Reading and Other Matters

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

Ever have one of those books you were embarrassed to say you hadn’t read but were afraid to admit it? You know, the kind of book you feel you would be caught with your pants down if someone asked you to weigh in on it for some reason: “You mean, you haven’t read such-and-such?”

So it is with Neil Postman’s Technology. I just finished it and feel guilty about having not read it a long time ago. I could not put it down. Now I can say to you, my readers, “What do you think of Postman’s view on the pervasive role of technology in American culture?” “What, you haven’t read it? You really need to do so.”

With this grand confession behind me, I actually don’t have a large quantity to say about the book itself except to say that, at its core, Postman reminds us of that most profound truth that the things that influence us the most in our day-to-day lives are the most subtle and evasive. We think we control our lives by sheer force of our own awareness of these influences. But like all things cultural, we are as much servants as kings of our own domains.

So embedded are our perceptions, in fact, in the “taken for granted” nature of the cultures surrounding us that we are rarely conscious of how these cultural phenomena affect us and the others around us. Like an iceberg in the North Atlantic sea, we may well be able to see and understand a small part of how our influences work and affect our lives, but it is the vast underworld beneath the waterline that is most telling. It is this underworld of culture that James Hunter says, in his book, To Change the World, that is most deceptively strong because culture is “most powerful…when it is perceived as self-evident.”

Such, says Postman, is the case especially with the technologies that fill our lives. We are often unconscious victims of the very tools we think we control. And by tools, he is not just speaking of the mechanical and electronic devices that fill our lives--computers, toasters, mp3 devices, and the like. Language, as we now use it, is a technological tool. How about polling? Think about how our values are being controlled now by the mere fact that we can almost instantaneously determine that 47% versus 53% now believe such and such is right. And, we now live in a world where we can know the most minute details of the most mundane set of facts immediately, all at our googled fingertips.

Our world is too much with us and we don’t even know it. I wonder how these technologies shape us ever so subtly? What is that Christian virtue of ‘patience’ you ask, for example? At one time, patience was that human enterprise that stretched out between spring-time when my grandfather farmer put his potato seedlings in and the fall when he pulled the potatoes out of the ground. For me, patience has been reduced to a milla-second as I pound on the side of my computer because it isn’t fast enough. Patience completely redefined and I don’t even know it!

Speaking of patience, I have got to end. I need to download my next book on my iPad.

The Residue of Another Day

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

When I came through the front door of the house the other day, Cec, my wife, hardly had to look up. She knew precisely what I had been doing that afternoon. I wore the residue of my day’s avocation like a woolly cloak. Although she hadn’t followed me step by step through the day, she knew with certainty my life had something to do with rich black dirt, back yard greenery, mulch and twigs , and…sweat. I had spent the entire day accumulating such, little by little. What to do with the excesses of the day? Off to the shower I went.

We talk a great deal these days about building lives of character, both in our churches but also in terms of a larger value-laden conversation we have with our culture. More times than not we speak of the enterprise in simple subjective terms as if character were a commodity that is manufactured solely from within ourselves. Like hardboiled New England farmers we think of character building as picking ourselves up by our bootstraps and “just doing it!”

Without diminishing our own initiative in living lives of integrity, I am increasingly thinking of character as an external phenomenon, as those things in life that cling to us. I used to meet regularly with a group of men on Wednesday mornings, and we used to talk often about the nature of temptation and the fact that none of us seem to get through a day without feeling the often-times grimy effects of the culture around us. How do we keep ourselves clean when our entire environment is so contaminated?

Indeed, in many respects, we are the sum total of the residue that clings to us. None of us—not even those of us who live between parsonage and pulpit—live outside the realm of our influences. And isn’t it the case that the influences that are least apparent to us are the most destructive spiritually? And we wonder why the Apostle Paul is so intent on disciplining us to put on the whole armor of God to combat the influences that so easily cling to us.

But, to speak of Christian character only in terms of the boot black that rubs off on us from our world is to look at one side of the story. What of the godly residue that we brush up against in the context of the influences God places in our lives each day? Can you name the five most influential individuals in your life, past and present? Who has God put in your life that has shaped you, one person, perhaps, who has altered your thinking and behavior in dramatic ways? Who has left a residue on your life? And, what character residue are others receiving from you as a result of your influence on their lives?