ordered system, it does not exist. Consequently, the actual creative act is to assign something its functioning role in the ordered system. That is what brings it into existence. (25)

The question here concerns not what they perceived but what they gave significance to. (25)

…our ontology focuses on what we believe to be most significant. In the ancient world, what was most crucial and significant to their understanding of existence was the way that the parts of the cosmos functioned, not their material status. (26)

In conclusion, analysts of the ancient Near Eastern creation literature often observe that nothing material is actually made in these accounts. …If we follow the sense of the literature and its ideas of creation, we find that people in the ancient Near East did not think of creation in terms of making material things–instead, everything is function oriented. The gods are beginning their own operations and are making all of the elements of the cosmos operational. Creation thus constituted bringing order to the cosmos from an originally nonfunctional condition. It is from this reading of the literature that we may deduce a functional ontology in the ancient world–that is, that they offer accounts of functional origins rather than accounts of material origins. Consequently, to create something (cause it to exist) in the ancient world means to give it a function, not material properties. We need to note the contrast: we tend to think of the cosmos as a machine and argue whether someone is running the machine or not. The ancient world viewed the cosmos more like a company or a kingdom. (33)

Would they have believed that their gods also manufactured the material? Absolutely, for nothing can be thought to stand apart from the gods. But they show little interest in material origins. Such issues were simply insignificant to them. (34)

PROPOSITION 3: “Create” (Hebrew ברא) Concerns Functions

If existence is defined in functional terms, creating is a material activity. If existence is defined in functional terms, creating is a function-giving activity. (37)

The English reader must face a difficult fact: one cannot comprehend the literal meaning of a word in the Old Testament without knowing Hebrew or having access to the analysis by someone who does. (37)

It can therefore be confidently asserted that the activity is inherently a divine activity and not one that humans can perform or participate in. (38)

The truest meaning of a text is found in what the author and hearers would have thought. (42)

The chapter does involve creative activities, but all in relation to the way that the ancient world thought about creation and existence: by naming, separating and assigning functions and roles in an ordered system. (45)

PROPOSITION 4: The Beginning State in Genesis 1 Is Nonfunctional

If the text offered an account of material origins, we would expect it to begin with no material. If the text offered an account of functional origins, we would expect it to begin with no functions. (46)

We must never forget that translation is the most basic act of interpretation. One cannot convey words meaningfully from a source language to a target language without first determining what they think the text means to say. (48)

The creation account in Genesis 1 can then be seen to begin with no functions rather than with no material. …in the ancient world, function was not the result of material properties, but the result of purpose. (49)

Genesis 2:18 | This verse has nothing to do with moral perfection or quality of workmanship–it is a comment concerning function. The human condition is not functionally complete without the woman. Thus throughout Genesis 1 the refrain “it was good” expressed the functional readiness of the cosmos for human beings. Readers were assured that all functions were operating well and in accord with God’s purposes and direction. Moreover the order and function established and maintained by God renders the cosmos both purposeful and intelligible. So there is reason or motivation for studying the detailed nature of creation, which we now call science, even if the ancient Hebrews didn’t take up this particular study. (50)

All of this indicates that cosmic creation in the ancient world was not viewed primarily as a process by which matter was brought into being, but as a process by which functions, roles, order, jurisdiction, organization and stability were established. This defines creation in the ancient world and in turn demonstrates that ontology was focused on something’s functional status rather than its material status. (52)

PROPOSITION 5: Days One to Three in Genesis 1 Establish Functions

Day 1 | describing the creation of time. (55)

Day 2 | the functions that serve as the basis for weather. (57)

Day 3 | differentiates terrestrial space. (57)

So on day one God created the basis for time; day two the basis for weather; day three the basis for food. These three great functions–time, weather and food–are the foundation of life. if we desire to see the greatest work of the Creator, it is not to be found in the materials that he brought together–it is that he brought them together in such a way that they work. … We should never lose the wonder of this. Functions are far more important than materials. (58)

PROPOSITION 6: Days Four to Six in Genesis 1 Install Functionaries

All of the rest of creation functions in relationship to humankind, and humankind serves the rest of creation as God’s vice regent (67)

SUMMARY | In days four to six the functionaries of the cosmos are installed in their appropriate positions and given their appropriate roles. Using the company analogy, they are assigned their offices (cubicles), told to whom they will report, and thus given an idea of their place in the company. Their workday is determined by the clock, and they are expected to be productive. Foremen have been put in place, and the plant is now ready for operation. But before the company is ready to operate, the owner is going to arrive and move into his office. (70)

PROPOSITION 7: Divine Rest Is in a Temple

Deity rests in a temple, and only in a temple. This is what temples were built for. We might eve say that this is what a temple is–a place for divine rest. Perhaps even more significant, in some texts the construction of a temple is associated with cosmic creation. (71)

But in the ancient world rest is what results when a crisis has been resolved or when stability has been achieved, when things have “settled down.” (72)

After creation, God takes up his rest and rules from his residence. … In the Old Testament the idea that rest involves engagement in the normal activities that can be carried out when stability has been achieved can be seen in the passages where God talks of giving Israel rest in the land… (73)

PROPOSITION 8: The Cosmos Is a Temple

Thus the absence of a temple was sometimes part of the description of the precosmic condition. (77)

Indeed, the temple is, for all intents and purposes, the cosmos. This interrelationship makes it possible for the temple to be the center from which order in the cosmos is maintained. (80)

Consequently we may conclude that the Garden of Eden was sacred space and the temple/tabernacle contained imagery of the garden and the cosmos. All the ideas are interlinked. The temple is a microcosm, and Eden is represented in the antechamber that serves as sacred space adjoining the Presence of God as an archetypal sanctuary. (82)

That is precisely what we are proposing as the premise of Genesis 1: that it should be understood as an account of functional origins of the cosmos as a temple. (83)

1. In the bible and in the ancient Near East the temple is viewed as a microcosm.
2. The temple is related to the functions of the cosmos.
3. The creation of the temple is parallel to the creation of the cosmos.
4. The creation of the temple is parallel to the creation of the cosmos.
5. In the Bible the cosmos can be viewed as a temple.

Genesis 1 can now be seen as a creation account focusing on the cosmos as a temple. It is describing the creation of the cosmic temple with all of its functions and with God dwelling in its midst. (83)

PROPOSITION 9: The Seven Days of Genesis 1 Relate to the Cosmic Temple Inauguration

We must draw an important distinction between the building of a temple and the creation of a temple. (87)

In summary, we have suggested that the seven days are not given as the period of time over which the material cosmos came into existence, but the period of time devoted to the inauguration of the functions of the cosmic temple, and perhaps also its annual reenactment. It is not the material phase of temple construction that represents the creation of the temple; it is the inauguration of the functions and the entrance of the presence of God to take up his rest that creates the temple. (91)

PROPOSITION 10: The Seven Days of Genesis 1 Do Not Concern Material Origins

Viewing Genesis 1 as an account of functional origins of the cosmos as temple does not in any way suggest or imply that God was uninvolved in material origins–it only contends that Genesis 1 is not that story. To the author and audience of Genesis, material origins were simply not a priority. (95)

The thological point is that whatever exists, be it material or functional, God made it. (96)

In the “after” picture the cosmos is now not only the handiwork of God (since he was responsible for the material phase all along, whenever it took place), but it also becomes God’s residence–the place he has chosen and prepared for his presence to rest. (97)

PROPOSITION 11: “Functional Cosmic Temple” Offers Face-Value Exegesis

Those who have championed the “literal” interpretation of the text have objected that these approaches are reductionistic attempts to bypass difficult scientific implications and claim that by pursuing them the text is so compromised that it is, in effect, rejected. … I believe that if we are going to interpret the text according to its face value, we need to read it as the ancient author would have intended and as the ancient audience would have heard it. (102)

Divine intention must not be held hostage to the ebb and flow of scientific theory. Scientific theory cannot serve as the basis for determining divine intention. (104)

…there is not a single instance in the Old Testament of God giving scientific information that transcended the understanding of the Israelite audience. If he is consistently communicating to them in terms of their world and understanding, then why should we expect to find modern science woven between the lines? People who value the Bible do not need to make it “speak science” to salvage its truth claims or credibility. The most respectful reading we can give to the text, the reading most faithful to the face value of the text–and the most “literal” understanding, if you will–is the one that comes from their world not ours. (105)

PROPOSITION 12: Other Theories of Genesis 1 Either Go Too Far or Not Far Enough

In this view, science cannot offer an unbiblical view of material origins, because there is no biblical view of material origins aside from the very general idea that whatever happened, whenever it happened, and however it happened, God did it. (112)

PROPOSITION 13: The Difference Between Origin Accounts in Science and Scripture Is Metaphysical in Nature

It is unconvincing for a scientist to claim that he or she finds no empirical evidence of God. Science as currently defined and practiced is ill-equipped to find evidence of God. (115)

As the result of an empirical disciple, biological evolution can acknowledge no purpose, but likewise it cannot contend that there is no purpose outside of a metaphysical conclusion that there is no God. (115)

God’s purposes and intentions are most clearly seen in the way the cosmos runs rather than in its material structure or in the way that its material structures were formed… (117)

PROPOSITION 14: God’s Roles as Creator and Sustainer Are Less Different Than We Have Thought.

