I’m one of many looking forward to the day that we can walk back into a movie theater and be entranced by big stories told on large screens. One movie that could kick things off for the season is Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. A second trailer was just released. It’s looks to be visually amazing and narratively challenging in a way that movies can do best. Here’s that trailer, shared with hope.
Benjamin Gibbard is one of the many musicians who have taken to a more consistent online presence during Our Current Moment. Discovering his “at home” show a few weeks ago was one of the highlights of early lockdown, actually (it was the day he was doing songs from around the time of Plans). Gibbard recently went on Stephen Colbert’s show to play “Life in Quarantine.” Definitely some good lyrical moments in the song as it attempts to capture what life has been like for may people these days.
I haven’t followed Seth Godin much lately for no reason in particular. I got out of the practice a couple of years ago and just haven’t given it much thought until recently. And I’m glad I did, because he recently made a distinction that, fittingly, has some real depth.
When things started to shift for everyone back in March, no one was prepared for it (in general, for sure, though this could apply to more specific situations, too). We did what we could, made adjustments as necessary, but then something else kicked in (or didn’t, depending on your previous work). An invisible system kicked in, a system based on relationships and trust that aren’t always in the spotlight. Which ties in some to Godin’s idea of bridges and tunnels:
Robert Moses, the road builder, understood that building tunnels takes just a little longer and costs just a little bit more.
And it turns out that bridges are monuments and create glory for those that find the resources to build them, there in the sky, for all to see.
Those are the two reasons why we end up with more bridges than tunnels. (Same is true with work culture and society at large).
But tunnels allow all sorts of productivity without calling attention to themselves or those that build them. A tunnel creates progress without changing the landscape. Many times, it’s an elegant solution to the problem for someone with the guts and fortitude to build one.
These are tunnel days, where the deep down and unnoticed work has been necessary and helpful. And while I wouldn’t take the same approach to bridges as Godin does, I understand his point. There’s a time and place for bridges, but it hasn’t been that way for the last couple of months. Those days will probably return, though, as life readjusts. But for now, we would be wise to remember the hard work, the hidden work, that is the network of relationships and community that often aren’t that obvious.
This was a big week for CBS and Survivor. The show finished its fortieth cycle over twenty years. I remember watching season one episodes all those years ago with friends in Fort Worth. And while I lost interest for a few years in the middle third of things, I’ve enjoyed Wednesdays on the island for the last while. I’ve even revisited some of my favorite cycles years after the fact (Australian Outback, Pearl Islands, All-Stars, Palau). And while the show has definitely changed over the years, it still finds a way to entertain and catch you off guard.
The folks at The Ringer have made the most of the week, posting a dozen articles about the show’s history and the events surrounding this week’s fortieth-cycle finale. You’ve got the “100 Most Iconic Moments” article (so comprehensive), the “tribal council is the cornerstone” article (pulling the curtain back is always interesting), and a dictionary full of Survivor-centric concepts and terms. The two most enjoyable articles, though, involve an interview with former contestants about some of the nitty-gritty, day-to-day realities of living without toilets and toiletries and a look at what the show could do to continue for another twenty years.
My hope going into an all-winners season, which ended on Wednesday, was that things would be sparse all around. Instead, we got the Edge of Extinction (only used once before) and fire tokens (a first-time twist). There’s lots of talk about how gameplay has changed over the years, but just as real has been the change brought about by gimmicks (like constant hidden immunity idols, Redemption Island, and the like). The “how to continue” article mentioned the importance of casting, of difficult decisions, and balance. But I like the fourth point the most. Concerning “show, don’t tell”:
Modern seasons of Survivor don’t have intros. They don’t have tree mail. They don’t have many shots of cooking food, fishing, or camp life in general. Sometimes they don’t even have reward challenges. That’s because the show has less and less time to show us those things, with the proliferation of advantages that need to be explained and idol hunts that need to be aired. But while on the face of it those old-school features seem easy enough to cut, they provide crucial insight into why some players are working with others: Which personalities click, who trusts who—all of that is built and demonstrated during mundane moments. Cutting the little things hurts the big picture.
The obvious solution here: Longer episodes. If that’s not possible—and it seems it isn’t, if Survivor couldn’t convince CBS to up the running time for Winners at War, as Probst has hinted producers wanted—then some sort of solution where additional content is put on CBS All Access could work. If that isn’t possible, then the show needs to think critically about how twists and advantages cut into the meat of Survivor.
