Waking Up with Wendell Berry

I'm very newly into the novel Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. It begins with a notice to the reader that I am trying hard to take seriously:

Persons attempting to find a "text" in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

I'm trying, really I am, not to be the dreaded explainer. That is my bent, I'm afraid, but the author has asked in good faith and good humor, and so I'm trying hard to indulge him and honor his request.

To resist explanation, it turns out, is to invite emotional resonance. I'm forty pages into Jayber Crow's 363 pages and already hopelessly in awe of the title character, telling his story in retrospect. By reading his memories of childhood I'm recalling my own memories; by way of his reflections on the impact of time and the wheels of progress I'm noticing how much the places I've lived have changed over the years, and how much I've changed myself in relation to them. I'm observing him observe these other people and recalling my own observations of the people whose paths I have crossed. It's not necessarily comfortable terrain for one such as I, so predisposed to deconstruction, but it's not a bad way to wake up in the morning.

This morning I awoke to Crow, late in life, recounting his time at The Good Shepherd orphanage, where as some odd institutional protocol his name was truncated from Jonah to J., only to be recast at some later date as Jay and familiarized as Jayber. What follows is how my day today begins, and I expect it will shape how my day today unfolds.

For a while after they had come to The Good Shepherd, the newcomers were known as "newboys" and "newgirls." This status of newness we sooner or later simply wore our way out of. . . . I remember a little girl, the E. Lawler I mentioned before, who came to The Good Shepherd when she was about seven years old. She was a slight, brown-haired, sad-looking, lonesome-looking girl whose clothes did not fit. She looked accidental or unexpected, and seemed to be without expectation, and resigned, and so quiet that even in my selfishness I wished I knew of a way to help her.

I watched her all the time. When her class went out to play, she did not take part but only stood back and watched the other girls. She always wore a dress that sagged and brown cotton stockings that were always wrinkled. She was waiting. I did not understand that she was waiting, but she was. And then one day as her classmates were joining hands to play some sort of game, one of the girls broke the circle. She held out her hand to the newcomer to beckon her in. And E. Lawler ran into the circle and joined hands with the others.

I wrote E. Lawler in my tablet so that I would not forget her.

Local Food and Sustainable Religion

I'm not what you might call "self-motivated." I often need external prompts to keep me going on my more mundane projects. One of those projects is gardening.

So every year now (for the second year in a row!) I'm reading a book that relates in some way to the growing of food. Last year was Barbara Kingsolver's wonderful book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a gift from one of my hippie author friends, who noticed that I had read Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma (a gift from another of my hippie author friends) and assumed that I must be a hippie foodie. I'm not, but the book was great.

This year's entry is Year of Plenty: One Suburban Family, Four Rules, and 365 Days of Homegrown Adventure in Pursuit of Christian Living, by Craig L. Goodwin. I met Craig at the Inhabit Conference last year, an event sponsored by the Parish Collective, a network of mostly urban and suburban hippies who want their religious life to be homegrown, organic and slow. It's a great event, if you're into that sort of thing.

Craig's family spent a year living locally, and facing up to all the implications of that. They went in fairly ignorant (less ignorant, I suspect, than he likes to suggest in the book, but by no means were they stealth hippies engaging in fraudulent life experiments), and dealt with the surprises as they came. I'm now at the point where the family is running out of staples, like flour, and running in search of homegrown replacements.

The family visits any number of processing plants with very little luck, until one food industry representative directs them to a "recovering conventional farmer." Fred proves to be a good match for Craig's "recovering conventional consumer"; I suspect I'll hear more from Fred as I continue to read. Anyway, Fred turns Craig on not only to local sources of flour but to the ecological logic of what has become, after a century or two of industrial progress, unconventional farming. Show concern for the sustainability of topsoil, Fred suggests, and your land will not dry up. I found this interesting: "The richness of the tropical rainforest is in the way it recycles the nutrients"--the interdependency of the soil and the plants growing in it. "Once the native vegetation disappears, so does the productive capacity of the soil." Deforestation in the Amazon, for example, won't result in more land for agricultural use; it'll result in more useless land and a starker, less stable environment.