In conclusion I suggest that God initiated the functions in Genesis 1 so that they are seen to originate in him. (122)

PROPOSITION 15: Current Debate About Intelligent Design Ultimately Concerns Purpose

Coincidence is just the word we use when we have not yet discovered the cause…It’s an illusion of the human mind, a way of saying, “I don’t know why this happened this way, and I have no intention of finding out.” – Orson Scott Card

In short, teleological aspects (exploration of purpose) are not in the realm of science as it has been defined and therefore could not be factored into a scientific understanding. (126)

PROPOSITION 16: Scientific Explanations of Origins Can Be Viewed in Light of Purpose, and If So, Are Unobjectionable

We have no cause to reject the science, yet science is incapable of affirming or identifying the role of God. (134)

We don’t organize campaigns to force academic institutions that train meteorologists or embryologists to offer the theological alternative of God’s role. Why should our response to evolution be any different? (135)

PROPOSITION 17: Resulting Theology in This View of Genesis 1 Is Stronger, Not Weaker

Our world tends to subordinate the functional to the material. That is why ever since the Enlightenment (at least) we have generally believed that it is most important for us to think of creation in terms of the material. … The Bible considers it much more important to say that God has made everything work rather than being content to say that God made the physical stuff. (143)

SABBATH. Sabbath isn’t the sort of thing that should have to be regulated by rules. It is the way that we acknowledge that God is on the throne, that this world is his world, that our time is his gift to us. (146)

The theological commitment we draw from Genesis 1 is that God is the author of order. (147)

1. The world operates by Yahweh’s design and under his supervision to accomplish his purposes.
2. The cosmos is his temple.
3. Everything in the cosmos was given its role and function by God.
4. Everything in the cosmos functions on behalf of people who are in his image.

PROPOSITION 18: Public Science Education Should Be Neutral Regarding Purpose

If a science course intends to discuss material origins from the perspective of a material ontology (which is essential to the nature of empirical science), there is no point at which the Genesis account becomes relevant, because Genesis does not concern material origins and does not have a material ontology. (151)

SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS

1. Genesis operates primarily within a functional ontology as a faith system.
2. Genesis is insistent in affirming teleology with no possible neutrality.
3. Consequently Genesis should not be taught in empirical science classrooms, for it is not empirical science.
4. Empirical science operates within a material ontology and can be taught as a byproduct of that ontology.
5. Empirical science need not favor teleology or dysteleology and should remain neutral on the issue as much as possible.
6. What science has to offer concerning descriptive mechanisms of material origins can be explored in metaphysically neutral ways without offense to biblical affirmations in Genesis 1.
7. If metaphysical naturalism were to be allowed in the science classroom, then there would no longer be any logical reason to ban discussions of design. Since metaphysical naturalism opposes teleological conclusions, it functions on the same metaphysical plane as design, which opposes dysteleological conclusions.
8. Irreducible complexity has a potential role in the empirical science classroom but should not be a matter for legislation one way or the other.

Summary and Conclusions

The position that I have proposed regarding Genesis 1 may be designated the cosmic temple inauguration view. (161)

It is the mark of stubborn and dogmatic persons to be oblivious to the need either to test their own beliefs or to recognize the successful tests that opposing beliefs have undergone. – Gerald Runkle

We must keep in mind that we are presumptuous if we consider our interpretations of Scripture to have the same authority as Scripture itself. … We must not let our interpretations stand in the place of Scripture’s authority and thus risk misrepresenting God’s revelation. (167)

— VIA —

For those engaged in this subject, Walton must be contended with. His theological work and textual criticism is beneficial, by the way, not just on Genesis, but the whole of Scripture. Learning to read texts on their own terms must be the fundamental “rule of thumb” for any reader of the Bible.

The one area of the book that is considerably weak, in my estimation, is Walton’s reference to Intelligent Design, specifically irreducible complexity. Not only because the Dover, Pennsylvania case was in 2004, time enough for some editing for this work, but also because it seems that the very argument Walton is putting forth a priori negates design as valid for empirical science.

The number of reviews online is encouraging, as I do hope that more will consider Walton’s work, not because he is smarter than others, but because he is one of the few who is approaching the Biblical text on its own terms.

As a part of their study of the Holocaust, the children of the Whitwell, TN Middle School try to collect 6 million paper clips representing the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis.

Beautiful. Several themes emerge in this movie that are worthy of note. And though the pace and tone of the movie is slow, a bit “small-town,” the 83 minutes are worth it.

HUMILITY OF TEACHERS. Throughout the film, you hear these teachers mention how they were challenged and transformed in their biases, not just along racial or ethnic lines, but along generational lines as well. They mentioned how they needed to look at their students in new ways, and to allow them to teach the teachers.

PEDAGOGICAL VALUES OF EXPERIENCE AND OWNERSHIP. The level of ownership on the students part for this project is to be commended. It was a student’s question that spurred them on, and student involvement that solidified the learning.

DON’T PROTECT. EDUCATE. It was briefly mentioned, but highlighted, that part of the educational experience is not to protect students from the realities of the real world. We are to expose them to the brutal truths, and empower them to live through the “hell on earth” with redemptive purpose, hope, courage, strength, and wisdom.

THE INSPIRATIONAL POWER OF A STORY. ‘Nuff said. And the producers of this film did a good job crafting the story.

THE LESSONS OF HUMANITY. I pray that the lessons of the Holocaust never grow wearisome, tired, or familiar… ever. These are lessons that we need to continually teach and talk about with every generation that emerges. And those of us who have heard the stories, been to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., or Yad VaShem in Israel, may we never become calloused-hearted, and may those lessons break us, mold us, shape us, again, and again, and again.

Short snippets of a random selection of young people does not a documentary make. I’m always thankful to be educated and exposed to various aspects of life and culture. And to a certain degree, this film accomplishes that. Some stories prompted me to feel proud and excited about the future. Others, a bit fearful. However, I do not concur that this was “fascinating,” “revealing,” or even “inspiring,” and overall, it seems to have missed the main thrust of the mission statement, which reads,

The Young Americans Project seeks to provide a voice for our generation. America wants to know who its young citizens are, what they desire, and how they will shape our nation’s future.  There are many questions that need answers. How will unlimited and readily available information change the way we view the world? Are we plagued by a sense of entitlement? Do we have the desire and tools to lead America into the future? Who are the innovators, the leaders, the role players? Where is the idealism? How will we respond to the globalization that has brought terrorism and unprecedented competition to our doorsteps?

While allusions to these themes were in the dialogue, none of them were addressed or even considered as a platform for discussion.

Our Time does help an isolated individual become exposed to the varieties of American expression, and that is something we could all benefit from. However, from a youth standpoint, much is left to be desired. No in-depth discussion, no studies, no sociological commentary, etc. Just random young people sharing their random thoughts. I commend the project’s aims. I’m disappointed with the projects results.

http://tyap.com/index.php

http://youlostmebook.com/

You Lost Me, Explained

You Lost Me, is about young insiders. At its heart are the irreverent, blunt, and often painful personal stories of young Christians–or other young adults who once thought of themselves as Christians–who have left the church and sometimes the faith. (11)

A generation of young Christians believes that the churches in which they were raised are not safe and hospitable places to express doubts. …Whether or not that conclusion is fair, it is true that the Christian community does not well understand the new and not-so-new concerns, struggles, and mindsets of young dropouts… (11)

You Lost Me seeks to explain the next generation’s cultural context and examine the question How can we follow Jesus — and help young people faithfully follow Jesus — in a dramatically changing culture? (12)

I believe that, within the stories of young people wrestling with faith, the church as a whole can find fresh and revitalizing answers. Let’s call it “reverse mentoring,” because we, the established Christian generation, have a lot to learn from the emerging generation. (12)

As we begin, recognize that we have both individual responsibility and institutional opportunity. …Implication: we have to reexamine the substance of our relationships and the shape of our institutions. (13)

Given this multitude of viewpoints, I can almost guarantee that some of what we will discover together will make you feel threatened, overwhelmed, and perhaps even a little guilty. My aim is to provoke new thinking and new action in the critical process of the spiritual development of the next generation. As a faith community, we need a whole new mind to see that the way we develop young people’s faith — the way we have been teaching them to engage the world as disciples of Christ — is inadequate for the issues, concerns, and sensibilities of the world we ask them to change for God. (15)

Part 1 Dropouts

1. Faith, Interrupted

1. Teen church engagement remains robust, but many of the enthusiastic teens so common in North American churches are not growing up to be faithful young adult disciples of Christ.
2. There are different kinds of dropouts, as well as faithful young adults who never drop out at all. We need to take care not to lump an entire generation together, because every story of disconnection requires a personal, tailor-made response.
3. The dropout problem is, at its core, a faith-development problem; to use religious language, it’s a disciple-making problem. The church is not adequately preparing the next generation to follow Christ faithfully in a rapidly changing culture.