The best season ever is Heroes vs. Villains and it featured just one twist, a back-to-back tribal council before the merge. The best season of the past five years is David vs. Goliath, and it was light on twists for a modern season. By contrast, at times Winners at War had to spend so much time on Edge of Extinction and the various advantages that came out of it that it couldn’t always develop the relationships that were shaping the season. That forced the editors to sometimes throw in a player saying that another contestant was “playing a winner’s game” or that they had a great bond with so-and-so—but it wasn’t able to actually show why that was the case.
It’s worth remembering that the times when the show is allowed to breathe are important. They’re not just breaks in the action—they help explain why a season unfolds the way it does.
I had hoped for more conversation between all of these winners. And you got some of it near the beginning as you learned about how Survivor has become it’s own extended world, especially for older players. And you got it some in the finale when Jeff interviewed the jury after the final “Edge of Extinction” return challenge. But there just wasn’t enough time for it, especially after the live reunion got cut because of Our Current Moment.
I will say that I miss “tree mail.” And I miss “luxury items.” And I miss “food eating challenges” and “auctions.” I miss different locations. (Looking back at the Australian Outback season I was reminded of how much the terrain played a role in things.) The best thing going for the show the last few seasons has been the unpredictable nature of tribal councils (a blindside almost every week?). But you feel it differently when you’ve had time to get to know the contestants a little more as people. And getting to know them as people is more than just hearing a transformation narrative, another trend that echoes what has happened so often in things like the Olympics: an attempt to “humanize” people that often borders on manipulative.
Things are a bit uncertain for now. Our Current Moment has kept future episodes from being filmed. Thankfully we’ve got another (long in mothballs) season of The Amazing Race coming up next week. It will be interesting to see how much cycle 41 of Survivor might be a clean slate, now that so many winner have come back through one more time. Maybe we’ll get a return to basics after all.
(image from parade.com)
We’re now entering the time of year where the best of speakers brings out their greatest wisdom to share with graduates as they move on from high school or college into the oft-promised “real world.” This is another thing bound to change . . . at least this year . . . in light of Our Current Moment. Perhaps there will be live speakers. Maybe there will be recorded messages sent from afar. Of course, it will appear as the written word.
Oft-maligned New York Times columnist David Brooks did something of the sort recently for The Atlantic. Titled “A Commencement Address Too Honest to Deliver in Person,” the piece articulates Brooks’ thoughts he feels inappropriate to say in front of parents, faculty, and the graduates themselves. In the piece, Brooks tries to present a kind of spin on Our Current Moment. I suppose how you understand life, the universe, and everything will affect how you feel about his advice. From things unable to said before parents:
You happened to have graduated into a global emergency that has interrupted everything. That whole career-track thing you’ve been worrying about? Fundamentally interrupted. Don’t see this as a void; see it as a permission slip.
See it as a permission slip to think differently about time. Usually, time flows continually, like a river, and one thing leads to another. But sometimes time comes in a discrete box. The next two years are going to be a discrete box. Think only about this unusual two-year box right now. You’ll probably have 60 more years after this box is over and they’ll probably be more normal. You can worry about them later.
Use this hiatus to do something you would never have done if this emergency hadn’t hit. When the lockdown lifts, move to another state or country. Take some job that never would have made sense if you were worrying about building a career—bartender, handyman, AmeriCorps volunteer.
From things he wouldn’t say live before faculty and administration:
The biggest way most colleges fail is this: They don’t plant the intellectual and moral seeds students are going to need later, when they get hit by the vicissitudes of life. If you didn’t study Jane Austen while you were here, you probably lack the capacity to think clearly about making a marriage decision. If you didn’t read George Eliot, then you missed a master class on how to judge people’s character. If you didn’t read Nietzsche, you are probably unprepared to handle the complexities of atheism—and if you didn’t read Augustine and Kierkegaard, you’re probably unprepared to handle the complexities of faith . . .
The wisdom of the ages is your inheritance; it can make your life easier. These resources often fail to get shared because universities are too careerist, or because faculty members are more interested in their academic specialties or politics than in teaching undergraduates, or because of a host of other reasons. But to get through life, you’re going to want to draw on that accumulated wisdom. Today is a good day to figure out where your college left gaps, and to start filling them.
And from what he could not say to the students themselves:
In college, you get assigned hard things. You’re taught to look at paintings and think about science in challenging ways. After college, most of us resolve to keep doing this kind of thing, but we’re busy and our brains are tired at the end of the day. Months and years go by. We get caught up in stuff, settle for consuming Twitter and, frankly, journalism. Our maximum taste shrinks. Have you ever noticed that 70 percent of the people you know are more boring at 30 than they were at 20?