The kicker of chapter five, for me, was the surprise twist at the end, in which Craig steps way back from his search for flour and sugar and cheese, and reflects on the parallels between environmental responsibility and congregational life. He's a pastor, so he thinks that way, but I found his insight to be quite compelling, and fertile ground for the church's ongoing reformation. Here's what he wrote:

I am learning that what farmers like Fred are doing agriculturally, I need to do theologically and pastorally in the church. Like farmers, our lives have become disintegrated and fragmented by rapid cultural and technological change. Maybe we've imagined the whole world as little more than a medium for growing souls, pushing and pushing until we erode the fertile topsoil that's essential to our faith--justice, goodness, mercy, compassion. Imagine what might change if we thought of the earth and everything in it as part of God's redemptive plan, as an integrated process of life breaking out "on earth as it is in heaven." Maybe even our stop at the dairy aisle and our choice of flour could be fertile ground for faithfulness.

An Anchor of Time: The Letter from Birmingham Jail, 50 Years Later

Everybody wants to be on Martin Luther King's side, but no one wants to cross the street.

Back in college one of my professors suggested that, while it was appropriate to date time from the birth of Christ, given the historical and cultural significance of that moment, the time had come to mark time differently. He proposed August 6, 1945, the day on which the U.S. government dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, and ushered in the nuclear age. That day changed history, he argued, and he was right.

But the interesting thing to me about how we mark time now--according to the birth of Christ--is how unremarkable that day was to the people who were living it. It's only through the lens of history that we came to recognize its significance, only in retrospect that we know how profoundly that day changed history.

So, if my professor is right and the time has come to re-mark time, I think we ought to look for something more subtle than a nuclear explosion. I might propose April 16, 1963.

April 16, 1963, is the day Martin Luther King Jr. began writing his letter to white clergy, on the occasion of his arrest and imprisonment in Birmingham, Alabama, for "parading without a permit" in an effort to end legal segregation in that city. He wrote in response to an editorial, written by various white clergy, offering general support for the cause of the black person in the American South but urging patience and meekness. Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the writing of that letter, and it is as current today as it was then.

Oh, the details of the story may be slightly different, but both in the specifics (the systemic injustices that keep people of different ethnicities separate and unequal) and in the generalities (the long arc of history that still leads to but has yet to arrive at justice), King's letter is profound and prophetic.

You don't know in a moment how significant a piece of writing will be. Even a bestseller can't be judged at the point of sale. Only time tells the real value of a good word. And time has been very good to King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. It is eminently quotable but merits thorough reading and reflection. It has been the impetus for any number of short-term and lifelong works of reconciliation and justice. It has shored up the courage of people fighting good fights; it has comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.

To those who seethe under a general situation of injustice or who crave revenge over specific acts of hate and violence--as I suspect many are feeling today--King's letter points to "the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest." For those who think the law is the law is the law, King points out that "everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal' and . . . it was 'illegal' to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany." To those who think that the best life is the avoidance of extremism and the preservation of peace at all costs, King replies that "on Calvary's hill three men were crucified . . . for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists."

"So the question," King asks for all time, "is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be." This question, grounded in history as it is, will haunt us far into the future. It is transcendent, the way all good anchors of time should be. As we return to it, we make inevitable progress on the long arc of history toward justice. As King declares in his letter:

Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.

For the full text of the letter (which I read once a year, every year--a practice I recommend wholeheartedly), click here.

Jesus with Skinny Jeans On

I found this recent episode of The Mindy Project (embedded below) wildly entertaining. Mindy meets a guy on the train and they go out on a date. She finds out that he's a Lutheran minister (he prays for dinner). She goes to his church and he dumps her because she's not selfless enough for him. She goes to prison to prove she's a good person. Hilarity ensues.

The thing that strikes me as most interesting about this episode is how fascinatingly odd Mindy finds it that someone would (a) pray before eating and (b) go to church. Churchgoing is that quickly becoming exotic and unexpected.

The concept of religious faith isn't pilloried by the episode, even though the show makes a mockery of contemporary worship services (Moby as liturgist?!?). Fair game, I say. But the church and the vocation of Mindy's would-be boyfriend (he's a Lutheran, probably mainly for the vestments, but he could have been a pastor in pretty much any church without a celibate clergy) are really just foils for more interesting questions:

[] Why do some people believe some things, and others don't?