The conclusion: after significant exposure to Christianity as teenagers and children, many young adults, whether raised Catholic or Protestant, are MIA from the pews and from active commitment to Christ during their twenties. (25)

…most young Christians are struggling less with their faith in Christ than with their experience of church. (27)

The next generation is caught between two possible destinies — one moored by the power and depth of the Jesus-centered gospel and one anchored to a cheap, Americanized version of the historic faith that will snap at the slightest puff of wind. (28)

There are three central arenas where these gaps are in evidence — and where the church has God-given opportunities to rethink our approach to disciple making.

1. Relationships. Many young people feel that older adults don’t understand their doubts and concerns, a prerequisite to rich mentoring friendships. …The next generation are consummate collage artists, able to blend a diverse set of relationships, ideas, and aspirations. This includes awareness of global issues as well as maintaining relationships with people across generations, religions, sexual orientations, and ethnic backgrounds. How can the Christian community understand and learn from the empathy and energy of the next generation, while also cultivating their quest for truth? (29)
2. Vocation. Can the Christian community summon the courage to prepare a new generation of professionals to be excellent in their calling and craft, yet humble and faithful where God has asked them to serve? Can the Christian community relearn to esteem and make space for art, music, play, design, and (dare I say it) joy?
3. Wisdom. How can the Christian community help young Christians live wisely in a culture of mental, emotional, and spiritual distraction?

A person sets his or her moral and spiritual foundations early in life, usually before age thirteen, yet the teen and young adult years are a significant period of experimentation, of testing the limits and reality of those foundations. In other words, even though the childhood and early adolescent years are the time during which spiritual and moral compasses are calibrated, the experimental and experiential decade from high school to the late twenties is the time when a young person’s spiritual trajectory is confirmed and clarified. (31)

Together we could lovingly challenge the church from within to repent and become truly Christian again. (34)

We need a new mind to focus on apprenticeship in the way of Jesus. (35)

2. Access, Alienation, Authority

I think this next generation is not just slightly different from the past. I believe they are discontinuously different than anything we have seen before. – Bob Buford

In this chapter I argue that the next generation is so different because our culture is discontinuously different. (38)

The next generation is living in a new technological, social, and spiritual reality; this reality can be summed up in three words: access, alienation, and authority.

ACCESS. Simply put, technology is fueling the rapid pace of change and the disconnection between the past and the future. (41) Will the Christian community connect meaningfully with the generation growing up in this context? (57)

ALIENATION. We might think of alienation as very high levels of isolation from family, community, and institutions. (44) Will the Christian community cultivate a presence-centered approach to developing young people, bringing us out of our isolation and alienating pragmatism? (57)

AUTHORITY. Let’s call this skepticism of authority — new questions about who to believe and why. (50) Will the Christian community see skepticism of authority as an opportunity or as a threat? (57)

3. Nomads and Prodigals

NOMADS. Frequently nomads among the Mosaic generation say that leaving church was less an intentional choice and more of a “slow fade,” a period of increasing detachment that took many months or years. For some, faith was never very deep; they were “in the building” but never really committed to following Christ. (63)

Here are some characteristics of the nomadic mindset:

• They still describe themselves as Christians.
• They believe that personal involvement in a Christian community is optional.
• The importance of faith has faded.
• Most are not angry or hostile toward Christianity.
• Many are spiritual experimentalists.

PRODIGALS. …young people who leave their childhood or teen faith entirely. This includes those who deconvert (including atheists, agnostics, and “nones,” those who say they have no religious affiliation) and those who switch to another faith. …Prodigals’ views of Christians and churches are all over the map, largely dependent on how positive or negative their experiences were. …one of the identity-shaping characteristics of prodigals is that they say they are no longer Christian.

• They feel varying levels of resentment toward Christians and Christianity.
• They have disavowed returning to church.
• They have moved on from Christianity.
• Their regrets, if they have them, usually center on their parents.
• They feel as if they have broken out of constraints.

4. Exiles

…let’s define exiles as those who grew up in the church and are now physically or emotionally disconnected in some way, but who also remain energized to pursue God-honoring lives. They feel the loss, in many ways, of the familiar church environment in which they once found meaning, identity, and purpose. They feel lost, yet hopeful. (75)

…many of today’s exiles…feel isolated and alienated from the Christian community — caught between the church as it is and what they believe it is called to be. (77)

• Exiles are not inclined toward being separate from “the world.”
• They are skeptical of institutions but are not wholly disengaged from them.
• Young exiles sense God moving “outside the walls of the church.”
• They are not disillusioned with tradition; they are frustrated with slick or shallow expressions of religion.
• Exiles express a mix of concern and optimism for their peers.
• They have not found faith to be instructive to their calling or gifts.
• They struggle when other Christians question their motives.

A film isn’t Christian just because it has inserted the gospel message in there somehow. A film can point to Christ when it honestly portrays our human condition and invites us to experience something about redemption that each of us needs. – Justin

It is not my intention to defend their vies or activities, a handful of which I can’t, in good conscience, endorse. Instead, through their stories, I hope to focus our attention on the larger exile phenomenon these young adults represent. (84)

The challenge for the Christian community is how to respond to the growing number of exiles. …Will we listen and take to heart their prophetic critiques of the church’s posture toward our increasingly pluralistic society? Will we change our structures, guided by the unchanging truths of Scripture, to nurture their gifts and unique calling into a world deeply loved by, yet in many ways hostile to, God? (87)

Part 2 Disconnections

Once I heard present-day leader Jack Hayford observe that the younger generation needs the older generation to help them identify the voice of God, just as Samuel needed Eli to help him know God was calling him. Hayford also observed that helping in this way requires that we recognize, as Eli did, that God is speaking to the younger generation. (94)

5. Overprotective

HELICOPTER CULTURE. …our culture’s obsession with safety has shaped two generations of Boomer and Buster parents who are deeply risk-averse when it comes to their kids. (97)

Is it possible that our cultural fixation on safety and protectiveness has also had a profound effect on the church’s ability to disciple the next generation of Christians? Are we preparing them for a life of risk, adventure, and service to God — a God who asks that they lay down their lives for his kingdom? Or are we churning out safe, compliant Christian kids who are either chomping at the bit to get free or huddling in the basement playing World of Warcraft for hours on end, terrified to step out of doors? (97)

Here are some of the criticisms that young Christians and former Christians level at the church:

• Christians demonize everything outside of the church.
• Christians are afraid of pop culture, especially its movies and music.
• Christians maintain a false separate of sacred and secular.
• Christians do not want to deal with the complexity or reality of the world.

Could it be that the growing desire for mainstream influence among the younger generation is the work of God — preparing them to bring restoration and renewal to our culture? (103)

An overprotected generation has been sold the lie that “Christian living” means material blessing, automatic protection, and bulletproof safety. (105)

The Risks of Parenting | …no Christian parent earns a reward in heaven for coaching his or her kids to live long and secure lives. (106)

The Risks of Cultural Influence | They want to be culture makers, not culture avoiders. (107)

Christ-followers contend with two opposing temptations. Cultural withdrawal and Cultural accomodation.

6. Shallow

After more than a decade and a half of research into American faith, I believe that the Christian church in the United States has a shallow faith problem because we have a discipleship problem. (120)

A second way our communities of faith contribute to shallow faith is by failing to provide meaningful rituals — or, when rituals exist, failing to provide a clear sense of their meaning and importance. (122)

In our research, we find clear evidence that many parents and churches have expectations of young people that are much too low or much to driven by cultural ideas of success. (123)

7. Antiscience

Dialogue, creative problem solving, living with questions and with ambiguity, group brainstorming, the opportunity to contribute — these are highly valued by the next generation. To the extent that we in the Christian community insist that young adults should just accept our “right” answers, we perpetuate a needless schism between science and faith. (135)

…most students who are likely to experience loss of faith do so before college; they begin to feel disconnected from their faith or from the church even before high school ends. (140)

I believe that people of faith have a responsibility and an opportunity to speak positively and prophetically to issues of science, rather than responding out of hostility or ignorance. (143)

What if churches made a concerted effort to identify scientific and mathematical inclinations in young people (as well as other skills and gifts), and then connected young believers with older Christians who are living out their faith in related careers? (144)

They are taught how to think well, not simply what to think. (145) [VIA: The problem (and please forgive my audaciously chauvinistic inquiry) is the question, Do Boomer and Buster Christians understand what it means to think well?]

