The worship of nature isn’t a particularly original movie idea, but Avatar goes beyond something like the normal fare of Star Wars to which most theatergoers are accustomed.  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, all the main characters believe in the force (if not take it for granted) and the presence of pantheism is primarily a plot device, or an excuse for interesting special effects.  The storyline in Avatar, on the other hand, draws most of its conflict from whether or not the pantheism of the Na’vi is true.  The climactic battle is about more than just which characters will triumph – it’s also a question of which theological system will be vindicated.  Because of this, Cameron’s portrayal of pantheism has a more evangelistic fervor than it would be if it just happened to be set in a world where – like Star Wars – practically all the characters take it to be true.

Avatar makes for powerful storytelling, and its apologetic for pantheism is a powerful one for multiple reasons.  For anyone that’s even remotely concerned about the environment, for anyone that has a tendency to root for the individual over a large corporation, or for anyone that has a gut reaction to see even an economic empire as being intrinsically evil, will easily find themselves hoping that the Na’vi will triumph even before we’re introduced to any of them.  Cameron introduces us to ideals that many of us share with the Na’vi before a discussion of their pantheism ever enters the scene, so by the time we hear discussions referencing Eywa – the mother goddess of the Na’vi – it seems like a harmless belief of a backward culture.

By the time we realize – through the discussions of the human scientists – that the Na’vi have a factual basis for their belief in Eywa, we’ve come to be emotionally invested enough in their point of view that most of us in the audience were probably hoping that they were right, anyway.

Quite a bit of the appeal of the Na’vi is the degree to which their life is seen as being beautiful and peaceful.  Not only is the natural state of Pandora beautiful, but it’s the only thing there that is – by contrast, all the human “civilization” that we’re shown there is nothing but ugliness and destruction.  Overall, the natural state of Pandora bears little resemblance to Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw.”  The death of even the animals (at least by the hands of the Na’vi) is largely avoidable, although this takes Jake Sully some time to learn. The Na’vi kill only what they need, and their lives in the state of nature are anything but – as Hobbes famously put it – “nasty, brutish, and short.”

Even death, to an extent, is held at bay:  when one of the Na’vi die, their soul is absorbed back into Eywa in a way that suggests that even if their lives cannot continue, their consciousness still does.

This view of nature, alas, doesn’t bear much resemblance to what any of us who have spent any time camping, for example, know to be true.  In our society, it’s those that have the closest connection to nature, perhaps, that are the least anxious to reunite with it.  The reason for this, I suspect, is that the degree of harmony with nature that the Na’vi have attained, on some level, doesn’t resemble nature as we know it now nearly as much as it resembles nature as it must have appeared in the Garden of Eden.  At the very least, this helps to explain some of the appeal:  if being in Eden without God isn’t enough to make someone a pantheist, probably nothing is.

Another reason for the appeal of the pantheism of the Na’vi is that it’s a belief system that’s constructed to appeal to those of us that are watching the movie:  there are no creeds; there is no liturgy, and the actions that Eywa would have her adherents take look suspiciously like what they would probably want to do anyway.  In addition, it’s a it’s a belief system that can be empirically verified, and Eywa is, under the right circumstances, willing to intervene on behalf of her followers.

It’s not like pantheism is a tough sell in modern American culture, anyway:  judging from movies like Star Wars and Dances with Wolves, to the writings of Deepak Chopra, to the “Love Your Mother” and “May the Forest Be With You” bumper stickers, it’s a belief that’s quite a few filmgoers, apparently, are comfortable with already.

Still, to dismiss the pantheism of Avatar as wholly without merit, or as being a symptom of what’s wrong with the theological beliefs of the average filmgoer, is something of an exercise in missing the point.  C. S. Lewis, in his autobiography, describes how his eventual conversion to Christianity came was more complex than just a conversion from atheism to Christianity – it involved several belief systems that he later realized were steps on the way.  In The Four Loves, he explains how pantheism was – for him – a necessary step:

“There is an easy transition from Theism to Pantheism; but there is also a blessed transition in the other direction.  For some souls I believe, for my own I remember, Wordsworthian contemplation can be the first and lowest form of recognition that there is something outside ourselves which demands reverence.  To return to Pantheistic errors about the nature of this something would, for a Christian, be very bad.  But once again, for “the main coming up from below” the Wordsworthian experience is an advance.  Even if he goes no further he has escaped the worst arrogance of materialism:  if he goes on he will be converted.”

It may be that most productive part of the portrayal of religion in Avatar is that those who had no interest in any sort of religion previously may now be open to discussing it.  Indeed, even for those for whom pantheism may not have been a necessary step, the religious overtones of Avatar have a potential to draw them into discussions about religion that they may not be comfortable with otherwise.

Pantheism, as Cameron presents it here, may ultimately not be that satisfactory in the long run:  those of us that do not have avatars of our own, it seems, will have to look salvation somewhere else.

*****

Back in 2004, the military geostrategist Thomas P. M. Barnett published The Pentagon’s New Map, a book about (among other things) America’s place in the world after the Cold War, and how globalization relates to issues of national security. This wasn’t Barnett’s first book, but it’s was the first one to present his overarching view of American foreign policy, and (as far as I can tell) is the first one that made Barnett a household name . . . at least at the Pentagon.  Since then, Barnett has written a few more books – Blueprint for Action, a sequel to Pentagon’s New Map, and Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, which came out in 2009.

Quite a bit of what makes The Pentagon’s New Map such a fascinating read is that it does a terrific job of making sense of American foreign policy throughout the course of the Cold War. By “make sense,” I don’t mean that Barnett explains that why U.S. foreign policy was right all the time – I mean that Barnett explains the motivations behind the foreign policy of the United States, primarily from the perspective of the military. This is not an apologetic for American foreign policy, but Barnett is (rightly, in my opinion) far more interested in answering the questions of why the United States has done what it has done, rather than just playing hypothetical “what if” sort of games. Foreign policy decisions, like just about any decision made in a complex environment with incomplete information, can really only be shown to be good or bad after a substantial amount of time has passed. In retrospect, some decisions that seemed wise at the time can seem to be pure lunacy (and vice versa), and the problem is nearly always compounded if the decision is interpreted by someone that does not share the assumptions of the individual that made the decision in the first place.

All that to say: to explain the foreign policy of the United States in a way that shows it to have been right – or even particularly coherent – may well nigh be impossible. That isn’t what Barnett is trying to do, in any case: he’s far more interested in telling us why it happened, what we can learn from this, and what our foreign policy should be going forward now that the Cold War is over.

To see where Barnett’s going with this, let’s back up and look at foreign policy throughout the Cold War, and contrast this with current U.S. foreign policy, and try and draw some lessons. Be warned, though, this is a summary of a 400-page book in just a few paragraphs, so this may be something of a rocky road, and your best bet is to go read Barnett’s book(s). In any case, here we go:

The overarching strategy of the United States during the Cold War was containment – the idea that the spread of communism could be slowed, and eventually stopped, by increasing American influence abroad. The most visible effect of this that everyone remembers from this, of course, is the Vietnam War, but to see containment as a philosophy that impacted only American military decisions is to underestimate how far-reaching this way of thinking actually was. The majority of the foreign policy decisions – why the U.S. supported rebels in a particular country but the government in some other country, where foreign aid went, what wars were deemed appropriate to send the U.S. military into, and who was the beneficiary of American military technology – make much more sense when looked at through the lens of containment of communism. (Interestingly – and just as an aside – before the fall of the Soviet Union, no one in the Pentagon seemed to think that Islamic terrorism was going to be much of a problem when compared to the threat of communism, which is probably why the United States supported Islamic rebels in Afghanistan when they were fighting the Soviets.)

