Alan Jacobs

Unapologetic: Holy Week 6: Sabbath

There is, I believe, in the adventure of prayer, in our intimate relation with God, a point of breakthrough that takes us straight into the heart of the akedah story, the heart of the cross. It can only be called a moment of authentic spiritual terror. It comes when one allows God to invade one’s vulnerability in such a way that one sees that one’s polite, manageable image of that God has all along been an idol - a very big “something” that can be relied upon to protect one’s good undertakings and worthy religious projects, and above all one’s acceptable image of oneself.

The smashing of this idol, whether through patient prayer or personal disaster - or both - is a crisis of huge spiritual significance: I can walk into the dread, in which, seemingly, God has become nightmarish threat, or I can retreat. But at the heart of this nightmare is the same irresolvable conundrum of the “binding of Isaac” or of the cross: for this new God who magnetizes me and allures me and demands of me nothing less than everything, and whom I desire above everything, is the same God who also seems to turn on me and slay me, even as he “binds” and hands me over, with Christ in the Passion, into a new posture of pure, passive love. The contradiction is, in human terms, seemingly unbearable.

unapologetic-book:

Jesus before Pilate, from Sue Symons’ Bath Diptychs.

RAY: Tonight we’re talking to Darrel Dexter, the Komodo-dragon expert, from Upper Montclair, New Jersey. Say, doctor, would you tell us a little bit about the Komodo dragon?

BOB: Happy to! The Komodo dragon is the world’s largest living lizard. It’s a ferocious carnivore found on the steep-sloped island of Komodo, in the lesser Sunda chain of the Indonesian archipelago, and the nearby islands of Rintja, Padar, and Flores.

RAY: Where do they come from?

BOB: [Mystified pause.] The Komodo dragon, world’s largest living lizard, is found on the island of Komodo, in the lesser Sunda chain of the Indonesian Archipelago, and the nearby islands of Rinja, Padar, and Flores. We have two in this country that were given to us some years ago by the late former Premier of Indonesia, Sukarno, and they reside in the National Zoo, in Washington.

RAY: I, ah, believe I read somewhere, where a foreign potentate gave America some Komodo dragons. Is that true?

BOB: [Pause.] Yes. The former Premier of Indonesia, Sukarno, gifted our country with two Komodo dragons—the world’s largest living lizards—and they reside at the National Zoo, in Washington.

RAY: Well, now, if we wanted to take the youngsters to see a Komodo dragon—where would we take them?

After two months of delays thanks to donations totalling $700, the Cowpocalypse finally arrives at 7:20 pm on September 7. At that moment, all the cows disappear. They have been raptured—replaced with an image of an empty patch of grass. Players can still click on the grass, still generate points for doing so, but there are no new cows to buy, no mooing to celebrate their action. In some sense, this is the truest version of Cow Clicker—the pure, cold game mechanic without any ornamentation. Bogost says that he expects most people will “see this as an invitation to end their relationship with Cow Clicker.”

But months after the rapture, Adam Scriven, the enthusiastic player from British Columbia, hasn’t accepted that invitation. He is still clicking the space where his cow used to be. After the Cowpocalypse, Bogost added one more bedeviling feature—a diamond cowbell, which could be earned by reaching 1 million clicks. It was intended as a joke; it would probably take 10 years of steady clicking to garner that many points. But Scriven says he might go for it. “It is very interesting, clicking nothing,” Scriven says. “But then, we were clicking nothing the whole time. It just looked like we were clicking cows.”

Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares.

I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers—and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the “chimpion.”

People like Nick Bilton over at The New York Times Bits blog argue that norms like thank-you messages can cost more in time and efficiency than they are worth. However, such etiquette norms aren’t just about efficiency: They’re actually about building thoughtful and pro-social character.

Take my six-year-old daughter. When she looked at her new iPod Touch (a Chrismukkah gift), she saw it as a divine labor-saving device. Unlike the onerous handwritten thank-you notes she had to do for her birthday, she envisioned instead sending quick thank-you texts to friends and family. Months later, she still doesn’t understand why her parents forbid the shortcut. And she won’t. Not anytime soon….

At stake, then, is the idea that efficiency is the great equalizer. It turns every problem into a waste-reduction scenario, but its logic has a time and a place. Social relations are fundamentally hierarchical, and the primary way we acknowledge importance is through effort. Sending laconic thank-you texts to family treats them no differently than business associates.

In claiming that effort is the currency of care, I’m not suggesting that efficient communication only belongs to instrumental contexts. For example, I encourage my daughter to routinely send short texts to people who are important to her. After all, every exchange can’t be deep or premeditated. A spontaneous “hi” here and “how are you doing?” goes a long way to reminding others that they aren’t alone and remain in our thoughts. But if a grandparent didn’t text, I would consider it incredibly rude and lacking in sympathetic sentiment if my daughter issued an unspoken ultimatum — like Bilton did with his parents — of get-on-my-technology-platform or get frozen out.

Bronfman’s Haggadah, which is illustrated with watercolors by his wife, Jan Aronson, includes quotations from such goyim as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and there is no Hebrew in it. God is depicted as an “energy,” as opposed to an anthropomorphic deity, and Moses plays a starring role (traditional Haggadahs usually minimize mentions of Moses, to emphasize God’s, not man’s, role in freeing the Jews).

Aronson’s illustrations attempt to capture these departures. In her rendering, the burning bush is not really on fire. “I figured Moses was trying to decide what he was going to do with his life,” she said. “And he went out to tend to the sheep, either at sunrise or sunset, and the light was coming through the bushes, and he was meditating. And it dawned on him that what he should do is go back to Egypt and take care of the business that was left. And so it wasn’t a burning bush per se.”

Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the first Asian-American rabbi in North America, summed up the new Haggadah’s approach to Judaism to the crowd with a quotation from “The Book of Mormon” (the Broadway show, not the religious text). “It’s a metaphor!” she said, and then she led the room in the singing of “Oh Freedom,” a Negro spiritual.

I get a lot of mail from people who agree with me, but are impatient and want to propose methods of moving to a better situation very quickly – with some kind of Ponzi scheme that people would buy into quickly, thereby causing things to change rapidly. I always respond to these people that what I’m actually advocating is a slower and more deliberative process. I’d rather take 20 or 30 years, because that’s probably how long we have before the employment crisis from automation will become severe. What I prefer to advocate is not that we change as fast as possible, but to engage in a more deliberative political and longer-term dialogue, which is why I wrote a book rather than proposing a Ponzi scheme to spark a quick transition. Besides, our current arrangements might not give rise to lock-in because ultimately it’s not sustainable.

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.

Increasingly, what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data about us. Unmasking Broadwell’s identity involved correlating her Internet activity with her hotel stays. Everything we do now involves computers, and computers produce data as a natural by-product. Everything is now being saved and correlated, and many big-data companies make money by building up intimate profiles of our lives from a variety of sources.

Facebook, for example, correlates your online behavior with your purchasing habits offline. And there’s more. There’s location data from your cell phone, there’s a record of your movements from closed-circuit TVs.

This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it’s efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.