8. Repressive

Let’s get right to it. Sexuality is one of the greatest expressions of God’s creativity and of his intention for human flourishing. It is also confounding and confusing to teenagers and young adults on their spiritual journeys. (149)

There is a big difference between frank, nurturing talk about sex and self-centered bragging. (159)

Much of the abstinence messaging, however well-intended, capitulates to culturally cultivated individualism: sex is about me. (159)

Neither traditionalism nor individualism is working — nor are they biblical. …We need to rediscover the relational narrative of sexuality. (160)

…we have a great opportunity to help the next generation live a new narrative of sexual life — the relational narrative We can begin by doing two things — making sex everybody’s business and making sex God’s business. (161)

…the purpose is thriving relationships, not sexual repression. (164)

Perhaps, with some level of optimism, we might describe young Christians as fertile ground for grace. (164)

9. Exclusive

“No compromise!” has been the slogan of the Western church, but it does not make sense to the next generation, for whom negotiation and cooperation are facts of life. (172)

…young people start with the basic assumption that everyone belongs and they have a hard time understanding spiritual communities that feel like insider-only clubs. (174)

Passionate, mission-driven exiles seem to share the conviction that the North American church has somehow lost its heart for the very kinds of people Jesus sought out during his earthly ministry — the oppressed, the poor, and the physically, emotionally, and socially crippled. (179)

Exclusion lacks love; the wrong kind of tolerance lacks courage. (180)

10. Doubtless

Is the Christian community capable of holding doubt and faithfulness in tension, welcoming hard questions even as we press together toward answers? (187)

We might consider shifting away from a focus on “experts” toward a more relational approach. (188)

I believe unexpressed doubt is one of the most powerful destroyers of faith. (192)

I think faith communities have not done a good job creating environments and experiences where students can process their doubts. Our posture toward students and young adults should be more Socratic, more process-oriented, more willing to live with their questions and seek answers together. …Dealing with doubt is a fully relational task. (194)

Part 3 Reconnections

11. What’s Old is New

…allow me to share three things I have learned from studying the next generation:

1. the church needs to reconsider how we make disciples
2. we need to rediscover Christian calling and vocation
3. we need to reprioritize wisdom over information as we seek to know God

…the Christian community needs a new mind — a new way of thinking, a new way of relating, a new vision of our role in the world — to pass on the faith to this and future generations. (202)

RETHINKING RELATIONSHIPS. Original assumption: The church exists to prepare the next generation to fulfill God’s purposes. New thinking: The church is a partnership of generations fulfilling God’s purposes in their time.

Flourishing intergenerational relationships should distinguish the church from other cultural institutions. (203)

• Over protective → Discernment | We cast out fear by discerning our times and embracing the risks of cultural engagement.
• Shallow → Apprenticeship | We leave shallow faith behind by apprenticing young people in the fine art of following Christ.
• Antiscience → Stewardship | We respond to today’s scientific culture by stewarding young people’s gifts and intellect.
• Repressive → Relational | We live by a relational sexual ethic that rejects traditionalist and individualist narratives of sex.
• Exclusion → Embrace | We demonstrate the exclusive nature of Christ by rekindling our empathy for the “other.”
• Doubting → Doing | We faithfully work through our doubts by doing acts of service with and for others.

For me, frankly, the most heartbreaking aspect of our findings is the utter lack of clarity that many young people have regarding what God is asking them to do with their lives. (207)

12. Fifty Ideas to Find a Generation

1. First, Be Honest
2. Confess
3. Increase Your Expectations
4. Preach a Better Gospel
5. Hand-Craft Disciples
6. Recover Imagination
7. Recognize Giftedness
8. Invite Participation
9. Take Risks
10. Re-center on Jesus
11. Don’t Overreact
12. Be a Rebel–Get Married
13. Take a Gap Year
14. Take Education Seriously
15. Interpret Culture
16. Find the Family of God
17. Find Calling in the Marketplace
18. Strengthen Family Ties
19. Think Christianly about Media
20. Avoid “Proxy Wars”
21. Refuse a Religious Veneer
22. Travel as a Family
23. Be Present
24. Be Intentionally Intergenerational
25. Disciple Like Jesus
26. Make Connections
27. Release Your Successors
28. Meet a Need
29. Reclaim Hope
30. Seek Diversity
31. Use Time Wisely
32. Be Nonpartisan but Not Apolitical
33. Tell On Yourself
34. Be Like Jesus
35. Embrace the Radical Gospel
36. Don’t Condescend
37. Have Faith in the Next Generation
38. Support a Student
39. Give Them What They Want
40. Be the Right Kind of Mentor
41. Catalyze Innovation
42. Un-market the Gospel
43. Lift Up the God of Justice
44. Take a Note from the Amish
45. Reason Clearly
46. Avoid False Ultimatums
47. Make Distinctions That Matter
48. Give Honest Answers to Honest Questions
49. Don’t Fear Doubt
50. Share Power

— VIA —

Here are my selected charts and data points from the book: You Lost Me, David Kinnaman – Tables and charts

[Disclosure: I'm preaching through this series with a church who has partnered with this campaign and had a brief cordial talk with Shelley Leith, the National Church Coach and Story Specialist, Western Region, at the NYWC, 2011. Thanks to Shelley for the dialogue. I hope my words here do justice to our conversation.]

There does seem to be some movement in the Christian Church regarding the Biblical text. Many are no longer satisfied with the pithy “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth” kind of understanding, or the overly simplistic “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” approach. There appears to be a genuine hunger for more, and this awakening coming not just from the publishing industry. Much of this may have to do with the prevalence of the “new atheists” who may have ironically and inadvertently heightened spiritual awareness and curiosity of the Bible. Much of it may have to do with the global religious climate. Much of it may have to do with the advancement of Biblical studies, archaeology, historiology, etc. Regardless, I am persuaded that this curiosity and interest is a good thing (Genesis). Understanding the Bible on its own terms for the kind of writing that it is and the kind of writing that the original readers would have understood it to be can only be beneficial for the faith development and expression in the Judeo-Christian ethic in our contemporary culture. Perhaps the Bible’s reputation and content not only be redeemed, but once again find prominence of place in public discourse. And that, not just because it’s “the Bible,” but because as we read it differently, we understand it more honestly and thoroughly; a perspective that illuminates the Bible’s brilliance when it comes to the human condition.

The Story is a good step in the right direction. It’s approach is simple: Bible only. Well, an edited version, but the actual text nonetheless (NIV version); you just have to get through a foreword by Lucado and Frazee.

I do have two opposite sentiments regarding this campaign, however:

1. Why not just buy a Bible with the full STORY? Part of the major problem with The Story is that it is a compilation of “selections” from the Bible. Hundreds of key elements are left out (Abraham’s cutting of the covenant, and Shiphrah & Puah, as examples). When the Bible was being written, it wasn’t as if the authors were throwing in “filler” material so that they met their word count quota. The significance of even the smallest detail in the grand Story (yes, including genealogies) that God is telling cannot be overlooked. While I understand the necessity of editing when publishing in this format, this reality conversely establishes the main reason to be disappointed with the campaign and production.

Okay, … however,

2. Bless God for The Story. May more people/churches engage with the fullness of this book and the STORY that God is truly telling in it. I do believe it is necessary for us to set aside “Bible-bashing,” (using the Bible as a condemnatory tool), “quote-mining” (finding verses in the Bible to substantiate our own opinions), “imaginative interpretations” (“I think this verse means … to me“), and “cultural eisegesis” (imposing our own viewpoints on the Bible to make it “relevant”). Like any other piece of literature in the world, we ought never to bastardize or manipulate words in ways they were never intended to be used. As Shelley mentioned to me at the convention, The Story is not intended to replace the Bible, but to be a beginning point for people to actually go and read the Bible. I trust her stated value, and hope that it actually does result in this behavior.

I am also thankful for the supplemental materials that Zondervan has provided. My brief perusal of the historical and cultural content provides much needed information for contextualizing the Bible appropriately. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be sold as part of the main curriculum package (which is discouraging for me), however, you can request it, and perhaps it will make its way into the main packaged offerings.

http://zph.com/qr60/

Every parent has a set of limitations. As you read these pages we hope you will learn to look beyond your limitations and embrace a set of principles that will help you influence your children beyond your own capacity. (20)

Chapter 1 – The Orange Parent

A Parent’s influence is best realized in partnership with the church.