When looking back on the Cold War, however, some commentators have raised doubts raised as to whether or not containment was the best way to win the Cold War, or even if any over-arching strategy was necessary at all. The fears articulated in the domino theory – the bogeyman of U.S. military planners at the time – didn’t materialize after the U.S withdrew from Vietnam (or at any other time, really). Consequently, it’s fun to speculate that the U.S. may have won the Cold War without having to ever get involved in Vietnam, for example. Looking back on the Cold War, it seems that containment may have been less necessary than anyone thought at the time, given that communism was going to collapse anyway.

As interesting as this sort of speculation is, though, it’s ultimately not that helpful: containment may have been executed badly, or it might have been a bad plan to being with, but it was the philosophy behind U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, which, let’s not forget, the U.S. won. Say what you want about containment, but on a very basic and very important level, it worked.

After the collapse of communism, though, the idea of containment doesn’t really lend itself well to any sort of follow-up plan. Consequently, there hasn’t been – at least from the perspective of the Pentagon – any sort of coherent long-term strategy now that the Cold War has ended, even though the sheer number of military operations that the U.S. has been involved in since then has been nothing short of astounding.

To a certain extent, this is completely understandable and expected, as after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was no clear enemy that could conceivably stand up to the U.S. military. Since 2001, however, this hasn’t been a problem. Still, the Pentagon is still interested in buying F-22 Raptors, maintaining nuclear submarines, or (up until recently) a ballistic missile defense shield. It’s difficult to see how any of those have any immediate impact to the wars that the U.S. has been involved with since 2001, which suggests that there’s more than a little bit of people at the Pentagon that are still thinking in terms of the Cold War (i.e., what big wars that the U.S. may have to fight in the future) and not in terms of what we know that the U.S. military is actually going to have to do now.

Barnett makes a good case that this way of thinking is probably not that productive, and a new global strategy – occupying a similar role as containment did during the Cold War – needs to be figured out. (Containment, it’s worth pointing out, doesn’t really make all that much sense in the current geopolitical climate – the terrorism that the U.S. would be trying to contain doesn’t typically have the goal of taking over an entire country, and as the events of the last decade have proved repeatedly, it doesn’t take that many people crossing the borders and setting off bombs to terrorize the entire world.)

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the U.S. has the only military that is designed to project power to any region of the world – something that Americans take for granted, but which is unusual enough that it’s worth pondering for a minute, here: any other country’s military is designed to either (a) defend the country where the military is based, or (b) deliver a bomb to somewhere else – presumably somewhere that the country doesn’t like very much. That’s really about all anyone other than the U.S. can do. No other country has military bases scattered over the whole globe, the ability to invade a country that’s half way around the world, or to put a Navy task force (with, at its center, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier) off just about anyone’s coast in order to make them behave. It’s also not much of an exaggeration to say that the U.S. Navy is the only blue water navy left in the world.

Barnett concludes that this means that the most important export of the United States is, of all things, security. There’s no other country that has the ability to project power to any given region of the globe, and with this level of power – at least, according to Barnett – comes a certain degree of responsibility that the U.S. did not have before the Soviet Union fell.

If we’re trying to figure out where we’re likely going to have to send the military at some point in the future, it’s worth asking where has the U.S. military been exercising this responsibility since the end of the Cold War. Barnett has drawn a map of the places in which the U.S. military has been involved since the end of the Cold War – peacekeeping operations, combat, evacuation, security, or even just a show of force – and it becomes obvious that there are regions of the world that need attention, repeatedly, and other regions which don’t need any attention at all. Barnett terms these two regions the “Functioning Core” and the “Non-Integrating Gap,” and to a certain extent, this is just a concise way of saying “countries that have bought into globalization” and “countries that have not bought into globalization.”

The Functioning Core and Non-Integrating Gap

This isn’t necessarily a one-to-one correspondence, here: not every country that hasn’t bought into globalization has necessarily had a U.S. military presence; the vast majority of those countries have not. Still, it’s almost a sure bet that any country that has bought into globalization hasn’t had to have the U.S. military come in and set up shop.

Looking at the way this has worked with India and Pakistan provides a helpful example that should make things more clear: India, by and large, has bought into globalization, whereas Pakistan, by and large, has not. The last time that India and Pakistan decided to start getting all excited about who, exactly, was in control of Kashmir, India was provided with a strong incentive to knock it off because investors generally do not like to be conducting business in a country that is talking about dropping nuclear bombs on its neighbor – especially if the neighbor has nuclear bombs, as well. Quite a few of the investors packed up and left, the Indian economy started to take a hit, and everyone (particularly the Indians) toned down the rhetoric pretty quickly. (Once all the investors realized that the nuclear weapons would all stay in their silos, most of them came back.)

The point, here, isn’t that countries with nothing to lose can blackmail their richer neighbors (although that’s may be worth investigating, too), but that India has a huge motivation to conduct itself in a way that will make the country a good place to conduct business – which, most of the time, is pretty similar to saying that India is going to be a pretty good place to live, too.

As Thomas Friedman has noted elsewhere, there haven’t been any wars fought between countries that both have McDonald’s. It’s obvious that this isn’t because of any peacekeeping skills that Ronald McDonald has, but because countries that are plugged into the globalized economy enough to have a McDonald’s are unlikely to want to fight any other countries that are plugged into the same globalized economy. If a country is plugged into globalization enough to have a McDonald’s, its economy is dependent on foreign investment, and nothing scares foreign investors like a war.

Globalization may be a temporarily stabilizing influence, but this isn’t to say that it has, in all circumstances, always been a good thing. The movement has its cheerleaders (Thomas Friedman, for example, in The World is Flat) and its thoughtful critics (Joseph Stiglitz, in Globalization and its Discontents, among other books). Still, the vast majority of commentators seem to agree that although globalization has been a good thing overall, it could certainly have been managed in a way that would be more equitable to a larger number of people in poorer countries. Perhaps the most resounding endorsement of globalization is this: even among those that are its harshest critics, no one has yet come up with a credible plan that could move more people out of poverty more quickly than globalization – or at least something like it – has done. As many legitimate complaints about globalization as there are, it’s still clear that the world is in better shape than it would be if globalization wasn’t there at all.

What’s less obvious, though, is that globalization doesn’t work only because it forces people to be responsible by pulling them out of poverty so that they have something to lose. If that was true, then we’d have nothing to fear from rich dictators. Clearly this isn’t the case.

This point is actually made more clearly in Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, in which he discusses (among other things) the relationship between democracy and liberalism. (Zakaria is using liberalism in the classic sense of the word that denotes an emphasis on individual freedom, rule of law, and respect for other points of view, not in the sense that most Americans now use the word when they refer to the left side of the American political spectrum.) Americans have a tendency to think that these two ideas go hand-in-hand, because that’s how it’s happened here. This hasn’t been true everywhere that democracy has developed, though – without a concept of liberalism, democracy can descend into what Alexis de Tocqueville called the “tyranny of the majority,” and although the result may be democratic, it’s not a liberal democracy, and therein lies the problem.

