the speed of God
Many of the key ideas in Andy Crouch’s new book The Life We Are Looking For emerge from his definition of the human person, which he derives from the Shema of Deuteronomy 6, as adapted by Jesus in Mark 12 (keywords emphasized):
One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”Thus Andy: “Every human person is a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love.” Simple and direct; but the more you think about it the more complex and generative a definition it is.
Early in his book, Andy talks about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who want to give us “superpowers.” And he says:
Here is the problem: you cannot take advantage of a superpower and fully remain a person, in the sense of a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love. This is not an unfortunate side effect of superpowers or a flaw that could be overcome with future improvements. It is the essence of their design because superpowers are power without effort. And power without effort, it turns out, diminishes us as much as it delights us.Elsewhere in that same chapter he quotes the Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama saying that “the speed of God” is three miles an hour because that was the speed at which Jesus moved through his world. So maybe, and I think this is one of the chief burdens of Andy’s book, what makes the most sense for us is to try whenever possible to move at the speed of God – and in that way refuse the offer of superpowers.
Of course, this dovetails with a lot of things people have been writing lately about slowness, but what I like about Andy’s book is that it specifies why we can find ourselves responding so warmly to the possibility of slowness. What happens when we seek superpowers, and especially super-speed, is the sacrifice of what I want to call our proper powers – the powers through the exercise of which we (heart-soul-mind-strength) flourish in love.
Let’s take a peek into Koyama’s Three Mile an Hour God:
Jesus Christ came. He walked towards the ‘full stop’. He lost his mobility. He was nailed down! He is not even at three miles an hour as we walk. He is not moving. ‘Full stop’! What can be slower than ‘full stop’ ‘nailed down’? At this point of ‘full stop’, the apostolic church proclaims that the love of God to man is ultimately and fully revealed. God walks ‘slowly’ because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is ‘slow’ yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, whether we are currently hit by storm or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.Thus: “I find that God goes ‘slowly’ in his educational process of man. ‘Forty years in the wilderness’ points to his basic educational philosophy.”
When the economist Gary Becker delivered his Nobel Lecture in 1992, he titled it “The Economic Way of Looking at Life.” Here’s a key quote:
Different constraints are decisive for different situations, but the most fundamental constraint is limited time. Economic and medical progress have greatly increased length of life, but not the physical flow of time itself, which always restricts everyone to twenty-four hours per day. So while goods and services have expended enormously in rich countries, the total time available to consume has not.So it turns out that “the economic way of looking at life” – which is pretty much the American way of looking at life, and certainly the Silicon Valley way – means that you think of time as a scarce consumable resource. Which is indeed how most of us, it seems, think about time, and that, in turn, is why we might experience the idea of traveling at the speed of God as not just wrong but, more, offensive – a failure to maximize consumption.
Breaking that habit of thought, and imagining how to move at the speed of God – these are real and vital challenges. Maybe the first thing we need to learn how to repair is our disordered sense of time — time is not a scarce resource but rather a gift.
mid-century modernity
Over the past few months, I have been thinking a lot about the remarkable cultural transition that took place, especially in the West but really all over the world, in the middle third of the twentieth century. Think about it: as that era opened we had the music of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times; as it closed we had Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those latter works come from something that most of us recognize as in some general sense our current world; the earlier ones seem so distant as to be alien. (Fascinating, yes, but alien.)
As I say, I’ve been thinking a lot about this transition, because I believe that we can’t understand where we are, culturally speaking, without understanding where we come from. And it’s not simply a matter of waving a hand and saying “The Sixties” — the transformation is more complex and gradual than that. Even a story like The Lord of the Rings seems to be ours in a way that nothing before the Thirties is. I’m trying to figure this out, and will continue to do so.
So note the tag on this post. It’ll be turning up often. And I have gone back to tag some earlier posts that are relevant to this inquiry, though I’m only beginning that task. Keep your eyes peeled for regular updates!
To wrap up his rowhomes project, Hytha’s planning to sell a collage of all 100 images that comprise it, and he expects the collage to sell for as much as $40,000. In the meantime, Hytha has been meeting with local organizations that specialize in home repair and tangled titles in an effort to figure out how to put the money to the best possible use. Whether it ultimately helps Philadelphians with rowhome repairs, tangled title resolutions, or both, Hytha’s donation will help protect the historical legacy and architectural vibrancy of the city’s oft-neglected neighborhoods. In so doing, what started for Hytha as an art project celebrating the tragic beauty of urban decay in Philadelphia’s built environment will have become a force counteracting that very decay.