[] What motivates our altruism, and are our motivations legitimate?

Anyway, I liked it, and I thought you might like it too. A little harsh on people in prison, and a little blue here and there. But comedy genius. Enjoy it while it's streaming.

The Cloud We Find Ourselves In

Before there was a cloud, there was a great cloud.

We read about it in the letter to the Hebrews. It’s mentioned explicitly in chapter 12, but the heart of it is actually in chapter 11, as a kind of litany declaring what faith looks like. Guess what: It looks like a cloud.

A cloud jam-packed with people, it turns out. “By faith we understand,” the writer tells us, “that the universe was formed at God’s hand.” Faith characterizes the stories we tell each other about Abel, whose sacrifice was better than Cain’s, and who paid the ultimate price for his great faith. Faith describes the experience of Enoch, who was taken from this earth. It describes the experience of Noah, of Abram, of Isaac and Jacob, of Joseph and his sons, of Moses and the people of God in their exodus from Egypt, of Rahab and Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah and David and Samuel and the prophets. Faith is the great motif of the story of God; it floats through two testaments like a cloud; it lights up the sacred text like a pillar of fire.

And yet the faith of Hebrews 11 was an unfinished story: “none of them received what had been promised”—and this is important—“since God had planned something better for us.” The writer of the letter to the Hebrews goes so far as to make us—you and me—the final object of all that faith: “only together with us would they be made perfect.”

The paean to faith in chapter 11 is the antecedent for the “great cloud” introduced to us at the beginning of chapter 12. Our connection to this historic faith is the rationale for our faith-rooted efforts in the present and the future: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.” Just as our antecedents await our witness to perfect their faith, we come to understand, we depend on their experience for the perfection of our own. And all of us, taken together, depend on Jesus for perfect and perfecting faith. We are incomplete without each other, and all together we are incomplete without Jesus.

Right. Jesus is important. But I’m mainly interested for the moment in the fact that we’re incomplete without each other. Communality is so hot right now—we crowdsource and kickstart and otherwise participate in a broader communal life in virtual and occasionally real physical space. Some code writer somewhere probably thinks she invented the cloud, where all our best selves commingle and cultivate something greater than the sum of our particular parts. But then we flip to Hebrews 12 and we see it’s always been there, supporting us and making demands on us.

What does it mean to participate in the great cloud? It means, among other things, that we owe it not only to our ancestors but to ourselves to get to know them. We search the Scriptures not just for fortune-cookie axioms to organize our days around but to know who we are, as parts of a whole but also as a whole with so many constituent parts.

It means, among other things, that we read beyond the Scriptures, to familiarize ourselves with those who came after Hebrews 11 but before Century 21. They too occupy the cloud with us, with them; they too help perfect us, and they too are perfected in us.

It means, among other things, that we engage one another fully, encouraging one another where encouragement is needed and challenging one another where challenge is needed. It means we play fair and fight nice, since we’re all in this cloud together, and we’re all interdependent for our mutual and collective perfection.

Someone will complain that I’m writing so much about perfection. (Not my uncle; he'll complain about the whole post. He hates when I write stuff like this.) Nobody’s perfect, someone will remind me, and the pursuit of perfection in the aftermath of humanity’s fall from grace is an idolatrous waste of time. To them I say, chillax. I don’t expect to become perfect; I don’t think I or anyone else is perfect. I do believe in a great mystery, however—that he who has begun a great work in us will see it to completion. Not in my lifetime, surely, any more than he completed it in the lifetime of Abraham or Isaac or Jacob, or Peter or Paul or Mary. In the meantime, we owe it to ourselves and to one another to make the most of this cloud we find ourselves in.

What Kind of Extremists Will We Be? Haunted by MLK

On this forty-fifth anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jr.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. . . .

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and . . . when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously constructed dams that block the flow of social progress. . . .

Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God. . . .

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? . . .

In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as being the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists. . . . So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent--and often even vocal--sanction of things as they are. . . . Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned to outright disgust. . . .

