Reading Location
My companion, the Hebrew Bible scholar, asks students to identify their reading location to help them discover the bias (cultural, theological, economic, political, gender) they bring to the biblical text. When I was in seminary it was called understanding the glasses one uses to read the biblical text. The seminary journey was doing the difficult work of deconstructing the perspective you entered seminary with so that you could begin rebuilding, sometime recycling, you beliefs. Claiming absolute objectivity is naive. It is simple self awareness, but our culture is in short supply of self awareness right now. America’s got an abundance of outrage, hypocrisy, and fear right now. We’ve all got zombies we are fighting.
Self awareness has something to do with humility and maturity. That’s different from being “woke.” I don’t consider myself woke, but I know how to navigate woke culture. It is not, “Smile more. Talk less.” as Burr suggests in Hamilton. I probably trigger people with my language from time to time. George Carlin used language and words to get people thinking. If only I was that diligent in my use of language all the time. Then I think I could be “woke.”
So, let’s name it: we all have bias that we carry with us. This isn’t necessarily bad. We all discriminate to one degree or another, brilliantly lampooned in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles.” But discrimination becomes morally indefensible, evil, when used to build systems to allow one group, or several groups, to keep others in indentured servitude based on race, gender, religion, or creed. America has become a more fickle Nation in my lifetime as the amount of “choices” have grown exponentially. You have the freedom to discriminate, in some instances, and freedom from discrimination in the public arena. How does self government work in that instance? We’ve always struggled with balancing individualism with what it means to be the United States of America. There are some freedoms that are either good for all of us or none of us. That’s a post for another day.
Y2K came and went. But, we have a millennium bug. It seems like each new century has one.
There are religious zealots that want their idea of g*d to reign.
There are political zealots that want their ideological idea of governing to reign.
There are economic zealots for whom they can never have enough or own enough. They don’t care how the world is divided up as long as they get the biggest piece.
We can’t seem to figure out a vaccine yet, so what antibiotic will it be this time?
You’ve probably seen the image above floating around social media the past few years. It is updated often. I thought about this chart while reading two articles in The Atlantic that located me in this adolescent United States of America. Where are you?
All four narratives are also driven by a competition for status that generates fierce anxiety and resentment. They all anoint winners and losers. In Free America, the winners are the makers, and the losers are the takers who want to drag the rest down in perpetual dependency on a smothering government. In Smart America, the winners are the credentialed meritocrats, and the losers are the poorly educated who want to resist inevitable progress. In Real America, the winners are the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland, and the losers are treacherous elites and contaminating others who want to destroy the country. In Just America, the winners are the marginalized groups, and the losers are the dominant groups that want to go on dominating.
How America Fractured Into Four Parts
George Packer, The Atlantic, July/August 2021
As the bobos (creative class) achieved a sort of stranglehold on the economy, the culture, and even our understanding of what a good life is, no wonder society has begun to array itself against them, with the old three-part class structure breaking apart into a confusing welter of micro-groups competing for status and standing in any way they can. So, for instance, the bobos have abundant cultural, political, and economic power; the red one-percenters have economic power, but scant cultural power; the young, educated elites have tons of cultural power and growing political power, but still not much economic power; and the caring class and rural working class, unheard and unseen, have almost no power of any kind at all. Our politics, meanwhile, has become sharper-edged, more identity-based, and more reactionary, in part because politics is the one arena in which the bobos cannot dominate—there aren’t enough of us.
How the Bobos Broke America
David Brooks, The Atlantic, September 2021
The Who asked the right question, “Who are you? I really want to know.”
How are we going to be decent neighbors and worthy of the high ideals of a Nation founded by fallible humans.
Yes, Michael, of course: context, context, context. Beyond an affirmation of what we can stipulate as that “reality” within our proclamation as people who (try to) follow God in Jesus the Christ, we are still proclaiming the same revelatory experience even as the One Who Is becomes revealed in our separate human experiences. So perhaps we can begin (or, as it were, “re-continue”) to proclaim our sameness as well as our differences. From my years in seminary and perhaps in the nearly four decades since, it has become (seeing through my still partially dark glass) clear that if we stress our apartness, we will soon enough and again come to see those of Other experiences not as fellows, but adversaries and enemies. I can pretty much attest that such multi-furcation is not what.God intends. Thank you for your posting and its thoughtful discourse. God bless—