Hytha shows us, then, that it’s possible to use NFTs without severing economic action from morality, and further, that the new technology actually opens up new frontiers for local civic engagement. With sufficient skill, hard work, and good fortune, struggling artists now have a realistic chance at becoming powerful community pillars—all while doing what they love. Moreover, while NFTs are often criticized for being detached from the world and devoid of real value, Hytha shows us that it’s possible to ground them in one’s environment and use them to help people appreciate the physical world instead of escape from it into cyberspace.
An argument worthy of serious reflection.
envelope please
A slow day at the museum, and the receptionist is sitting at their desk as a stranger approaches, perhaps a tourist.
‘Hi’, the stranger begins, ‘I found this on the street just around the corner.’ He puts a wallet on the desk and pushes it over to the receptionist. ‘Somebody must have lost it. I’m in a hurry and have to go. Can you please take care of it?’. Without waiting for a response, the stranger turns and leaves.
The wallet is a clear plastic envelope, which the receptionist picks up and turns over. Inside they can clearly see a key, a shopping list, some business cards and a couple of bank notes.
So what happens to the envelope? That’s the question asked by Alain Cohn, a researcher at the University of Michigan, and his team — who have dropped off similar envelopes all over the world. Stafford continues:
For me, the most interesting finding is not whether most wallets were returned (they were), or whether the wallets with more money in were more likely to be returned (also true), but the differences around the world in the rates at which the wallets were returned. These differences were huge, varying from 4 out of every 5 wallets being returned (in Scandinavia, of course, and Switzerland), to fewer than 1 in 5 being returned (in places including China, Peru and Kazakhstan).
Trying to understand this range led Cohn and his team to the World Values Survey, an international research effort that polls citizens around the globe about their beliefs and attitudes. One question, in particular, asks about faith in other people: ‘Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?’. In Sweden, for example, most people agree with this statement. In Peru, fewer than 10 per cent do. Cohn’s analysis suggests that it is this generalised trust in other people that drives the cross-cultural differences seen with the lost wallets.
Stafford, following Cohn, thinks that the key variable here is “views of human nature,” but that’s not obviously correct. What if the key variable is “views of social responsibility”? I wonder if Cohn et al. asked any questions about that.
Re: those eggs, once I tried Alton Brown’s way of boiling eggs – which is not to boil them but rather to steam them – I knew I’d never use any other method. Foolproof.
Happy 92nd birthday to Gary Snyder pic.twitter.com/At40v7B4l7
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon)
Jacques Pépin calls this dish Eggs Jeannette, after his mother, because she would always make them for her kids when they were sick. The most comforting of comfort foods, and an Easter and Mother’s Day tradition in our household. (UPDATE: Les Oeufs Jeannette.)
Edward Heathcote, with a piece that provides an interesting counterpoint to my recent post on a 1950s skyscraper:
Sennett refers to the difference between Billionaires’ Row and the Rockefeller Center, a place of constant public and civic activity. In Rem Koolhaas’s 1978 book Delirious New York, written as the city was mired in bankruptcy but while its cultural scene was, arguably, at its apex, the Dutch architect argued that the skyscraper contained all the potential of a self-contained city. A “social condenser” is what he called it: “A machine to generate and intensify desirable forms of human intercourse.”
The slender profile of 111 W 57th represents the proud nail in the coffin of that potential. It transforms an archetype which was, since its birth at the end of the 19th century, a container built to accommodate the complex needs of the contemporary metropolis.
The skyscrapers of the golden era, the 1920s and 1930s, aspired to the condition of the vertical city, connecting the street to the sky via a labyrinth of corridors and arcades, shops, hotels, restaurants, subways, studios, theatres and, of course, offices with their own set of stratifications from secretaries to executives. This skinny tower aspires to something very different, the exclusion of the 99.99 per cent.
Ultimately, this is a skyscraper that has been built because it was possible, physically, economically and politically, to build it. Finance and engineering collide in the refinement of a new, very contemporary type of tower. It is, in its way, just as emblematic of its time as the buildings of the 1920s were of theirs. The economies of global cities are built on real estate, that is how they maintain growth. These towers may look insubstantial, but this is not a glitch. It is the new reality in which unimaginable wealth towers over the city uncontained, not by accident but by design.