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. . . . Let us all hope that . . . in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

A Prayer About Time, 3.0

Every few years I repost the following prayer written by Robert Banks, a missiologist from Australia, and published in his book The Tyranny of Time. Today seems like as good a day as any to repost it yet again. A blessing on your head.

***

God our Father,
you are the Maker of everything that exists,
the Author of the world of nature
and of all living things,
the Creator of both space and time.

Without you there would be no past,
present or future;
no summer or winter,
spring or autumn,
seedtime or harvest;
no morning or evening,
months or years.

Because you give us the gift of time
we have the opportunity
to think and to act,
to plan and to pray,
to give and to receive,
to create and to relate,
to work and to rest,
to strive and to play,
to love and to worship.

Too often we forget . . .
and fail to appreciate your generosity:
we take time for granted
and fail to thank you for it,
we view it as a commodity
and ruthlessly exploit it,
we cram it too full or waste it,
learn too little from the past
or mortgage it off in advance,
we refuse to give priority
to those people and things
which should have chief claim upon our time.

Help us to view time more as you view it,
and to use it more as you intend:
to distinguish between what is central
and what is peripheral,
between what is merely pressing
and what is really important,
between what is our responsibility
and what can be left to others,
between what is appropriate now
and what will be more relevant later.

Guard us against attempting too much
because of a false sense of our indispensability,
a false sense of ambition,
a false sense of rivalry,
a false sense of guilt,
or a false sense of inferiority:
yet do not let us mistake our responsibilities,
underestimate ourselves,
fail to be stimulated by others,
overlook our weaknesses, or know our proper limits.

Enable us also to realise that
important though this life is, it is not all,
that we should view what we do
in the light of eternity,
not just our limited horizons,
that we ourselves have eternal life now.

God our Father, you are
not so much timeless as timeful,
you do not live above time
so much as hold "all times . . . in your hand",
you have prepared for us a time
when we will have leisure
to enjoy each other and you to the full,
and we thank you, appreciate you
and applaud you for it.

Amen

Platform for Postmoderns: Self-Promotion and Self-Loathing

This post is part of an occasional series on platform. Read the first entry here. Find the whole series (on shuffle!) here.

***

As intriguing an intellectual exercise as I find this series on platform to be, the fact of the matter is that it's only really interesting to people who have something to sell. It may be a book or a song or a film; it may be a set of skills or a big, revolutionary idea. It may be something you're not selling for money; maybe you're looking for converts or cobelligerents. Michael Hyatt, whose book on platform got me started on this series, talks about "wow products" and experiences as a priori to the work of building a platform: If you don't have something worth wowing over, why on earth are you trying to get in people's faces and on their radar?

So, if you're interested in platform--space you carve out for yourself that draws people's attention to you and helps them focus on what you're trying to say or do--you're probably interested in selling something. (If you're not interested in selling something but you're interested in platform, you may need to read this book.) To enter into the work of building a platform means--inevitably, unavoidably, unabashedly--to engage in self-promotion.

The notion of self-promotion sickens a lot of people; it petrifies a lot more. I've had people agonize with me over self-promotion while simultaneously promoting themselves to me. It feels wrong to do it; it feels exploitative of our friends and family and conversation partners. It feels slick and smarmy and dirty. It feels like we imagine selling our soul must feel.

And yet when it works, it feels sooooo goooooood.

Postmoderns are natives in a world steeped in advertising. Prior to the twentieth century advertising was primarily descriptive: this product does this and doesn't do that. Only carnival barkers over-promised, and they usually got run out of town on a rail. But you knew that had to end; advertising had too much in common with evangelism, and evangelism only works as a big, big sell. Richard Dahlstrom tells the story of how Coca Cola advertisers mimicked the missionary enterprise and changed advertising from description to proselytization:

After Asa Chandler purchased the coca-cola formula from a pharmacist in 1887, he cast a vision to his sales team, declaring that this product should be, “a thirst quenching, heaven-sent drink; a blessing to this sun-parched earth.” Chandler was a Methodist who began his sales meetings with prayer and ended his training weeks with the whole team singing stirring renditions of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

Think about that: advertisers were now soldiers, aping Christian missionary zeal, convincing themselves that their product was "heaven-sent," authorizing themselves to foist Coke on the masses by any means necessary. And Coke was just the first domino; advertising very quickly became a matter of over-promising, tying the wow product to the existential angst of the consumer--selling the sizzle rather than the steak. Asa Chandler saw himself as a missionary for Coca Cola, but he, and now we all, became carnival barkers writ large.