To quote an few examples from Zakaria – take Iran, a country that’s still in what Barnett would consider the Non-Integrating Gap. Iran is both (fairly) stable and (somewhat of) a democracy, at least in the sense that its leaders can be replaced on a regular basis, but hasn’t bought into globalization for two closely related reasons: (a) a theocratic government, and (b) a desire to be separated from the globalized (or, as it’s commonly called now, the “western”) world. In the view of at least the leaders in Iran, the risk of corrupting Islam isn’t worth any of the benefits of globalization that might bring. Consequently, even though you’ve got what’s technically a democracy in Iran, you’ve got a regime in power that doesn’t do so well respecting the individual rights of its citizens, as recent events have shown.

Saudi Arabia, like Iran, doesn’t have a tradition of liberalism, but unlike Iran, the Saudis do not even have the pretense of a democracy. The massive oil revenues that fund the country (and the lifestyle of the royal family) have kept the government from having to depend on its citizenry in any significant way. How the country spends its money, though, is what’s telling: Saudi Arabia has become notorious for funding schools that teach Islamic fundamentalism.

The point of all this is that it takes more than just democracy to buy into globalization, and it takes more than large infusions of cash to keep a country from trying to spread Islamic fundamentalism. Consequently, neither Iran and Saudi Arabia have bought into globalization, as Zakaria would put it – or, as Barnett would say, they’re both still outside the Functioning Core.

In any case, it’s pretty clear that a country or citizenry’s ability just to make a bunch of money doesn’t mean that their country has bought into globalization, or democracy, or liberal democracy. The countries in the industrialized west – that most everyone else, now, is imitating, at least to a certain extent – benefit from globalization, in Zakaria’s view, because they’ve embraced an economic condition (free trade), a set of values (liberalism), and a form of government (democracy).

In Barnett’s view, the point of U.S. foreign policy – at least militarily – is to drain what he terms the “swamps” where terrorism, right now, thrives. All the countries that are security concerns for the U.S. are countries that have not bought into globalization, and Barnett demonstrates this by showing where the U.S. military has been deployed since the end of the Cold War. Note that this isn’t a one-to-one correspondence, however. If a given country hasn’t bought into globalization, this doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily guaranteed to have the U.S. military show up, but what Barnett is saying is that if a country gets plugged into the global economy, we’re a lot more likely to have neighbors like India and China than we are Pakistan and North Korea.

This is, it’s worth noting, what the Bush administration was attempting to accomplish in Iraq, albeit in what now seems like an incredibly clumsy and counterproductive way. The idea behind the entire operation was that the Iraq that resulted would (eventually) be both a liberal democracy that would be plugged into the global grid and would be a stabilizing influence in the Middle East. This didn’t work for many reasons, but one of them is something that has been a consistent error in American foreign policy for awhile, and that is the assumption that the establishment of a democracy would bring free trade and liberal values into the country when in fact, as Zakaria points out, it seems to work far more productively when it’s done the other way around.

Barnett concludes that the military strategy of the U.S. should follow what our economic strategy (frequently articulated as much by American or international corporations as much as by the Federal government) has been for the last decade: bring as many countries as possible into globalization. As much as If there are no “swamps,” as Barnett puts it, where terrorism will be able to thrive, then the United States is going to be more secure. This is, on some level, the only way to get America to be secure at all, short of closing all the borders and living in a police state.

*****

The problem, though, is that free trade is a huge part of globalization, and trade on any sort of scale or over any sort of distance depends on oil prices staying relatively cheap. This is something that’s unlikely to be true for very much longer.

Demand for oil has nowhere to go but up: world population is still going up, and the globalization that Barnett extols as being good for our national security has resulted in substantial numbers of people being pulled out of poverty in the countries that have embraced globalization. The most notable examples at this point are India and China. While just about everyone would agree that pulling large numbers of Indians and Chinese (and anyone else) up from below the poverty line is a good thing, it’s also worth noting that once those same people get pulled up to the middle class, they’re going to burn a lot more oil than they did before, and consequently the demand is going to jump significantly.

How significantly? The middle class that is developing just in India is larger than the population of the entire United States, and most people in that middle class are intensely interested in buying cars. Tata has developed a car – the Nano – that retails for around $2,000, and thanks to the increased prosperity brought about by globalization, this is something that, over the next few years, millions of Indians will now be able to afford for the first time.

This isn’t just an isolated event in India (and China, where the number of cars is increasing dramatically, as well). With our current energy technology and infrastructure, odds are pretty good that wherever a standard of living increases, it increases because someone is consuming more energy – and frequently this means burning more oil. However, it’s worth noting that this isn’t true all the time: China’s increased power demands are being met because they’re building lots of coal-burning power plants. Farmers living on the edge of the rain forest in South America slashing-and-burning their way to more firewood and farmland, neither of which involve oil prices, at least directly. Still, oil (or some derivative of it) seems to be what’s most in demand when it comes to just about any sort of transportation, and, unfortunately, burning oil is probably the most environmentally friendly option of what’s listed here – illustrating the difficulties encountered when trying to fight poverty and climate change at the same time.

All that to say – even if oil production was a constant, the increased demand of millions of new cars on the road is going to drive prices up, as will the increased amount of trade that made all this wealth possible in the first place. Clearly demand is going up, but odds are good that oil production isn’t going to be able to increase to meet demand. It’s probably not going to even be able to stay constant, either.

Recent Crude Oil and Gasoline Prices

There’s no shortage of books being published now on the concept of peak oil, from Jeff Rubin’s somewhat panicky Why Your World is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller to Christopher Steiner’s myopically optimistic and overly predictive $20 Per Gallon. The most carefully researched and most balanced book that I’ve run across so far, however, has been Paul Roberts’s The End of Oil, which is unfortunately now a couple years out of date, but still well worth a read.

There are enough unknowns in predicting peak oil that while there may be widespread disagreement about how far into the future oil production is actually going to peak, or even if we’ve already passed the peak already. Just about everyone that’s looked at the problem agrees that it’s probably going to happen before too long. Right now, for every six barrels of oil that we consume, oil companies find . . . one. Clearly this isn’t sustainable. The question, at this point, isn’t so much if oil production is going to start dropping off, but when.

On the other hand, the gradual decline of oil production doesn’t mean that oil is just going to go away overnight. As the price of oil continues to go up, oil fields that are difficult to access – and therefore, not worth exploiting now – will probably become economically viable at some point in the future. This means although we’re not going to run out, we’ve already run out of oil that’s easy to get to. What we’ve got left is oil that’s at the bottom of the ocean somewhere, or oil that has to be extracted from tar-like sands in Canada. This sort of oil – which increasingly, is the only sort of oil that’s left – costs more because it’s harder to get to than big gushers in the middle of Texas. Even if demand somehow diminishes, the increasing price of finding, extracting, and refining oil means that the price will not be able to fall all that much.

There are obvious ways in which the increasing price of oil is going to change society – the most visible of which is what has happened to SUV sales (and American automakers) when gas prices began to climb. We can expect the trend to smaller and more fuel-efficient cars to continue, and the increasing price of gas is likely to be far more effective in regulating gas use than the government’s CAFE standards have been in the past.