Maybe it’s just me, but I never seem to have enough time or space. Instead, my approach to parenting has often been random and reactive. I think many of us respond to what we feel is right in the moment. We reach for the closest book on the shelf, scan the first Web site in our Google search, or sort through multiple lists given to us by the “experts.” Then we parent by experiment. (25)

Too many parents wake up one day and realize they have economized on the very relationships they vowed would always be a priority. (26)

…the essence of parenting is really about nurturing critical connections that affect eery child’s future. (26)

No one has more potential to influence your child than you. (27)

Are you starting to feel a little pressure? Good. It may be healthy from time to time to feel a little desperate, especially if your desperation drives you to get help and admit that you don’t have the capacity to be a perfect parent. If parenting isn’t a little intimidating, then maybe you don’t really understand how critical your role is. (28)

We need to remember that our influence has more to do with our relationships with our children than it does our skills as parents. Your purpose as a parent is not to develop exceptional parenting skills. (29)

Your role is not to impress your children or anyone else with your ability to parent; your role is to impress your children with the love and nature of God. (29)

But there is a flip side to this principle. It is the other thread that runs through these pages: Some things are simply beyond a parent’s capacity to do. (29)

You are not the only influence your children need. (30)

Here is a primary point of this book: Your children one day will seek affirmation and approval from adults other than you. (31)

Two combined influences will make a greater impact than just two influences. (31)

We call that the Orange Factor. (32)

Chapter 2 – Stock Family Syndrome

God isn’t holding up a perfect picture; He’s writing a bigger story.

Reality looks different for every family. (39)

If most of the parents in the Bible had shown up in your church, you would have suggested they go to counseling. (43)

So, what is God doing? He’s not trying to give you a better picture. He’s writing a story. (43)

It seems like God is more interested in using broken people than He is in creating a better picture. (44)

We can breathe a little easier to learn that God is not nearly as interested in putting a picture in front of us as much He [sic] is trying to tell a story through us. (44)

If you were to invite Go into your less-than-ideal story and learn to cooperate with whatever He wants to do in your life, the dynamic of your family could radically change. (45)

Rather than painting a picture of a perfect family, God wants to use family as a canvas for His redemptive story. (45)

Our experience has been that when parents become preoccupied with ideal pictures, it can actually do the opposite of expanding their capacity: It will drain their energy. (46)

What we are suggesting is that there are two different approaches to family. When we take the Better Picture approach, we try to conform every family to our picture of what family should be. When we take the Bigger Story approach, we learn to see every family as a potential platform for God to demonstrate His story of redemption and restoration. (47)

Chapter 3 – Family Value #1: Widen the Circle

Pursue strategic relationships for your kids.

…enhance your child’s relationship with you.

…advance your child’s relationship with God.

…connect your child to relationships with those outside your home.

A time will come when you and your children will need another adult in their lives besides you. (62)

First of all, don’t take it too personally. Second, don’t be too proud. (63)

Here is the main question: What are you doing to encourage your child’s relationship with people outside the home? (64)

As a parent, I believe that one of the greatest values of the church is its potential to provide community for my children. (65)

The goal is for you to pursue strategic relationships so another adult voice will be speaking into your son’s or daughter’s life, saying the kinds of things you would try to say as a parent. (72)

When you widen the circle, the goal is to have other trusted adults int he lives of children before they need them so they will be there when they need them. (76)

Chapter 4 – Family Value #2: Imagine the End

Focus your priorities on what matters most.

What I give to my children or what I do for my children is not as important as what I leave in them. (82)

Who do I really want them to become? (87)

As strange as it sounds, I think I sometimes make the mistake of trying to compete with God. Instead of pointing to Him, I try to be the hero. …Wise parents will strive to make sure they are not trying to become a substitute for God. (89)

Chapter 5 – Family Value #3: Fight for the Heart

Communicate in a style that gives the relationship value.

Sometimes it is easy to forget that you can win the argument and force the right behavior but lose the heart in the process. (100)

…winning an argument actually isn’t winning. (101)

Every family fights, but there is a world of difference between when you fight with someone and when you fight for someone. (101)

If you want to pass on a legacy to the next generation, it has to be transferred relationally. Anytime you pass down rules, practices, or truths outside of the context of a genuine, compelling love, you establish an empty religion. (104)

The problem with rules and reasons is that you can debate them — but you can’t debate a trusted relationship. unfortunately, most of us parents are better skilled at fighting to win the argument than we are at fighting to win the heart. …One of the most powerful things a parent can do is learn to communicate in a style that values the relationship. (107)

Moses wanted future generations to see how they were personally linked to that bigger story, how they fit into a master plan, and how they were connected to a relationship with their Creator. Instead of encouraging parents to assume the role of attorneys who build a logical case for why the law should be followed, Moses prompted them to focus on the character of the Lawgiver. (109)

During the formative and teenage years, it is actually more essential for the parents to earn trust with the child than it is for the child to earn trust with the parents. (110)

[Moms and dads] need to see their parental role as a marathon, recognizing that building a relationship in which their child trusts them is even more important than whether they can trust their child regarding the immediate issues of the day. – Chap Clark

How trustworthy we are as parents is much more important for their growth than how trustworthy they are. (112)

Moses knew a secret about obedience — it starts when you really believe that God can be trusted. (113)

…our capacity to love our children and family is somehow linked to our love for God. Stated another way, if you want to love your children beyond your capacity then learn to love God. (114)

Chapter 6 – Family Value #4: Create a Rhythm

Increase the quantity of quality time you spend together.

Rhythm in your home actually shapes your family values. …Rhythm silently but significantly communicates value. (122)

So — and here’s the key question — how normal is God in your home? (123)

It’s characteristic of humans (especially prosperous humans) to create an image of God so narrowly defined that it separates Him completely from culture. Instead of seeing everything as somehow connected to God’s story, we love to categorize and segment our faith. (128)

Family Times, p.132

If families decided to take advantage of the times already built into their routines, initiating interaction would be more natural. Spiritual discussions would be normalized. Doing so moves these important conversations from the formal to the everyday, engaging a rhythm that already exists but leveraging it for the most important purposes. (133)

Rhythm requires two primary components — intentionality and constancy — and can be defined as a strong, repeated pattern. (134)

It’s not quantity or quality time you need as a family — it’s the quantity of quality times. (135)

Chapter 7 – Family Value #5: Make It Personal

Put yourself first when it comes to personal growth.

Moses was explaining that this has to be in you as a parent before you can expect it to be in your children. The most important thing that happens as a result of reading this book may not be what happens in the lives of your children, but what happens in your life. (152)

If you are merely trying to instill faith and morals for the sake of the kids, but it’s not a priority personally, they’ll eventually catch on. (155)

God is interested in writing a bigger story, and your personal growth is part of the plotline. In fact, your developing story may be more influential than you think. …This is not about a perfect model, just an honest one. Whatever you want your children to become, you should honestly strive to become as well. (157)

It would fundamentally change the way we look at our lives if we really believed the greatest thing that could happen in the heart of a child would be what happened in the heart of a parent. (158)

Everything doesn’t have to be right in you or about you before you can be a positive influence in your children’s lives. But there is one thing you have to embrace if you hope to have lasting influence: You have to be authentic. You have to make it personal. (161)

Chapter 8 – Back to the Story

You can mobilize your family to demonstrate God’s love in a broken world.

The truth is, it’s possible to hold on to our kids so tightly that we forget the ultimate goal of parenting is to let go. There’s a danger in caring more about our children’s protection than we do about providing them with a meaningful purpose. There is a danger in caring more about our children’s safety than we do their faith. When we become overly preoccupied with our children’s immediate physical and even emotional well-being, we can end up robbing them of necessary experiences, life lessons, and opportunities. (180)

The mission of the family is not to ultimately protect your children but to mobilize them to demonstrate God’s love to a broken world. (180)

All leaders and parents are called to lead their children to be the church, not to keep children in the church. When we simply protect and preserve, we make the same mistake the one servant made in the parable of the talents. We cover our children with our fear and lack of faith. We hinder their potential to make the kind of difference in the kingdom that they were designed to make. If you hope to parent beyond your capacity, then you need to connect your children to a mission that is greater than your capacity. (187)

— VIA —

What makes this book so excellent on multiple levels is that not only are these great lessons about parenting, these are fundamental human truths that are applicable to all aspects of life. Here are a few of my highlighted examples:

Tell a greater story | On page 181-182, they write about a story of Don Miller shared at one of the conferences they put on (links below). The big idea for a father who was struggling with a daughter dating someone of ill-repute was to stop yelling at her and putting on more restrictions because the story that is being told at home is a worse story than the one she was living with by being with her boyfriend. Stop telling that story, and tell a more compelling story. The father, taking the advice, decided to set the family on a mission, to raise $25,000 for an orphanage in Mexico. Not only did the family think dad was crazy, but they rallied together, used their resources (like MySpace), and the daughter ended up breaking up with the boyfriend. Why?