A hundred and twenty five years later, we are steeped in this kind of hyperpromotion. You can't take five steps in a modern economy without being sold something, whether it's a make and model of car or the sticker on its bumper, whether it's the billboard towering over your horizon or the spam text on your phone. Such advertising fatigues us and we know it, but it also is all we know, and so even though we hate it, it's where we go and what we do when we need to get a word out. It's the logic we subscribe to when we seek to build a platform for ourselves, when we seek to create a wow product or experience and bring it to market.

How do we break out of this vortex? How do we promote the things we're passionate about without coming to hate ourselves in the process?

First of all, we should know what we're passionate about, and invest our promotional energies in that. Asa Chandler was, it seems to me, passionate about Christianity; he forced himself, I think, to be passionate about Coca Cola. Passion can be cultivated, but it shouldn't be manufactured. Figure out what you're passionate about before you invest yourself in building a platform--even before you invest yourself in creating a wow product. Passion is the first ingredient in wow, anyway. It's passion that will sustain you in the hard work of making your products and experiences compelling; it'll sustain you in the often frustrating work of assembling a platform for getting the word out.

Second, we should give ourselves permission to be enthusiastic. I talked to a friend recently who has written her first novel; she's noticed that it's much easier for her to promote these fictional characters, this imagined story, than it is for her to promote her more memoirish writing. It feels to her like she's doing a friend a favor, rather than promoting herself, which often feels like begging for attention or shouting silliness like some Shamwow salesman. But all her writing comes out of a passion for the way words work on people; she has a natural enthusiasm for the craft of writing and the art of words. If your platform is based on your passion, moreso than a particular wow product, then your enthusiasm will be more organic, less manufactured. The things you promote become less products and more byproducts; the platform you assemble for yourself becomes less like conquered territory and more like space you're willing to share. It's our passions, not our products and most certainly not our platforms, that make us interesting, that make us compelling to the people around us. It's our passions, not the vain pursuit of platforms or wow products, that make us enjoy what we're doing and forget for a moment that we live in a social-Darwinian world where you're either selling something or being sold something. It's our passions that help us break free of the artificial, hyperpromotional world that we all secretly love and all desperately hate.

So when you think about platform, don't think about selling yourself. Don't even think about selling your stuff. Think about what you love, and then share what you love with the world. Soon enough all the other pieces will start to fall into place.

***

Do yourself a favor and read Brian Mahan's Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose. It's my very favorite book and will help you sort through this self-promotion--self-loathing stuff.

Platform for Postmoderns: Embracing Abundance

This is the latest in a series on platform for postmoderns. Find previous posts (in inexplicably nonsequential order) here. The first post can be found here.

***

There's a fundamental logic underlying free market capitalism: every equation is zero-sum. For you to make something the world wants or needs, someone else will be forced to not make something else. For every sale you get, someone else loses a customer. For your star to rise, someone else's star has to fall. There's a finiteness to the world; only so much of everything exists, and so only so much of anything can come into being.

It's hard to argue the logic of that premise. The whole notion of environmental responsibility is based on the understanding that oil and carbon and topsoil and water are finite. Put a five-person family in a three-bedroom house and more than one person is going to be sharing a room. Every budget has a fiscal cliff. Even the days of our lives are numbered; as Moses once wrote, "Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away" (Psalm 90:10). Pardon my French, but Moses was a bummer.

And yet we are continually inspired to reject the limitations of time, space, money, power. Indeed, it's in defiance of such limits that nearly all innovation emerges. The Wright brothers defied the apparent restriction of gravity, the previously unassailable logic that we are bound to the earth. A few decades later and we're floating freely in space. Arguably as inspiring as Moses' words above are sobering, are Robert Browning's words describing the ache to create, to do an altogether new thing: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for?" Browning rejects the notion of scarcity that undergirds modern economics; his universe is endlessly abundant.