Quite a bit of the changes that will result, though, are going to seem more interesting and unpredictable to live through, due to the fact that our society runs on cheap oil in ways that most of us don’t usually think about. Right now, for example, the trade that has enabled Americans to buy massive amounts of inexpensively made plastic products from China (and, incidentally, improved the living conditions of lots of Chinese) runs on cheap oil, both for the manufacturing of plastic products and the transportation costs involved in moving a container ship across the Pacific Ocean. At some point, the cost of transporting all this stuff is going to be more than the difference between U.S. and Chinese labor – at which point, it’s going to become more less expensive than the cost of just making it furniture, for example, back in the United States.

A similar situation will eventually come about with the food supply – right now, the fertilizers that grow most of America’s food supply are made mostly from petroleum products: right now, organically grown food is substantially more expensive than non-organically grown food, but the gap will likely narrow in the future: as petroleum-based products increase in price, the cost of the fertilizers for organic food is going to increase, while it seems that organic fertilizers – mostly products like cow manure – are unlikely to experience a similar drop in supply. (Similarly, locally grown food will become more economical, as the costs of transporting food rise with gas prices.)

All that to say: if we’re just looking at the experience of people in America, the end result of these changes won’t necessarily be all bad, although the process of going through it may be, to a certain extent, traumatic. As with any shift in society, the individuals and businesses that have anticipated the change will likely do well, while those that haven’t will likely have to change or face severe problems. For example, Wal-Mart – or any business that is based on transporting goods over long distances – is likely to become less economically viable unless their business model changes. Likewise, any housing developments that have been beyond the bleeding edge of urban sprawl are likely to be beyond the range of the public transit that will likely be in demand when gas prices climb, and those property values will likely take a hit.

Still, eating locally grown food and buying furniture from craftsmen that live down the road doesn’t seem like a bad change at all. As someone has pointed out, the changes that more expensive oil prices will force Americans to make will force the average American city to make changes so that it resembles Paris more than Houston. Again, that’s not all bad: given those two choices, most of us would much rather vacation in Paris.

The problem – at least as it relates to issues of national security – arises when we start looking at the effect of the increasing price of oil on the rest of the world, not just America. Undoubtedly, this is going to cause more problems in countries that are still getting than it is going to cause here. (Or, at least, America will be better equipped to absorb the shock.) Most of us have the option to buy smaller, more fuel-efficient cars (or just driving less in our current cars) if the price of gasoline doubles, but for people in developing countries that are buying cars for the first time, the price of gasoline doubling may make automobile ownership something that’s beyond the range of what’s feasible for them to afford in the first place.

Just in general, getting countries connected to the rest of the world using globalization (via the process of free trade) is something that’s going to continue to be more difficult as the price of oil goes up. Globalization, at this point, may actually be something a race: countries that aren’t able to get connected before the price of oil takes a more dramatic turn upward will have a much more difficult process getting connected at all. Consequently, the price of gas going up will likely make it quite a bit more difficult to drain the swamps, to use Barnett’s terminology, that are now sheltering terrorism. We had best drain them quickly, while it is still possible to do so.

There is not, at this point, an obvious and easy solution to this problem as far as I can tell. In addition, any proposals towards solving this problem will vary wildly depending on the assumptions of whoever is doing the proposing: how much government intervention one feels is necessary to solve problems as opposed to faith in the free market to work issues out on their own, for example; or how much priority one believes efforts to combat climate change should be given.

However, reserving judgment on those issues as much as is possible, I offer a couple suggestions of varying feasibility below. You are welcome to offer your own, as well.

America needs to plan for the coming oil price increases by reducing our oil consumption – or, at the very least, putting in the infrastructure that we’ll need after oil prices rise – so the increase in oil prices resemble a gentle slope upwards that can be easily climbed, and not a brick wall that can’t. Quite a bit of this preparation will likely be done with help from Adam Smith’s invisible hand, so government-mandated preparation for this may be, in some instances, largely unnecessary. For example, it’s worth noting that hardly anyone was interested in debating the government’s CAFE standards when was $4 per gallon. At that point, the Americans that were looking for new cars already had significant motivation to look for something that got good gas mileage, without any encouragement from Washington. (This isn’t to say that the CAFE standards can’t be helpful, on some level: if the government had actually enforced the current CAFE standards, instead of letting lobbyists from Detroit categorize SUVs as “light trucks,” it’s likely that U.S. automakers wouldn’t have been so myopically focused on larger cars – in which case, automakers in Detroit may not have needed government assistance to stay afloat.)

In preparing for other issues, though, Smith’s invisible hand may be likely to give us all the finger, and some preparation may be warranted: for example, right now, Americans are driving less each year as gas prices continue to rise. Under these circumstances, the continued construction of new roads may not a great deal of sense – the tax dollars that are funding new road construction now may be better served putting in public transit, high-speed rail systems, or other ways of transportation that will undoubtedly more in demand when gas is more expensive.

As the bumper sticker says, renewable energy is national security. While that may a bit of an oversimplification, the point is still essentially sound. At some point in the future, it’s likely that the people that are interested in saving the polar bears and the people that are interested in national security will probably find themselves, increasingly, on the same side of the debates – assuming, of course, that both sides take a significantly long-term view of things.

2. Green technologies need to be made economically viable, and they need to be made economically viable for developing countries. This seems a tall order when, right now, they’re not economically viable here, but green technologies are likely not going to be deployed in any sort of widespread way until they’re economically viable. Very few governments are going to potentially cripple the industries in their country by demanding that they use energy sources that are more expensive, when other governments have not done the same to their industries; and green technology adopted only because of government subsidies typically only lasts as long as the government subsidy.

Still, deploying new technology in countries that don’t have our current level of technology may actually be easier than deploying it here. Countries in Africa, for instance, have been able to go straight from having no telephones to cell phones – they were able to skip the step of having land lines all over the place, which meant that getting everyone to adapt to the higher level of technology was easier because there was no other practical alternative.

The overall point, though, is that once green technology becomes economically viable, there will be a way to (a) protect countries that have just started globalization from having their efforts collapse due to the increasing price of oil, and (b) once again, we’ll be in a position where we can connect previously non-integrating countries to the rest of the world.

*****

Countries that – for whatever reason – can’t get connected to to the rest of the world are unlikely to be able to improve their standard of living on their own – at least in comparison to what might have been. As many problems as globalization has caused, it’s probably still the best bet to pull people out of poverty, give them a representative government, and make our country more secure at the same time.

We’ve just got to figure out to continue the process when the price of oil goes up. If we can’t, things are sure going to get interesting . . .

This story, as it were, is about hiking in the Grand Canyon, and, if you’re interested in any sort of chronological order, actually takes place before the previously described adventures on Mt. Olympus. Without any further ado, here we go:

*****

I was in my mid-twenties before I went to a national park without a member of my immediate family. Although this has been true for awhile, now, but I didn’t realize it until fairly recently.

I am indebted to my parents for many reasons that are obviously too numerous to exhaustively list here. One of the many reasons, though, is that fairly early on in life, they started introducing me to national parks. I’m grateful that they provided the introduction; however, the resulting experience of national parks after the introduction – i.e., when I was stomping around National Parks without my parents there – has been somewhat more involved. It’s also led to some bad choices, and (not coincidentally) some pretty good stories.