But then a pandemic hits, and suddenly you have time to read Henry James and Marilynne Robinson, to really look at Rembrandt and Rothko. Suddenly you feel your consciousness expanding once again. The old intellectual muscles come back . . .
I wonder if you will sense what many of your elders do—that the whole culture is eroding the skill the UCLA scholar Maryanne Wolf calls “deep literacy,” the ability to deeply engage in a dialectical way with a text or piece of philosophy, literature, or art. Or as Adam Garfinkle put it in The American Interest, “To the extent that you cannot perceive the world in its fullness, to the same extent you will fall back into mindless, repetitive, self-reinforcing behavior, unable to escape.”
Like I said, your preconceptions and presuppositions will color how you understand what he says (or says he wouldn’t say). But his point, I think, is clear. We do live in a different moment and we do lack a certain kind of depth/perception. And now, if we are wise, we can do something to correct it.
The folks at Faith & Leadership recently posted an interview with James K. A. Smith about his most recent book, On the Road with Saint Augustine. On Twitter, Smith was quick to point out that the interview was done before Our Current Moment. The interview is a nice distillation of both his current book and his other recent work about desire and formation. In fact, based on the title of the article, “What Do Our Institutions Teach Us to Love?” might lead us to think it’s more about his pre-On the Road work.
While the whole piece is encouraging and challenging, there are a few parts that stick out in my thinking. First:
I’m trying to ask why Christians aren’t more peculiar. Why aren’t we weirder than we are?
The way to account for our assimilation to the default of the majority culture was not on the basis of what we believed or didn’t believe. It was much more explainable in terms of our having practiced our way into preformed ways of life and love. At the end of the day, what the culture has hoodwinked us into was not so much about what we thought or believed but what we had come to love . . .
We haven’t been fooled by bad information; we have been captivated by distorted formation. We needed a new attention to the dynamics of formation of the habits of the heart, which then turns into a renewed articulation and intentionality about Christian worship as one of those engines for counterformation.
The language of formation and transformation have become key in my own thinking about faith and practice and education, partly because of Smith’s influence. So when he talks about implementation of thoughtful reflection, there’s a real resonance for me.
I think people who have leadership responsibilities should first of all shift their self-understanding so that leadership doesn’t just mean that they are the articulators-in-chief. They’re not just the ones responsible for the message, so to speak.
In some ways, leadership is really about being an architect of the ethos of a community, which means that some of the most significant influence that leaders exercise is their ability to shape the rhythms, rituals, routines and practices of a community or an institution.
It is here that the idea of a kind of “habit” audit comes up. That’s something we’ve done as a reflective piece at the beginning of the last few years at school. It’s a great idea, though it can be difficult to do when things are in motion. Which makes Smith’s next comment interesting:
Ideally, what has to happen is you have to find a way to hit the pause button, try to gain some distance on an institution and its rhythms and practices, and then look at the things you do and ask, “What are they doing to us?”
That mostly looks like trying to take the things that are familiar and taken for granted in your institution and then asking, “What are these practices teaching us to love on an affective level, even if our message might be saying something else on an intellectual level?”
On Twitter, someone asked Smith if Our Current Moment could be seen as a kind of “pause button.” Smith responded that it might be possible but highly unlikely since lots of people in organizations are exhausted from trying to survive the moment. I do hope that a lull will come at some point where we can all step back and ask what’s becoming of us. Digital and online technology has been a great help to many over the last two months. Without it, much of learning and life would have stopped. But it’s also doing things to us, things that should be thought about and acted on.
Last week I posted some reflections on the Praxis group’s “Designs for a Different Future” series. Their first article laid the foundation for moving forward by acknowledging the role that the extremes of control and withdrawal might be playing in how we understand Our Current Moment. The second article talked about the potential for normalcy snapback as a response to things even though we could easily acknowledge much that wasn’t necessarily good about the way things used to be. The third and final article has to do with a topic on everyone’s minds these days: the tricky art of prediction.
I mentioned something about time and prediction a few days ago in a post about the book Antifragile. I’ve just spent the last week in the section of that book where Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about the difficulty of prediction, particularly when people are already obsessed with the “new.” Funny enough, Crouch and Praxis make mention of the idea of “black swans,” which is something Taleb concurs that Our Current Moment is not (though I see both sides). The article starts with this about prediction:
We live in an era of prediction. We gather data about the past and present, construct implicit or explicit models that seek to explain those data, and project events in the future. Human beings have always tried to infer the future — Jesus referred to an ancient method of weather forecasting based on the color of the morning or evening sky. But in some domains, we can now make predictions over far longer periods of time, with far more confidence, than our ancestors — including the weather, with everything from the dew point to the path of hurricanes reliably forecast days in advance.