The heart will gravitate toward whatever offers adventure and significance. (182)

This is not just true for parenting. This is true for the journey of faith and why the Christian story needs to be retold.

A trusting relationship is the foundation of obedience | I so appreciated the foundation of the shema in this book (Deuteronomy 6). Very well done, and a brilliant exposition of the ways in which God has modeled this kind of trusting relationships prior to the command to obey.

Model the way | This is a fundamental leadership and life principle, and they do a great job illustrating this in the context of parenting. I very much appreciated their focus on the parent as the most critical focal point in the parenting process.

The value of both/and | Unfortunately, many if not most people swing pendulums far to other sides in order to compensate. I appreciate the authors’ willingness to say that both the church and the family are critical ingredients in raising our children. We need each other, and we ought to depend upon each other. Their respectful exhortation is very well done for both/and.

Thank you Joiner & Nieuwhof for this gift to our kids, and to the Kingdom of God.

LINKS

http://www.whatisorange.org/orangeconference/

http://studio252.tv/

Think Orange and the Orange Leader Handbook for churches

The Essence of Orange DVD

A lot of devices can recognize the words you say. But the ability to understand what you mean, and act on it; that’s the breakthrough with Siri.

- Scott Forstall

The parallels with hermeneutics seem profound. A lot of Bible readers recognize the words. But the ability to understand what it means, and act on it, now that would be a breakthrough.

Introduction

…the very concept of a Canon of Scripture, of a fixed corpus of sacred books, implies a long process of selection and rejection from among a host of candidates. (xvii)

Until the Hellenization of the East, it is extremely unlikely that anyone in the ancient world, outside of the congregation of Israel, had the slightest interest in the Jewish people, its history and literature. …It is nothing short of miraculous that this literature, the product of a small people in  a tiny segment of the ancient world that knew independence for but brief interludes, that possessed no political power and that generally encountered nothing but animosity, should not only have survived, but should have conquered, too. There is one simple explanation. The books of the Hebrew Bible survived because men firmly and fervently believed them to be the inspired word of God, sacred literature. (xix)

…it is beyond doubt that it was not the stamp of canonization that affirmed the holiness of a book; rather the reverse. Sanctity antedated and preconditioned the final act of canonization. (xix)

Excellent new translations into modern English, a deluge of popular works on archaeology, a plethora of encyclopedias, dictionaries, historical atlases, reliable non-technical commentaries of recent vintage, all deprive any literate person of the excuse of ignorance. Only the motivation is lacking. (xx)

This book, the first of a projected series, is designed to make the Bible of Israel intelligible, relevant and, hopefully, inspiring to a sophisticated generation, possessed of intellectual curiosity and ethical sensitivity. (xxii)

Literalism involves a fundamental misconception of the mental processes of biblical man and ignorance of his modes of self-expression. It thus misrepresents the purport of the narrative, obscures the meaningful and enduring in it and destroys its relevancy. (xxiii)

…there must yet remain that elusive, indefinable, essence which lies beyond the scope and ken of the scientific method, and which is meaningful only to the ear that is receptive and attuned. Spiritual insight and sensitivity are as indispensable a scholarly ingredient as a faultless methodology. It is not unreasonable to demand, surely, that an awareness of the existential human predicament be an essential prerequisite for the understanding of the biblical message that addresses itself precisely to this predicament. (xxv)

In actual fact, no advanced cultural or religious tradition has ever existed in a vacuum; it cannot therefore be studied in isolation. (xxvi)

…the culture of Canaan was essentially a mixed one, for its geographic position perforce imparted to it a richly international character that impeded the maintenance of individuality and the development of cultural and religious independence. In view of all this, the discovery of numerous parallels between Israel and her neighbors should hardly occasion surprise and chagrin. (xxvii)

…to ignore subtle differences is to present an unbalanced and untrue perspective and to pervert the scientific method. Accordingly, we have constantly emphasized in this book the importance of difference, and have been at pains to delineate those areas in which Israel parted company with its neighbors. (xxvii)

…but nowhere has monotheism ever been found historically as an outgrowth or development of polytheism. Nowhere else in the contemporary world did it become the regnant idea, obsessive and historically significant. Israel’s monotheism constituted a new creation, a revolution in religion, a sudden transformation. (xxviii)

That Israel, alone of the peoples of Near Eastern antiquity, arrived at such a concept is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored in the scientific study of the Bible. (xxix)

It is as though the accidents of geography, topography and environmental conditions all conspired to produce irresistible centrifugal forces that could not but make for a maximum of ethnic diversity, for the intensification of the rivalry of political and strategic interests, and the interpenetration and interweaving of religions and cultures. (xxix)

CHAPTER I: Creation

Not science; The purpose of the narrative; Enuma Elish; The meaning of myth; The function of Enuma Elish; The function of the Genesis narrative; The biblical Creation account is non-political and non-cultic; The Creation account is non-mythological; Mythology, magic and God’s freedom; “Let there be!”; “Male and female He created them”; Man the pinnacle of Creation; The nature of God; The Sabbath; The cosmic Battle; The Garden of Eden; Cain and Abel.

Not science

Biblical man, despite his undoubted intellectual and spiritual endowments, did not base his views of the universe and its laws on the critical use of empirical data. …Rather, his thinking was imaginative, and his expressions of thought were concrete, pictorial, emotional, and poetic. hence, it is a naive and futile exercise to attempt to reconcile the biblical accounts of creation with the findings of modern science. (2-3)

The literalistic approach serves to direct attention to those aspects of the narrative that reflect the time and place of its composition, while it tends to obscure the elements that are meaningful and enduring, thus distorting the biblical message and destroying its relevancy. (3)

The purpose of the narrative

Whether the Hebrew Genesis account was meant to be science or not, it was certainly meant to convey statements of faith. As will be shown, it is part of the biblical polemic against paganism and an introduction to the religious ideas characteristic of the whole of biblical literature. It tells us something about the nature of the one God who is the Creator and supreme sovereign of the world and whose will is absolute. It asserts that God is outside the realm of nature, which is wholly subservient to Him. he has no myth; that is, there are no stories about any events in His life. Magic plays no part in the worship of Him. The story also tells us something of the nature of man, a God-like creature, uniquely endowed with dignity, honor and infinite worth, into whose hands God has entrusted mastery over His creation. Finally, this narrative tells us something about the biblical concept of reality. It proclaims the essential goodness of life and assumes a universal moral order governing human society. (3)

To be sure, these affirmations are not stated in modern philosophical terms. But, as we have already pointed out, the audience of the biblical writers had its own literary idiom. Therefore, to understand them properly we must not confuse the idiom with the idea, the metaphor with the reality behind it. The two have to be disentangled from each other and the idea conveyed must be translated into the idiom of our own day. (3)

The meaning of myth

Since time immemorial man has used his faculty of detached thinking and his propensity to introspection to reflect upon the nature of the world about him, to wonder about the origin of things and to record in literary form his answers–be they mythical or speculative–to the mysteries of existence. [VIA: "myth" does not equal "fairy tale" or "imagination."] (6)

A myth may be a vital cultural force. It can be a vehicle for the expression of ideas that activate human behavior, that reflect and validate the distinctive forms and qualities of a civilization, that signify a dynamic attitude to the universe and embody a vision of society. (6)

The function of the Genesis narrative

The theme of creation, important as it is in the Bible, is nevertheless only introductory to what is its central motif, namely, the Exodus from Egypt. God’s acts in history, rather than His role as Creator, are predominant in biblical thought. (8)

“Male and female He created them”

In polytheistic mythologies creation is always expressed in terms of procreation. Apparently, paganism was unable to conceive o any primal creative force other than in terms of sex. (12)

The sabbath

…there are no biblical sources recounting the founding of the weekly sabbath-day. The antiquity of its existence is presupposed in all the legislation and even in the narratives. …There cannot be any doubt that the sabbath belongs to the most ancient of Israel’s sacred days. (19)

The garden of Eden

God does not interrogate the serpent, and the voluble reptile utters not a sound in the presence of the Deity. (26)

The Garden of Eden incident is thus a landmark in the development of the understanding of the nature of man, his predicament and destiny. Man is a free moral agent and this freedom magnifies immeasurably his responsibility for his actions. (27)

In short, we are being told by the Garden of Eden story that evil is a product of human behavior, not a principle inherent in the cosmos. (27)

Cain and Abel

…the story of Cain and Abel must once have existed as an independent, full-bodied tale. (29)

The Bible is thus, in its treatment of the very first recorded act of worship, formulating two basic concepts that characterize the religion of Israel. (29)

…The Bible is expressing one of the most profound, if saddest, truths in the history of religions when it shows how an originally well-intentioned act of divine worship could become the cause of the first murder committed by man. (30)

CHAPTER II: The Flood

The biblical account; History or legend? The origins of the Hebrew account; The Mesopotamian provenance of the biblical version; The Mesopotamian flood stories; the Epic of Gilgamesh; The origin of the Mesopotamian stories; The biblical-Mesopotamian parallels; The biblical-Mesopotamian contrasts; The omnipotence of God and the limitations of the gods; The motivation for the Flood; The salvation of the gods; The motivation for the Flood; The salvation of the hero; The moral sin; The mythological contrast; The new creation; The blessing, the covenant, and the rainbow.