That this didn’t happen when I was hanging around with my parents is understandable, perhaps, as every time I saw a National Park with them, they seeing it in the context of what was supposed to be a relaxing family vacation for everyone. Even if there are no parks and no adventures involved at all, this is still a difficult prospect when driving cross-country with two kids in the backseat of a station wagon. The prospects for any sort of serious wilderness adventure under these circumstances is pretty much nil, unless dad decided that he doesn’t want to stop to ask for directions somewhere in the middle of Utah. (This, alas, never happened.) Looking back in retrospect, I’m just now realizing that driving across the continental United States with two kids in the backseat of a station wagon is pretty much enough adventure for anyone, but I don’t think that I’ll have the complete appreciation for actually how much of an adventure this unless I ever drive across the 48 states with a couple kids of my own.

In any case, when we saw the Grand Canyon – and Bryce Canyon, and Zion, and the Smoky Mountains, and Rocky Mountain National Park – the experience was heavily dependent on the views from overlooks, and the amount of hiking that took place was minimal. Given the circumstances, this is a great start, and the only practical way to see any national parks with kids that have been cooped up in the car all day. Sadly, it’s also the only experience that most national park visitors ever have. Most people seem to be able to be happy with this – I’ve heard some people say that if the view can’t be seen from the car, then it’s not good enough for them to bother to see. As long as I can remember, I thought that the “let’s just see it from the car” philosophy of seeing National Parks was a big steaming pile, to put it bluntly, and my inclination on seeing most of these sights was an immediate desire to climb to the top of them, or (in the case of the Grand Canyon) to hike to the bottom of it.

Two memories from the first time I saw the Grand Canyon, from when I was a little kid:

1. The view from the overlook, of course. I remember this as being predictably awesome, and if memory serves (after all these years, I’m almost certain that it doesn’t) that I first saw it at sunset, or sunrise. The view was as good as advertised, and I was even more pleased to find that, years later, my memory was apparently incapable of exaggerating the view. Very few things in childhood are as big as I remember them being, but the Grand Canyon is. I recall feeling slightly dizzy when I stood on the edge and somewhat concerned that I would somehow fall over the edge, even though I was a few feet away and behind a solidly built railing. It’s a cliche that every aficionado of national parks repeats, but there’s no way to capture how big the Grand Canyon unless you’re actually there. It’s a cliche because, when you’re there, it’s obviously true, and the first view of it is absolutely mesmerizing, no matter how many pictures of the thing you’ve already seen. I suspect that that my sister and I enjoyed it more than my parents did, if only because we were not concerned about keeping tabs on the two hyperactive children that may or may not throw themselves over the side of the overlook just to see what would happen.
2. I also have a vivid memory of hiking the first quarter-mile or so of some trail that went all the way to the bottom – looking back on it, this was almost certainly the Bright Angel Trail. My parents said that we could walk just a little way down and then we would have to turn around to go back to the car. We all just meandered down the trail for just a little bit, and I distinctly remember hoping that my parents would somehow forget to turn around and we would, as a result, find ourselves at the bottom after a few minutes. I was determined to do my part and not remind them to turn around, and also not to look tired, but this was pretty much the entirety of my plan for any sort of adventure. Not surprisingly, this didn’t exactly pan out like I hoped that it would, and after 10 minutes or so we turned around and trudged back up to the car. Still, for me, this was the highlight of my National Park experiences up until that time, and remained on the top of the list until we got to Rocky Mountain National Park and saw snow on the side of the road that was higher than the roof of the car. This resulted in a small snowman built on the roof of the car, and a snowball fight that was cut short by the rangers telling everyone to get down to a lower altitude because there was a storm coming. It was just as well: we had started the day at a much lower altitude and were all wearing shorts.

Fifteen years or so later, I’m capable of passing for an adult in most social situations, to no one’s surprise but my own. I’ve somehow acquired a job (that I still have, incidentally) that involves quite a bit of traveling, and the company that I work for is happily flexible when it comes to travel situations. If it happens that there are two trips – back to back – in the same area of the country, we’re typically given the option of staying out in that area of the country over the weekend so that the number of plane tickets that the company has to buy is reduced. Prices being what they are, this typically saves the company quite a bit of money even if they foot the hotel bill for the weekend, which they do. It’s worth noting, however, that this is a much better deal if your travels have taken you to Florida in the middle of summer, or Southern California, well, any time of year, than if you end up in, say, Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the middle of January. Generally, we try to take the good with the bad. Still, Ann Arbor in January? In that particular situation, management isn’t going to blame you if you want to come home as soon as you possibly can. Most of the time, it works out well – getting a weekend in Florida or out west is generally welcome (for me, anyway) just about any time of year.

In any case, this past spring, work had me out in Utah and Arizona last spring, and the schedule worked out in such a way that I’d be able to stay a few extra days. A trip to the Grand Canyon seemed like a good idea, but I figured out that I was going to be traveling only a week before I was going to be in Arizona. This doesn’t work so well for trying to hike the Grand Canyon, because if you’re planning on spending the night in the canyon, you need a wilderness permit – essentially, a permission slip from the National Park Service that says you can spend the night somewhere in a wilderness area. In the Grand Canyon, this typically translates to anywhere below the rim. Most of the time, the NPS allowes hikers to reserve them for a given day up to three months in advance, and you had better believe that by 2 months and 29 days before that day, the wilderness permits are pretty much gone. A week beforehand, when I found out that I would be there, there was no way I could get one of reserved ones. However, there was a last hope: in addition to the ones that you can reserve ahead of time, there are a few that you can get if you actually show up at the wilderness office and get put on a waiting list. This – for lack of any better ideas, really – was the plan.

The night before this ordeal got underway, I was staying in Flagstaff, AZ. Flagstaff is about a two hour drive from the Grand Canyon, and because I wanted to make it to the wilderness office early – I would be leaving Flagstaff two hours earlier than that. When I got up that morning, it was dumping snow – not the sort of start that I had envisioned, but I drove through it anyway, and by the time I got to the Grand Canyon, it was nice and clear. After a few quick stops at overlooks, and after a few tourist-style pictures, I found the wilderness office and wandered in to see if I would be able to get a wilderness permit.

Inside the wilderness office was a nasty surprise: I learned that when you get a wilderness permit in person, you’re not getting one for that day. You’re getting one for the next day. The ranger described to me that they start handing out the wilderness permits at precisely 8 AM, and because the line starts well before they open, if you’re not there by, oh, 7 AM, you probably aren’t getting one. So, as I realized, I couldn’t get a wilderness permit for the day I was there, because I was not there yesterday. Because I am having this conversation with the otherwise helpful ranger at roughly 8:30, it looks like I can’t get one for tomorrow, either. He tells me, however, if I show up early tomorrow, that I will be able to get one for the following day so I can spend Sunday night in the canyon. Or, if I want to get a two-day wilderness permit, I can spend Sunday and Monday night in the canyon.

This does exactly fit into my plans, as I was planning on being back in Flagstaff by Sunday night, and I’ve got work-scheduled stuff on Monday, so this isn’t really going to work unless I am willing to miss my flight home, which isn’t exactly a career-enhancing plan.

Still, the plan of spending two nights in the canyon is a good one, and isn’t all that unusual. In my specific case the seed of this idea can be blamed on my geeky fanboy attitude towards the books of Don Miller. Don got a lot of attention a few years back for his book Blue Like Jazz, a memoir which became something of a fad in some Christian circles. However, it wasn’t Don’s first book, and (in my opinion, for whatever that’s worth) it also wasn’t his best.

The first book that Don published was called God and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance, and although it’s a pretty good book, it didn’t really generate much of a following. A few years later, after Don was more well known, it got republished under the new title of Through Painted Deserts, at which point it, since this didn’t go according to the publisher’s plan, it continued to not generate much of a following.