Crouch and team admit the weaknesses of prediction (and are much more kind to the concept than Taleb:
The problem with prediction is not actually that we have too few well-informed predictions, but that we have more than enough — and it is not until after a “black swan” appears that we realize we could and should have acted on the predictions that were available to us.
And then:
Predictions, especially when based on rigorously refined models, are modestly useful and often much better than nothing.
But prediction itself, as we are all now viscerally aware, is a very fragile way to live.
But it’s really the turn that the group makes next that sets things in a better, more hopeful direction. They set us in the way of promise, and the imagery they start of with is the picture of the marriage vow.
The language of the vow itself is designed to emphasize that the future this couple will face is unpredictable: it may be better or worse, involve financial gain or loss, it may be medically untroubled or may bring terrifying illness. The only future event predicted in the entire vow, in fact, is death.
From there, they double-back to the earlier connection with withdrawal and control:
The quest for better predictions, on the other hand, is almost always a move toward control — to reduce risk while increasing the likelihood that our actions will matter. And yet predictions often leave us strikingly passive, tending toward withdrawal, as they suggest that the forces determining our future are fixed and immutable . . .
Predictions aim to decrease risk — the uncertainty that we all instinctively fear. But because predictions are so fragile, those who rely on them actually end up exposed to new risks.
Promise, they assert, is the better way of preparing for the future.
Promises, on the other hand, would seem to increase risk. Andy’s life has been in countless ways exposed to more risk because he made a promise to Catherine — exposed not just to uncertain loss, which is what risk usually means, but also to the certain loss of being parted by death from someone he has vowed to have, hold, love, and cherish.
And yet, while promises greatly increase the risk in our lives — and no one should ever imagine that it is not terribly risky to promise anything in this unpredictable world — promises also introduce new resources to handle whatever risks and actual losses we may face. Because promises build trust.
The article has much more to say, of course, particularly about the role of trust in whatever happens next. Beyond that, the article also brings things back to the hope of redemption found in the Christian faith.
+ + + + + + +
Over the next weeks and months much will be written and revised about how to handle what comes after Our Current Moment. I feel like Crouch and the folks at Praxis have provided some framework that gives direction without defaulting to fear or pride. I’ll be curious to see what else they say as we enter the summer months.
Back at the end of March, as Our Current Moment was getting underway in full, Ephraim Radner posted a piece calling into question the quick move many churches made to online services only. A few days ago, the same site that posted the original piece posted a response by four different ministers (a little late, I thought) and then a quick but honest response by Radner. He quickly admitted the difficulty of not embracing the internet, as ubiquitous as it has become. But then, rightly so, he poses some “Questions that Remain.” A good excerpt:
But now what? The fact remains that the Time of the Virus has reduced the church to a varied version of a religious Facebook. We’re trying to do good and be helpful and responsible like everyone else. And so we should: just as neighborhood associations are looking after folks on the block; and local business associations are cooking food for the needy; and friend groups are staying in touch and doing things together virtually, like singing and encouraging, so Christians are active in similar ways. As Christian churches, we are helping to organize food deliveries, financial aid, prayer chains, discussion groups, and study activities. We are looking in on our less-connected neighbors. We try to keep spirits up and instill hopeful attitudes. It’s all good. And, of course, the gospel has no qualms about taking what is good in the wider world, and using it for the glory of God. Despoiling the Egyptians, one used to call it.
But what is the great divine glory that we are lifting up in this moment of cultural appropriation? What is our special calling, if indeed we have one, that points to Jesus the Christ in his particular, cosmically incisive and transfiguring person? Whatever it is, it seems to have been muffled by the ongoing hum of the social machine. Live-streamed worship and prayer, and the shift to virtual communication at every turn makes all kinds of theoretical sense in a context of physical confinement. But what exactly are we communicating, and what should we be communicating at just this time? What is the message that even the medium cannot massage?
He gives a number of options, of course, all thoughtful and challenging. He ends with this:
Live-streaming and the rest, remember, was put into place with an immediacy that was astonishing. Within days! Everybody switched to online in an instant — with Zoom and Microsoft Teams ready to offer a helping hand (and bill). All the while, nobody had enough face masks, and the dying wards were closed to family and to clergy, and those who suggested some other means of physical presence, or urged a common appeal to authorities, or who talked about sensible and cautious gatherings of eucharistic praise, of true bodies given to bodies, were excoriated for their lack of moral integrity.