History or legend?

Whatever historical foundations may possibly underlie such traditions, it is clear that popular imagination has been at work magnifying local disastrous floods into catastrophes of universal proportions. (38)

The omnipotence of God and the limitations of the gods

In both instances the building of an ark, rather than a ship, is intended to attribute the hero’s deliverance solely to the will of God, and not to any human skill. (49)

The motivation for the Flood

As we emphasized in the previous chapter, the inability to produce a divinely sanctioned, absolute, standard of right and wrong was among the inherent limitations of mythological polytheism. (51)

The moral sin

The story of the Flood, like that of Sodom and Gomorrah, presupposes the existence of a universal moral law governing the world for the infraction of which God, the Supreme Judge, brings men to account. It asserts through the medium of the narrative, that man cannot undermine the moral basis of society without endangering the very existence of civilization. In fact, society, by its own corruption, actually may be said to initiate a process of inevitable retribution. (52)

The mythological contrast

One of the universal beliefs of paganism was that the gods required food and drink to sustain their immortal and supramundane quality (54)

In other words, the Deluge is directly connected with Creation. it is, in fact, the exact reversal of it. …it means that in biblical theology human wickedness, the inhumanity of man to man, undermines the very foundations of society. (55)

The blessing, the covenant, and the rainbow

…the symbol of divine bellicosity and hostility has been transformed into a token of eternal reconciliation between God and Man. (59)

CHAPTER III: The Tower of Babel

Introduction; The ethnological framework; One language; The dispersal of mankind; The rise of idolatry; “Come let us build a city”; “…and a tower”; “Come let us make bricks and burn them hard”; “Brick served them as stone and bitumen served them as mortar”; “With its top in the sky”; “To make a name for ourselves”; The function of the ziqqurat; The anti-pagan polemic.

The ethnological framework

This emphatic reiteration of the common ancestry of post-diluvial men, and the stress upon their national divisions, serves two immediate purposes. it points up the natural, non-magical approach of the Bible to the problem of the rapid increase of humanity after the Flood, and it expresses at the same time the notion that this natural proliferation is in accord with the divine will. For the repeopling of the earth is a matter of great concern to God. (65)

We may conclude, therefore, that the biblical writer accepts ethnic diversity as a natural product of the multiplication of the human species in accordance with the divine blessing and will. But the rise of linguistic diversity and the dispersal of mankind over the face of the globe have to be separately accounted for. This, then, is one of the functions of the “Tower of Babel” narrative. (66)

The dispersal of mankind

The building project was thus a deliberate attempt to thwart the expressed will of God, something that would interfere with the unfolding of the divine scheme of history. It is in this light that the sin of the builders must be viewed and the vexation of God be regarded. (67)

The function of the ziqqurat

The prime motivation of the builders is said to have been the consolidation of the group unity. …The monumental edifice that resulted was a source of pride to every citizen, so that it served the entire community, politically, socially and religiously as an effective, cohesive force. (74)

The ziqqurat was thus a means by which man and god might establish direct contact with each other, and the construction of it would be an expression of the human desire to draw closer to the deity, an act of deep piety and religious fervor on the part of man. (75)

God’s transcendence is absolute and His independence of materiality complete. Not the monumental achievements of human ingenuity, but only the human heart can forge a link with God. (77)

The urbanization of society, the growth of material civilization and the rise of monumental architecture may all, from the Bible’s point of view, involve a retrograde step in man’s spiritual progress. This is a theme that receives its fullest treatment in the prophetic activity of a much later age. But it is highly significant that it appears for the first time at the very inception of Israel’s history. (77)

CHAPTER IV: The Patriarchal Period

The problems of chronology; Number harmony; the source material; The Mesopotamian background–its inconvenience; The religious contrasts: The inter-tribal relationships; The interethnic contrasts; The extrabiblical sources; The family of Shem.

Number harmony

Schematized chronology, the featuring of neatly balanced periods of time, thus constitutes the poetic superstructure, the rhetorical framework for the biblical exposition of certain profound ideas about human events and their inner, deeper, meaning. The patriarchal year numbers inform us, not about the precise passage of time, which is of relatively minor importance, but about the ideas that animate the biblical narrative. If the text has Sarah bearing a child at the age of ninety when she was, as is explicitly stated, beyond the child-bearing stage, it is but a poetic way of describing the emergence of the people of Israel a an extraordinary event. The use of numerical symmetry is Scripture’s way of conveying the conviction that the formative age in Israel’s history was not a series of haphazard incidents, but the beginning of the fulfillment of God’s grand design. Not blind chance, but the hand of God is at work preparing the way for the emergence of the people of Israel. In other words, the patriarchal chronologies constitute paradigmatic, rather than pragmatic history. (84-85)

The source material

The traditions of the Book of Genesis are now acknowledged to be an authentic reflection of the age with which they claim to deal. (85-86)

The Mesopotamian background — its inconvenience

There could not be any conceivable reason either for inventing these traditions or for abruptly discontinuing them at the end of the patriarchal period. They must, therefore, represent an authentic historical situation. (86)

This argument may be strengthened by yet another peculiarity of the narratives. Their foreign origin and associations make Abraham, Isaac and Jacob always strangers and aliens in Canaan. …It is in fact, highly significant that Israel never made conquest or settlement the basis of its rights to its national territory. Its title to the land derived solely from the everlasting validity of the divine promise to the patriarchs. It is this very inexpediency that authenticates the traditions of the Book of Genesis relative to the Mesopotamian origins of Israel. (86-87)

The religious contrasts

Much the same conclusion as to the antiquity of the patriarchal narratives may be derived from the simple fact that they have preserved materials offensive to the later religious consciousness of Israel. (87)

The family of Shem

Of thirty-eight names connected with the patriarchal family, no less than twenty-seven are never found again in the Bible. This fact, alone, makes it highly unlikely that the narratives are products of later inventiveness, and increases the probability that they reflect historic traditions actually derived from patriarchal times. (92)

CHAPTER V: From Mesopotamia to Canaan

The problem of Ur; The divine promise; The descent to Egypt; The wife-sister motif; Affirmation of the promise; The patriarchal wanderings.

The problem of Ur

…the association with Ur must reflect an authentic tradition since it is difficult to find a reason for its invention. (98)

It is no accident that exactly ten generations separate Noah from Adam and that exactly ten more bring us to the birth of Abraham. (100)

The divine promise

It should be noted that the divine blessing, bestowed while Abraham was still in Haran, made no mention of the gift of land. (101)

The promise of nationhood was supplemented by the grant of national territory, two themes that henceforth dominate biblical history and theology. (102)

The wife-sister motif

There was an institution, peculiar it would seem to Hurrian society, which may be described as “wife-sistership.” “Sistership” in Nuzi did not necessarily have anything to do with blood ties, for it could indicate a purely legal status. …In other words, Beltakkadummi enjoyed the dual status of wife-sistership which endowed her with superior privileges and protection, over and above those of an ordinary wife. (103)

CHAPTER VI: The Battle of the Kings

Its antiquity; The invasion route; Abram the Hebrew.

It is now recognized that this entire account is based upon a document of great antiquity. (111)

The insertion of YHWH, therefore, can only be meant to emphasize the identity, not the difference, between the God of Melchizedek and the God of Abraham, known to the people of Israel as YHWH. (117)

CHAPTER VII: The Covenant

The structure of chapter 15; The sequence of thought; Abraham’s heir; The moral rationalization; The form of the covenant; Hagar the concubine; The change of name; Circumcision; The new Abraham.