Moses himself rejected scarcity, actually, even as he was lamenting the limitations of time. He found drinking water in a desert, for pete's sake. And when his lieutenants complained to him that other Israelites were daring to give direction to the people of Israel during the exodus from Egypt--a zero-sum platform grab if ever there was one--Moses countered with an appeal to abundance: "“Are you jealous for my sake? I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!” (Numbers 11:29). In Moses' ideal world, everyone had power and wielded it well; everyone had, in fact, everything they needed and nothing they didn't.

That's the fundamental fallacy of a platform mentality shaped by scarcity: that, responsibly handled, there isn't enough of everything for everyone; that to wield influence, one needs to be elevated above everyone else; that for a platform to be effective, it must tower over and even undercut all other platforms. That's not how it plays out in practice, of course: Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, two international church leaders whose platforms were constructed under a modernist paradigm in a free market economy, aren't to my knowledge out to destroy each other. But the assumption underlying the modernist platform strategy presumes that you and I have time and attention and even loyalty enough for only one of them; they are in fact competing with each other for you. More to the point, if you have a message to disseminate--about marriage, for example--you're in head-to-head conflict with massive marriage brands like Les and Leslie Parrott, and John and Julie Gottman. You may as well give up now, because you don't have a fighting chance.

Postmoderns have seen the destructive quality of competition over limited resources in oil-based wars, slave labor and planned obsolescence. Meanwhile, they have grown up with technology that makes everything imaginable available at the touch of a button. Given these experiences, the notion of competing with someone in order to share something with everyone is preposterous. Postmoderns don't enter into competition with people who are interested in the same things; they enter into generative relationship with them. For the postmodern, there is plenty of room at the table, and a smorgasbord of ideas yields a feast of new insight--a vastly different image from the modernist vision of a marketplace of ideas, where supply supposedly drives down demand and only the fittest survive.

Of course, businesses that traffic in platform (publishing, for example) operate in a modernist economy still driven by scarcity, and so they continue to play by the rules of the modernist paradigm. Self-sustaining institutions are usually the last to convert to emerging models. But a new economy, a new paradigm, is possible; the pursuit of platform in an age of abundance requires merely that we think outside the box.

One way of doing so is to disseminate freely--to scatter ideas like seeds in whatever medium is available at any given moment. I write on blogs, for example, because I'm interested in getting an idea out there, to see how others interact with it. You can read what I write here freely, and you can comment as often as you like. We might think of a blog as an outpost in a war on competing brands, I suppose--by posting regularly we draw the attention of an audience away from some other platform and toward our own. But we don't have to think of it that way. We can instead think of it as what it is: one of many social media that is peculiarly conducive to idea sharing and generative conversation. We might think of it, in other words, as what we're bringing to a common table. This view of platform is less mercenary than the old regime's, and it syncs up nicely with a postmodern world in which playing well with others is a high value.

Any common table calls for people to gather around it, and so part of the task of building a postmodern platform is to announce the abundance, to find conversation partners and cultivate the conversation. Publicity, marketing and even sales are still part of this emerging economy. These things are done broadly, as you make scattershot announcements about new content as it goes live and offer incentives for people to engage your content; they are also done narrowly as you engage individuals with your content, commenting on their content and inviting them specifically to critique and build on what you've done. You make space in small and big ways for the conversation you want to take root and grow. You take responsibility for keeping the conversation vital and useful. And gradually you find that you've become a go-to voice in a can't-miss conversation. You've got yourself a platform, and nobody else had to suffer for it.

This approach to platform takes time, obviously. But contrary to Moses' lament, just like everything, there's plenty of time to go around.

On Loving and Simultaneously Coveting Your Neighbor

Something I read this morning reminded me of something I read quite some time ago, a description of something that author had himself read. I wrote about it in my book Deliver Us from Me-Ville, so it's entirely possible you read it from me. I'll reprint it here for your convenience.

***

Limitless factors contribute to how our inner unsettledness manifests in our outward life, just as countless external catalysts force us to decide how other people will influence us--the scripts that over time have burrowed their way into our subconscious, the degrees of complexity our various relationships have taken on, the amount of responsibility or pressure we're carrying as an extension of the power or status or wealth we've acquired for ourselves. Jean Vanier recognizes the complexity of this internal process and the inevitability of its impact on how we relate to others. "There is an endless list of those we may exclude," he observes, and we might add those we may insult or demean or patronize or otherwise offend; "every one of us, we may be sure, is on someone's list."