Through Painted Deserts, in any case, is more contemplative travel literature, really, and it recounts the time in Don’s life when he moved from Houston, Texas, to somewhere in the state of Oregon (eventually Portland, although he doesn’t get all the way there by the end of the book), a trip that took place in a Volkswagen van that, to put it as charitably as possible, made every day even more of an adventure than it would have been otherwise.

In any case, at the (arguably) climactic scene in the book, Don and Paul (who owns the van) get to the Grand Canyon and, incidentally, go through the same process with the wilderness office that I was did. The outcome is different, though, because as they have no specific time schedule and no airplane in Phoenix to catch later in the week – they’re able to hang around for a few days and get the wilderness permit that they had originally wanted. The trip that Don and Paul hiked, as near as I can determine from the descriptions in the book, is to go down the South Kiabab trail to the Colorado River on the first day of hiking. They spent the night at Phantom Ranch, the campground at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and the next day they hiked about 1/3 of the way up the Bright Angel Trail, and spend the night at Indian Garden, the campground there. This unfortunately leaves the most difficult hike for the last day: the hike the rest of the way out of the canyon up Bright Angel Trail.

This was more or less the trip that I wanted to take, and up until the part where I determined that I wouldn’t be able to get a wilderness permit, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable plan.

The ranger at the wilderness office explained to me that even if I didn’t have a wilderness permit, I could still hike – as much as I wanted – as long as I didn’t spend the night below the rim of the canyon. I decided that I should at least try to get down into the canyon even if I couldn’t make it all the way to the bottom, and so off I set down the Bright Angel Trail after packing the backpack full of the various goodies that I needed for the day. After a few minutes of stomping down the trail, it dawned on me how different it was to be in a National Park without my parents (or anyone else, for that matter) for one primary reason: there is no one there to tell you to not do something that is border-line stupid.

The rangers and the guidebooks give a few rules of thumb for hiking in the canyon, and two of the most important are:

1. Going up is harder and takes longer than going down. Assume, while you’re planning, that it will take you twice as long to get down as it will to get back up. In addition, and
2. Whatever you do, don’t try to hike all the way down to the bottom and back up in one day.

As I was beating feet down the trail, I did a bit of math: if I had x hours until sunset, and it would take twice as long to get up as it would down, then only 1/3 of x could safely be spent going down. As soon as 1/3 of x had elapsed, it was time to turn around. With these two rules in mind, I couldn’t help but notice that the faster I got down the trail, the more ground I would be able to cover before it was time to turn around. (What I didn’t realize at the time was that if I worked harder going down the trail, not only would I have less energy for getting back up the trail, but taking only twice as much time to get back became less and less realistic.) Happily ignorant of these observations at the time, I made great time. By the time I got to Indian Garden it was still fairly early in the morning, but unfortunately it had started to hail. The more immediate concern, however, was finding a bathroom (thanks to the signs, an easy task) and refilling all the water bottles (also easy, for the same reason).

At this point I briefly considered turning around, mainly because of the hail. Bad weather is the sort of minor setback that would have made an ordinary person turn around, especially, as I’ve already mentioned, I probably would have too, if I had someone with me to tell them to not do something stupid. The hail wasn’t actually very large hail, and seemed to just be bonking harmlessly off the goofy wide-brimmed hat that I was wearing, so I did not turn around. I also blame this decision, in retrospect, on my love of photography. A bit of explaination is in order: most people, when faced with bad weather in a national park, tend to head for the car, the hotel, or any shelter that is available. Most people don’t actively seek out this kind of weather – unless that person is a photographer. Just about any landscape photographer can’t help but notice that the vast majority of memorable pictures taken in national parks are shot during what normal people consider to be bad weather. There aren’t too many landscapes that can’t be made better by either storms, sunsets, or (ideally) a combination of the two. Consequently, while bad weather at the Grand Canyon may send casual tourists running for the Bright Angel Lodge, it also seems to bring guys carrying camera bags, tripods, and the like strapped to them – alternately excited about the better-than-average views but also worried that their beloved camera gear is getting wet.

In any case, my enthusiasm with regards to photography has always exceeded my skill, and although I don’t honestly expect that to change anytime soon, I at least know enough that bad weather shouldn’t – at least from a standpoint of trying to get the perfect shot – prompt a sprint for the car: continued adventure down the trail meansthat odds will be much higher than average that a better-than-average picture will result.

With these arguably masochistic ruminations in my mind, I continued happily stomping down the trail, fully expecting that the penance of hiking through the hail was the price I would have to pay for a memorable view of the canyon in a storm.

As I continued down the trail, the anticipated great view didn’t materialize, but at least the hail stopped. I was probably another mile down the trail before it occured to me that I’d probably be able to make it to the bottom of the canyon while still observing Rule #1, even if, in the process, I broke Rule #2. Since I was still breaking a rule that I had originally set with the intention of observing, it was time to rationalize: in order to impress on all the hikers the seriousness of Rule #2, the rangers had thoughtfully provided some rather horrific examples of what would happen if you broke the rule. All of these examples, I couldn’t help but notice, took place in the summertime – the main danger, it was implied, was the heat and resulting loss of water. Clearly, this wasn’t a problem for for me right now: it was cold at the rim of the canyon, and I had started hiking with three layers on, actually – even at the bottom of the canyon in the hottest part of the day, it was only about 75 degrees.

I think it was Robert Heinlein that said “Man isn’t a rational animal. Man is a rationalizing animal,” and, like many other of Heinlein’s churlish observations, it’s true in most cases. I was still rationalizing when I got to the bottom of the canyon, at which point deciding whether or not I came around a bend in the trail and saw the Colorado River. Further rationalization became irrelevant: I was there. Getting down to the bottom is optional; getting back out is mandatory, so continuing onward took on a flavor that was decidedly more urgent.

The problem at this point, though, was twofold: First, no one wants to hike back out the same way that they came in, and secondly, as long as I was at the bottom, it seemed like a waste to not take at least a little bit of time to keep looking around. I mean, since I live in Alabama, it’s not like I can get down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon just on whenever odd weekend that I happen to drive by. The map that I was carrying provided me with what seemed like a good solution: I could take the river trail east down down the Colorado River until it hit the North Kaibab trail – the other main South-Rim-to-Colorado River trail that was just about a mile downstream. I could then take the North Kaibab trail back out of the canyon about 1/3 of the way to the top, at which point it would run into the Tonto trail – an east-west trail that connects the Kaibab trail with Bright Angel. I could take the Tonto Trail back to Bright Angel, and then take Bright Angel the rest of the way out.

This appealed to for a couple reasons – it resembled – at least a little bit – the trek that Don Miller made when he was in the canyon, and I’d also be able to make an enormous loop, and see more of the canyon without ending up at the wrong trailhead when I got done.

After planning this out, I started down the River Trail, which runs roughly parallel to the Colorado River. Being close to the swiftly-moving Colorado provided a fascinating view, and I started to get excited about crossing it. There are two bridges across the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon – one for the Bright Angel Trail and another for the Kaibab Trail, and they’re both fairly close together. The bathrooms and water fountains are on the north side of the river close to the Bright Angel Camp Ground, so I crossed the Bright Angel Trail Bridge and quickly found the rest area, which was errily deserted. After a quick refill of the water bottles – and a nervous glance at my watch – it was time to continue. I was on the north side of the Colorado River for only 15 minutes.