Each time God allays the doubts of the patriarch He employs and emphasizes a key word of the original question. (120)

It is of interest that neither the age of the patriarch, nor the locale of the event is recorded, contrary to the usual practice. These omissions are most likely deliberate and meant to stress that the divine promises, sealed by a covenant ceremonial, are eternally valid and free of all dependence on time and place. (121)

Abraham’s heir

It is now widely accepted that behind the biblical narrative lies the institution of adoption,… (122)

The form of the covenant

Here again, Scripture made use of existing Near Eastern convention which it adopted for its own purposes. to waht extent this is so may be gauged from the astonishing fact that the covenant completely lacks, as we have pointed out, mutuality. it is a unilateral obligation assumed by God without any reciprocal responsibilities being imposed upon Abraham. The use of established legal forms of treaty-making to express such a situation is a dramatic way of conveying the immutable nature of the divine promise. In a society in which the capriciousness of the gods was taken for granted, the “covenant between the pieces,” like the covenant with Noah, set religion on a bold, new, independent course. (127)

Hagar the concubine

It is stated quite openly that Sarah treated Hagar harshly, as if to leave no doubt as to where the sympathies of Scripture lie, God, as the guardian of the weak and the suffering, reveals Himself to the lowly maidservant bringing her a message of comfort and hope. (129)

The change of name

The name of a man was intimately involved in the very essence of his being and inextricably intertwined with his personality. (129) Conversely, anonymity is equivalent to non-being. (130)

If Isaac, alone, undergoes no change of name, it is only because his was divinely ordained even before birth. In this way Scripture is expressing once again the idea of the God-given destiny of the patriarchs and the notion that the origins and fate of the people of Israel are central to the divine plan of history. It is probably this that accounts for the curious fact that the patriarchal names, as well as the names of the great biblical heroes like Moses, Aaron, David and Solomon, are unique to their bearers, never being attached to any other personage in all of scriptural literature. (131)

Circumcision

The practice of circumcision is widely attested in the ancient world. (131) God is not instituting a totally new and unknown rite, but is adapting and transforming an existing custom. (132)

1. It is now conceived of as being divinely ordained and as deriving its sanction solely from that fact.
2. it cannot be abrogated.
3. the Bible shifted its performance from puberty to the eighth day of birth
4. the rite has been invested with entirely new and original meaning.

It is described both as a “sign of the covenant” and as a covenant itself. (132)

CHAPTER VIII: Sodom and Gomorrah

The historical background; The nature of the catastrophe; Abraham and the Sodom story; The sin of Sodom; The concept of God; The absence of repentance; The doctrine of merit.

The nature of the catastrophe

Consider this. Abraham, the elect of God, the founder of the people of Israel and proponent of a faith which turned its back upon contemporary religious notions, and to which the conduct of the inhabitants of Sodom was utterly abhorrent, stands before God to plead for the lives of pagans of another race; pagans, what is more, who were to become the eternal symbol of human depravity. He neither rejoices at the downfall of evil, nor adopts an attitude of indifference. He feels a sense of kinship with those human beings of Sodom and a sense of involvement in their fate. In this way, the scriptural narrative has cast the father of the Jewish people in a representative role that foreshadows the later prophetic conviction of the destiny of Israel among the nations. (143)

The sin of Sodom

The “outcry” of Sodom, then, implies, above all, heinous moral and social corruption, an arrogant disregard of elementary human rights, a cynical insensitivity to the sufferings of others. (cf. Ezekiel 16:49-50)

The idea that there is an intimate, in fact, inextricable, connection between the socio-moral condition of a people and its ultimate fate is one of the main pillars upon which stands the entire biblical interpretation of history. (146)

The doctrine of merit

The patriarch had established the principle that the wrathful judgment of God could be averted through the merit of an innocent nucleus; so God delivered Lot from the catastrophe through the merit of Abraham. This “doctrine of merit” is a not infrequent theme in the Bible and constitutes the first of many such incidents in which the righteousness of chosen individuals may sustain other individuals or even an entire group through its protective power. (150)

The Sodom and Gomorrah saga is, accordingly, the precursor of this biblical “doctrine of merit,” a doctrine that has profound consequences for man, for it implies that the individual is of supreme importance and that from his actions may flow beneficial consequences for all society. (151)

CHAPTER IX: The Birth of Isaac and the Akedah

The expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael; The binding of Isaac; Human sacrifice in the ancient Near East; The ancient nucleus; The Akedah and the call at Haran; The shift of emphasis; The trial of faith.

Human sacrifice int he ancient Near East

…by the second millennium B.C.E., the age of the patriarchs, it had long been accepted that animal offering was, in normal circumstances, a perfectly satisfactory surrogate. …Canaan, however, seems to have been something of an exception in this respect. (158)

The ancient nucleus

All this is in such glaring contradiction to the Torah legislation and prophetic teaching that the conclusion is inescapable that the core of the Akedah narrative must belong to the earliest strata of Israelite traditions, containing echoes of a dim past and reflecting a popular, unofficial, notion of religion. (159)

The Akedah and the call at Haran

The Torah, then, has used the ancient Akedah tale to encase the account of the spiritual odyssey of Abraham within a literary framework, opening and closing with divine communications that involve agonizing decisions carried to completion with unflinching loyalty, and culminating in promises of a glorious posterity. (161)

In other words, the Akedah in its final form is not an attempt to combat existing practice, but is itself a product of a religious attitude that recoils naturally from associating God with human sacrifice and which felt the need to explain the ancient tradition as an unprecedented and unrepeatable event, as a test of faith. …That God rejected the practice as utterly abhorrent was taken for granted. (162)

The trial of faith

…the value of an act may lie as much in the inward intention of the doer as in the final execution. …Tradition has rightly seen in Abraham the exemplar of steadfast, disinterested loyalty to God. (163)

CHAPTER X: Winding Up Affairs

A resident-alien; The Hittites; The negotiations; The purposes of the story; A wife for Isaac; The oath; The aspect of faith; The symbol of Isaac; The role of providence; The wifely virtues; Laban; Marriage by consent; The genealogical framework.

CHAPTER XI: Jacob and Esau

The birth of the twins; The moral issue; The importance of the birthright; The transference of the birthright; The oral testament.

…there is every reason to believe that Jacob’s dealings with Esau and his father represent a stage of morality in which the successful application of shrewd opportunism was highly respected. (188)

CHAPTER XII: Jacob and Laban

The vision at Bethel; Jacob in Laban’s household; The tribes; Jacob’s escape; Jacob across Jabbok.

The vision at Bethel

The details of the scriptural narrative reveal a subtle and deliberate rejection of pagan notions even as they employ their idiom. (193)

In sum: the biblical narrative ignores the non-Israelite sacred history of Bethel, inferentially dissociates itself from all pagan connections, and recasts events and motifs in the light of Israelite concepts. (194)

The tribes

The phenomenon we are here discussing is unique to the Bible in the literature of the ancient world. No other people, as far is is known, had a genealogical concept of history. …In biblical historiography, on the other hand, a pedigree became the literary form through which ethnic origins and groupings are described. (197)

In other words, tribal relationships are treated as family relationships and are expressed in terms of such, by being reconstructed into genealogies. (198)

Jacob across Jabbok

The thigh, being regarded as the seat of the reproductive powers, would acquire an especially sacral character. But none of these reasons is given in the biblical account. Instead, an “historic” explanation is produced, so that the practice commemorates an event of epochal importance in the life of the patriarch. (206)

Is it not remarkable that Jacob’s nocturnal encounter with the angel and the change of name to Israel should occur precisely at the moment he crosses the boundary into the first territory of the promised land to be occupied in the future by the people of Israel? (206)

CHAPTER XIII: Joseph

“A coat of many colors”; The dreams; The sale into slavery; In Potiphar’s house; The interpretation of dreams; The seven-year famine; Joseph’s elevation; The reconciliation; The settlement in Goshen; The nationalization of land; The death of Jacob and Joseph.

The miraculous or supernatural element is conspicuously absent. …God never intervenes openly and directly in Joseph’s life as He does with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. (211)

The dreams

In each experience the theophany is straightforward and the message perfectly clear. This is not the case with Joseph’s dreams, nor with those of the butler and the baker and Pharaoh. Here, the symbol, not the words, is the language of intelligence, nad the dream is therefore enigmatic. Against this background, it is not to be wondered at that dreams are frequently productive of anxiety. To be ignorant of the true meaning is to be deprived of knowledge that might well be vital to one’s welfare. Notice how in each of the cryptic dreams God does not figure explicitly in the content. Yet it is tacitly accepted that He is the ultimate source of the message being conveyed. This does not mean that the ancients did not recognize such a thing as an idle dream. They did; and that is why dreams in the Joseph biography always come in pairs, to prove their seriousness. (213)

In Potiphar’s house

Probably nothing is more indicative of the wide chasm separating Israel from its neighbors than the line of argument used by Joseph in rejecting the repeated entreaties of the would-be adultress. (217)

The interpretation of dreams

Why Potiphar chose to incarcerate Joseph instead of executing him, as might have been expected, we can never know. (217)

The settlement in Goshen

This divine communication serves the purpose of transforming the descent to Egypt from a family visit into an event of national significance, which has its preordained place in God’s scheme of things. (224)

— VIA —

There are many more treasures to be mined. The above are just the “highlights of the highlights.”