Brian Mahan suggests that our compassion--our capacity to care for other people--is inhibited by our ambitions, "setting limits on the reach and intensity of fellow-feeling." He recalls a thought experiment created by Walker Percy to illustrate this awkward psychosocial negotiation. The experiment is predicated on your run-in with your neighbor Charlie, who you've known to be very sick. "You look at him sympathetically" but then notice that he doesn't appear concerned or even unhealthy; he looks genuinely happy as he approaches you. "He has triple good news. His chest ailment turned out to be a hiatal hernia, not serious. He's got a promotion and is moving to Greenwich, where he can keep his boat in the water rather than on a trailer." So how do you feel? Percy gives you two options: (1) You feel unequivocally happy for your neighbor, or (2) you're happy for him but suddenly feel a little less happy for yourself. Those who picked the second option are given a continuum of seven choices to describe "which of the following news . . . would make you feel better." The options range from your neighbor dropping dead on the spot to your saving your neighbor's life from a runaway garbage truck careening toward him. The spoiler answer is the seventh, in which you're generally happy, your neighbor is generally happy, and all of a sudden the city off in the distance is leveled by an earthquake, and only you and your neighbor have survived. Percy sums up the experiment: "In a word, how much good news about Charlie can you tolerate without compensatory catastrophies, rescues, and such?"

***

Percy's experiment is recounted in Brian Mahan's excellent book Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose.

Jean Vanier's excellent insight is found in his book Becoming Human.

Question: How do you gauge and otherwise control covetousness in your life?

Platform for Postmoderns, Part Three: Building Coalitions

No man is an island. No book is a solo effort. No movement is an isolated incident.

Much noise has been made in recent years about "tribes." Broadcasting is out; narrowcasting is in. Affinity groups are the new mass market. Even the notion of platform, the subject of this series (see the first three entries here, here and here), functions on the underlying assumption that you can't please everyone, so you'll have to find people who are pleased when you please yourself. Or something like that.

The object of the game, in book publishing and other celebrity-based industries, has been to identify a group and climb to the top of it. There's a certain type of person who considers James Franco, for example, the greatest actor of his generation. Lady Gaga has assembled millions of "little monsters" to sit at her feet. In my field, Christian publishing, there are John Piper Christians, Rick Warren Christians, Rob Bell Christians and Joel Osteen Christians, proof positive that white men aren't entirely homogenous. (Well, maybe not proof positive . . .) Such huddled masses need leaders, and these folks and their equivalents in other demographics have seen the opportunity and taken it.

The problem with celebrity is that it's unsustainable. I've had recent gossipy conversations about people who have "left their platform," either by choice or under duress, and whose cultural power dissipated almost overnight as a result. "The phone stops ringing," my friends lamented on behalf of our other friends; that's what happens when a musician dares to experiment with another genre, or an actor makes one too many inaccessible films, or when an author or speaker or otherwise celebrated cultural leader ventures beyond the acceptable scope of their cultural leadership. We are past the age of tyrants, after all; we enjoy whatever platform we have by the consent of the governed.

The consent of the governed, in the case of cultural celebrity, is especially fickle. And so even when we do everything right--when we play by all the rules in Michael Hyatt's book Platform--our platform can collapse underneath us. In a free market economy there's always someone, something around the corner waiting to shove us off our perch, vying to capture the imagination of our tribe. For every iPhone there's a Galaxy waiting in the wings; for every Lady Gaga a Ke$ha; for every Prayer of Jabez a Your Best Life Now. We find out quickly, tragically, that whatever love we felt from our audience was actually only lust. We thought we heard them say, "I will always love you," but in reality they had only promised "Here we are; now entertain us."