I’m shouting because, even though everybody is right, in some real sense, something is awfully wrong.
I have friends on both sides of the discussion. And it’s been interesting to sense a real parting of the ways with it, with little or nothing for those of us who might live in some kind of middle ground (a no-man’s land, for sure, it seems).
I do think we need to ask ourselves some hard questions sooner rather than later. As with the whole “flatten the curve” charge, the idea has been to buy ourselves some time to prepare for a longer haul, a longer wait. But it seems we’ve found little time for such a disposition in the maelstrom of the moment. Maybe the time is now, and the time is worth carving out.
You can read the rest of Radner’s post here.
I suppose one of the things I look for, that I read for, is language. One of the gifts of reading is discovering a vocabulary to better name concepts and experience. You can find it in all kinds of places: theology, biography, education, sociology. And it’s a big part of why I’ve come to enjoy the work of Andy Crouch and his compatriots at Praxis. A couple of days ago I linked to the first of a set of reflections by Praxis concerning Our Current Moment that I’m finding helpful in thinking through things for myself. That particular reflection focused on suffering and the struggle between withdrawal and control. The intent was to lay some groundwork for further conversation.
The second reflection is about the “pain and possibility” as we think about the future. And while the whole piece is worth thinking about, it’s the introduction of the concept of the “normalcy snapback” the I find most intriguing.
Crises are tremendously stressful for individuals and entire societies . . . there is a powerful force in the wake of Suffering that pulls us towards Withdrawal and Control. And there is no better place to withdraw to, and no place where we feel more in control, than the past. The “normal” we knew before, even with all its faults and fault lines, was familiar, and many of us benefited disproportionately from its inequities. The desire to snap back to that normal as soon as possible is overwhelming, a psychological and sociological force that should not be discounted.
From there, the history-shaping events of 9/11, World War I, and the Spanish Flu are referenced as moments when such a snapback might have been considered unlikely but totally desirable. The article continues:
Such a normalcy snapback is a totally plausible scenario for our societies in the coming years, especially if the public health system and the public financial systems eke out best-case-scenario recoveries. To be clear, we do not wish one ounce of unchosen suffering on anyone. We hope that vaccines and effective treatments are quickly found and that the economic recovery is swift.
But then comes the pivot. And it’s worth considering (especially since we can assume that people on all sides of every issue is thinking something similar).
But we do not hope for a return to normal — because normal was not neutral. We were not living in anything like a healthy world. Should the world around us superficially snap back to “normal,” our task will actually still be the same — to move the horizons of possibility towards God’s shalom, the flourishing for everyone, especially the vulnerable, that is the ultimate standard by which all nations and generations are judged. Our task will just be made more difficult by the widespread sense that everything is fine.
And our judgment is that there is not actually a normal to return to. Any normalcy snapback will be to a large extent a mirage. A few years ago the wildly popular series Downton Abbey followed a British aristocratic family through and beyond the Great War. Much of the pathos of that series revolved around the reality that though families like the fictional Crawleys did persist through and beyond the Great War, their role was permanently changed. The society that existed before the Great War simply did not exist in the same way afterwards . . . The horizons of the possible shifted, for better or for worse, even as many people did their best to hang on to “normal.”
It is a difficult pill to swallow, and one reason why real reflection on Our Current Moment is so important institutionally (if not personally). How do we see these things “through the eyes of faith” in a way that points towards what we believe is God’s intent for history?
Tomorrow we’ll take a quick detour from that point into some recent writing by Ephraim Radner in response to his thoughts about the church in Our Current Moment. I am grateful for the language of the “snapback,” though. It names something so many of us are feeling and hoping for but that we cannot, perhaps, afford.
(image from visitbritain.com)
A couple of creative approaches to Our Current Moment that resonate with me as a fan of things today. The first is a recent piece by Dave Eggers that satirizes the confusion of our times. I may not agree with all of the conclusions, but he shines a light on some of the frustrating parts of each day. It’s set up as a question-and-answer that folds in on itself over and over again. You can read it here.
And then there’s Cobie Smulders’ “remake” of her classic How I Met Your Mother song, “Let’s Go to the Mall.” The original song, which debuted early in the series, brought the revelation that before she was a wanna-be TV reporter, Robin Scherbatsky was a teen pop star in Canada (where pop culture was always ten years behind America). It’s nice seeing an actor who has moved far from her sitcom roots return to a favorite moment. And it’s always good to see multiple talents at play. For your enjoyment and edification: “Let’s Go to the Mall: Quarantine Edition.”
Space Enough, and Time 