Crossing the Colorado River

The bridge for the Kaibab Trail – which I crossed, to start going back up – is right next to a small beach where rafts that go down the river use as a rest stop. It’s a bit weird to run into an abrupt instance of civilization when you’re so far in the middle of nowhere. A few rafts were pulled up on the beach, and the sight was a bit jarring.

“Civilization,” of course, may not be the best choice of words, here, but “raft” isn’t the best word to use, either. “Raft” seems to suggest the tiny inflatable boats that we all flipped in the neighborhood swimming pool at some point when we were kids. These things that were pulled up onto the beach didn’t really fall into the same category – they had outboard motors, huge coolers embedded in the center consoles, and enough room to sit at least a dozen people. Running across something so jarringly artificial like that – when you’ve hiked that far into the wilderness – comes as a bit of a shock.

Dusty-looking orange and red rocks, a muddy brown and green river . . . and then a fleet of florescent inflatable rafts. Strange.

After crossing the bridge, I immediately started trudging up North Kaibab, though, and although the trail was steep, I made great time starting out: it was practically the first time all day that I had to walk uphill. North Kaibab is steep, though, and I slowed down pretty quickly – I learned later that it’s not recommended to hike out using North Kaibab. Whichever path you’ve come down, it’s recommended to go back up Bright Angel. Before I got to the worst that North Kaibab could dish out, though, I came to the Tipoff – the intersection of North Kaibab and the Tonto Trail, which was just about when it started dumping rain.

Thankfully, at this point, there wasn’t much of a decision to make, and at least it wasn’t hail bonking down all over the place. There was no where to go but up, and heading back to the Bright Angel Trail was the only logical decision. Besides, I was hot from climbing up the Kaibab trail, and the rain was welcome. I started heading west on the Tonto Trail, and after a few minutes, the rain let up.

Rain from the Tonto Trail

For most of the day, I had been running into other hikers on occasionally – not frequently enough to spoil any sort of feeling of being in the wilderness, but frequently enough that I , but the Tonto Trail was deserted. I was on the Tonto Trail for about three miles, and I didn’t see anyone. The feelings of solitude were almost palpable – the canyon felt deserted and desolate.

The mind does weird things when faced with that much solitude, and pretty soon I began wondering if I had missed Indian Garden. This would have made the day much more interesting, to say the least. After Bright Angel, it’s something like another eight miles before the next next trail that goes up to the rim. After a few miles, though, it’s hard to tell where you are just by memory – unless you’re really paying attention, quite a few of the landmarks inside the canyon tend to look pretty similar.

The Tonto Trail was deserted

Fortunately, the Bright Angel Trail is well-marked enough that it’s nearly impossible to miss, but still: just because there was no possibility of missing the trail didn’t mean that my mind didn’t want to contemplate worst-case scenarios.

Probably about 20 minutes before I would have started getting concerned, Indian Garden appeared around the next bend. I knew where I was and had been there just a few hours earlier, so all that remained was getting back up this last part of the trail.

Not surprisingly, this was the most exhausting part of the hike, and it began to feel urgent – as I gained altitude and afternoon began to turn into early evening, the temperature began to cool off, and rain showers were still sporadically soaking parts of the Canyon. The rain, which had seemed so welcome earlier when I was hot, began to seem more ominous: if I got wet out here, I probably wouldn’t be able to get warm or dry until I made it back to the car.

Still, though, being out in the bad weather paid off: the sun beginning to go down with the storms across the canyon made for some of the most memorable views of the day, and my favorite picture of the hike, too.

Headed back up the Bright Angel Trail

I didn’t make it out without getting soaked one last time, but I was close enough to the rim of the canyon that I just hiked through it. I finally made it back out of the canyon – before sunset – wet, tired, and hungry, but pretty pleased that I made it. I sat in the car with the heater going for awhile to dry myself off, and then found dinner.

*****

The next morning, I wasn’t particularly surprised to find that I so sore that I was barely capable of walking on level ground. Trying to go uphill – no matter how slight the slope – pretty much just didn’t happen at all. I hobbled around to a few overlooks and generally didn’t do anything more physically taxing than shuffle to the car and take aspirin, and watch tourists tell each other how big the canyon was. What surprised me is that I wasn’t any better the day after that, so I more or less repeated the same itinerary.

So I guess, in a way, the park ranger was right: a day of hiking followed by two days of recovery doesn’t really seem like a better idea than doing the whole thing over three days. It takes the same amount of time, and 2/3 of the days are substantially less fun.

I’m guessing, if I had told the ranger at the wilderness office what I had done – and how it had all worked out – he probably would have had the last laugh. There’s really no way that I could have told him, though. The wilderness office is on top of this little hill, see . . .

Let’s say that you own a stock that, over the course of a year, increases in value. You’re more likely to keep the stock (and thus make money on it) if you are updated on the progress of the stock over infrequent intervals as opposed to intervals that are closer together. That is, if the price goes up over the course of a year, and you only check the price every 6 months or so, you’re likely to see that the price has gone up since you last checked it – this will make you feel good, and you’ll probably hang onto the stock.

If you check it every week, though, the price will not always have gone up – if a stock price goes up over the course of a year, it doesn’t mean that it’ll make a small amount of progress every week. The noise that’s inherent in stock prices will mean that it goes up some of the time (in our example, probably even most of the time) and other weeks it will have gone down.

What we would like to think is the weeks that the price will go up will make you feel good, and cancel out the effects of the weeks that the price goes down, but this is not the way the human mind works: it takes quite a bit of the price going up to cancel out the mental effects of the price going down, and so the more frequently that you check the stock, the worse you are likely to feel about it, unless of course the stock price never goes down at all, which – to use Taleb’s term – would be a black swan.

To make matters worse, news agencies won’t report that what they’re actually seeing is just noise, because no one’s going to watch a news show that says something to the effect of “Hey, a bunch of stocks went up and down today, but it’s really just noise in the system. There’s no good reason for it.”

Even if the host of the show is right about this, his ratings are going to go through the floor – people are going to want to watch the show that can actually give them a reason why – even if the reason is completely bogus. To say that there’s no reason is probably going to get the host of the show fired.

When you look at it this way, this means that on some level, news sources (at least about stocks) have a vested interest in not telling anyone the truth, at least to the extent that they’ll have a tendency to make up explanations where none actually exist. (It’s difficult to explain this in such a way that doesn’t make it look like a creepy sort of conspiracy theory, but it makes good sense.)

The end result is that if you check the stock price every day – or, even worse – multiple times a day – you’re probably more likely to unload a stock that, ultimately, you probably shouldn’t have sold. If you check the stock price once a year, you’ll be getting quite a bit of signal for the amount of noise that you’ll have to sort through. The more frequently that you check the stock price, the more noise you’ll be getting for what’s essentially the same amount of signal: the stock price went up over the course of the year.

Taleb’s point in all this is that at least in the context of the stock market, having more data doesn’t necessarily translate into being better informed, because it’s extremely difficult to separate the signal from the noise. What’s signal and what is noise isn’t going to be obvious until quite a ways down the road (or maybe not even then) and when you’re in the middle of it, it’s pretty much impossible to tell. According to Taleb, not many stockbrokers know, either.