Celebrity is unsustainable not only thanks to these external factors--the loss of lofty position or the abandonment of your audience--but also thanks to what celebrity costs. Platform can be all-consuming, leaving precious little emotional energy or even chronological time to devote to more homespun, mundane things like maintaining a relationship with your spouse or your kids, your parents or your siblings, your friends and neighbors. Even your vocation--the presumed touchpoint between you and your tribe--competes for your attention with your platform. You can be so busy telling other how they can change the world like you did that changing the world becomes the lowest priority on your to-do list.

When platform is understood through the lens of celebrity, everybody loses. Three of the four Gospel writers report these wise words of Jesus: "What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?" In retrospect, as we watch modernity wind down, we are forced to ask also, What good is it for the world?

A postmodern platform must learn some hard lessons from the unsustainability of the modernist, celebrity-based platform. These lessons are hard because they involve the ego, and our egos don't like to learn lessons. But here's the essence of it: In a postmodern world, building an isolated, individual platform is a waste of time. The logic doesn't play out. Instead of building platforms for themselves, postmoderns who have a message or a vision they want broadly disseminated should concentrate on building coalitions.

A coalition is like a union. Like-minded people recognize that their common goals can be more efficiently accomplished, their voices better heard, if they speak in unison and stand together. Their common goals are discovered together rather than dictated from a single leader; their leaders are, in fact, designated from below as being particularly equipped to carry their message to the halls of power. A coalition can change things were an individual can't.

Most platforms under the modern paradigm are already coalitions, to be honest. Hyatt acknowledges in his book the team that stands behind the coherence and volume of his message, from editors and designers to administrative assistants and the like. Read the acknowledgments in any book and you'll see that it takes a village to raise an individual's voice. What's been obscured in that approach to coalition building is that the various players in any platform are there voluntarily; in a free society, in a free market economy, they can always stop doing what they're doing, and go do something else. Even some of the members of these modernist villages don't realize how free they are, how much of their freedom they've surrendered to the agenda of the person they've placed on a platform.

But a real coalition is communal all the way down. Each individual participant is there voluntarily and knows it; they've not only embraced a vision but contributed to it, in meaning and money and sweat equity. Therein lies the value: the platform is the thing that people have built; the message is part of the infrastructure of the medium by which it is amplified. The audience is already invested--not just enough to consume the message but to repeat it, to become ambassadors for it. The platform's viability is liberated from celebrity and grounded in a communal vision.

Coalition building is how governments work; it's how unions work; it's how movements work. Coalition building is how anything with longevity works. When Jesus began his public ministry, he didn't build a website; he built relationships with twelve people whose priorities overlapped but occasionally clashed. He traveled with them, ate with them, talked about grand ideas with them. By the time of his crucifixion they recognized that they were just as vulnerable to the hostility of the state and the religious authorities as he was, so they hid in an upper room. By the time of his ascension they recognized that they were just as responsible for the propagation of Jesus' message as he was, and so they went about doing greater things than Jesus did (John 14:12) and millennia later his followers are still delivering Jesus' message to the ends of the earth.

How do you build coalitions? It takes time--time to understand your own priorities and subject them meaningfully to the priorities of like-minded others, so together you can arrive at something that all involved can invest themselves in. It takes humility--a willingness to recognize that you're not the only person who cares about your subject matter, not the only source of good ideas. It takes mutuality and graciousness--a willingness to share stages and ideas and not worry so much about credit. It takes great self-awareness of both your potential and your limits, and it takes the courage to push yourself on both.

The payoff is really good. You'll have a platform that not only you but people you admire and trust can stand on and deliver an important message to the world. You'll have a dedicated space that is maintained not by force of individual will but by aggregation of great people. You'll be able to dispense with all the artifice and soul-sucking loneliness that comes with a celebrity-based understanding of platform. And you'll make a lot of friends and share a lot of love.

Some well-built coalitions I like and see great potential in:

Red Letter Christians
The Parish Collective
Forge Missions Training Network
The New Monasticism
Missio Alliance
Christian Community Development Association

There are others, of course, and you're welcome to mention those you like here. But the main idea is this: You are wasting your energy and subverting your message if you go it alone. The age of celebrity is dying and needs to be allowed to die. A better future will come as people marry their messages to the messages of others, and platform becomes not a proprietary place for individuals but shared space for great ideas.

Keep checking back for more thoughts on platform for postmoderns.