*****

In a similar vein, there’s an anecdote – probably apocryphal – concerning a lawyer who had little to no regard for the intellectual ability of the judge before whom he was arguing a case. When the lawyer concluded his argument, the judge leaned forward and said, “I cannot say that I am any the wiser after listening to you.” The lawyer smiled and replied, “That is undoubtedly true, your honor, but at least you are better informed.”

No word on how sympathetic the judge was, but I’m guessing that he wasn’t amused.

*****

The lessons that can be drawn from these sort of illustrations are, I suspect, perfectly valid when applied to trying to learn anything of value from the nightly news. Just because viewers of the news are better informed about whatever it is that the news is covering doesn’t necessarily mean that any of them are any better equipped to understand what the actual situation is – if Taleb’s example holds, they’re actually worse off than if they hadn’t watched the news at all.

The regions for this are legion:

As in Taleb’s example, the signal to noise ratio is going to be more difficult to sort through if we’re absorbing the news at frequent intervals – what seems important right now may not be revealed to be all that important down the road, and the things that are truly important may slip under the radar. If a news channel has to report something for 24 hours every day, it’s pretty much a sure bet that a pretty high percentage of the stuff that gets airtime isn’t really all that important.

To make matters worse, the news agencies don’t really have any sort of motivation to cover what’s truly important in the first place. What they do have a motivation with is to compete for viewers with other news agencies or (even worse) reruns of Family Guy. Consequently, cable news networks have to present the news as entertainment, and as a result they have much more of a motivation to keep their audiences interested (or shocked, titillated, or riled up at whatever political party they’re not a part of) than they do to keep them informed.

A interesting example of this is presented in Thomas P. M. Barnett’s Great Powers: America and the World After Bush. Barnett, who – it’s worth noting – is not a supporter of George Bush, wonders if the Bush administration’s successes with China won’t have more of an impact, 50 years from now, than the administration’s failures in Iraq.

After reading that, most of us – myself included – have a reaction that’s something akin to: “China? What successes did we even have in China, and when was that ever even discussed?”

And that’s precisely the point: as far as CNN was concerned, it was probably never worth discussing, or if it was, it wasn’t given the same quantity of airtime that more interesting issues (like, for example, the latest story about Lindsay Lohan breaking out of rehab) get on a fairly regular basis. To be fair to CNN, this probably isn’t because there’s any media conspiracy to make the Bush administration look bad (though it’s not like it would have been that challenging, anyway) but because good news rarely makes people keep watching. Instead, reporting on the latest body counts from Iraq (if you’re MSNBC) or reporting on the success of the surge (if you’re Fox News) or reporting on Paris Hilton’s stay in jail (if you’re any news network at all) draws more viewers than an in-depth discussion of the governmental policies that are, for example, drawing China into gradually liberalizing its trade laws.

Additionally, a large part of why this sort of data that is presented on the nightly news is useless is that information generally isn’t useful unless whoever is absorbing it has a context in which they can place it: if I know that there is tribal warfare in Uzbekistan, for example, this piece of data doesn’t do me any good unless I understand some of the background of the various ethnic groups and their motivation for wanting to fight each other. On a more basic level, it also helps if I can locate Uzbekistan on a map.

Data without context isn’t actually useful information, and it doesn’t help anyone understand the world any better. Unfortunately, the sound byte quality of the nightly news pretty much precludes the communication of any comprehensive context and background.

The best way I’ve heard it summed up, alas, has been “Television is to news what bumper stickers are to philosophy” – true enough, perhaps, but on some level it felt wrong to learn this lesson from reading a bumper sticker.

*****

One of the many issues in which any sort of clarity of thought has become a casualty of ratings-boosting nonsense is pretty much anything that has to do with environmentalism. It’s a complex topic that doesn’t lend itself well to sound bytes, and coverage of it – especially when coupled with anything to do with politics – tends to reveal more about the political biases of whoever i’s doing the reporting than what’s actually going on with the planet. Furthermore, the overwhelming impression that is disseminated by the media is that the most important and most urgent environmental problem (if not the only problem at all) is climate change.

If we’re actually trying to be informed about the state of the environment, getting our information about the environment from either newscasters or politicians is probably not a good idea. On some level, it makes about as much sense as it does for evangelical Christians to get all their advice about politics from a psychologist.

On the other hand, there’s something to be said for listening to scientists, science writers, or people that have charged into the discussion from somewhere in academia. The books that follow are some of the more interesting books about ecology and the environment that have been written recently, and I think they’re all worth a read. All of them give enough background to help put the information they present in some sort of context, and most of ideological axes seem to have been checked at the door.

1. William Stolzenburg, Where the Wild Things Were

The traditional view of ecology – at least, the overly simplistic view of ecology that we all were exposed to in elementary school – was that it works in a mostly bottom-up way. That is, the survival of the species on the top of the food chain is heavily dependent on the species that are lower on the food chain. This is true as far as it goes, but a big limitation in this way of thinking is that if this is the only model by which we understand ecology, there’s no obvious problem if the top of the food chain is removed.

Removal of apex predators, though, has been happening all over the place – probably the most well-publicized example, at least in this country, has been the U.S. Government’s attempt to eradicate the wolf population of the western United States over the last century. Unfortunately, the reduction in the big predators all over the planet – of which wolves are only one example – has had a more far-reaching impact than most people suspected that it would – Stolzenburg refers to the big predators as “keystone species,” because they are just as necessary for an ecosystem to function correctly as the prey that are traditionally seen as being the base of the food chain. This may sound obvious, but the case studies that Stolzenburg cites reveals that this works in unexpected ways: wolves being re-introduced to Yellowstone has led to a re-population of the aspen groves, of all things, even though the elk population on which the wolves prey has remained more or less constant. (Before the re-introduction of the wolves, the elk were being shot on a regular basis by the rangers to keep the population under control.) The behavior of the elk changed with the introduction of the wolves, even if the numbers of elk was a constant.

Overall, though, this isn’t a very optimistic picture: reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone was a great start, but that’s going to have to happen all over the place and with lots more species for the ecological damage that’s been done by removing keystone species to be undone.

There’s a more detailed review over on the book review section of the Christian Science Monitor that’s worth a read. So is the book itself.

2. Charles Clover, End of the Line

Clover is the environment editor for the London’s Daily Telegraph. He’s been keeping an eye on fisheries all over the world for the last 20 years, and the results are not encouraging. End of the Line is the the book that details the current status of the world’s fisheries, and how overfishing is depleting them at a dangerous rate. The book hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, unfortunately, but it has recently been made into a documentary film. At least so far, it hasn’t been getting a whole lot of attention, either, but perhaps the situation will improve.

Clover makes a compelling case that the problems that we have with the world’s fisheries is a much more immediate problem than global warming – and, in theory, it should be easier to fix, too. No new technology is needed: just slow down the rate of fishing in the areas that have been depleted.

It’s also refreshing to read a book about the environment in which the United States is not the primary culprit, which sets this book apart from most of the discussions about the Kyoto Protocol, for example. The United States doesn’t hasn’t been doing everything right, but compared to the situation in Europe and Asia, at least we’re not doing as bad as we could be.

There’s an interview with Clover and a discussion of the book over on salon.com that’s worth a read. Depletion of the world’s fisheries is one of the largest problems, and it is being discussed less than just about any other problem. Consequently, this is probably the most important book on this list, and it’s one of the least well-known. It also includes a list of sustainable fish – what to eat and what to avoid, and which restaurants are helping and which aren’t. (Surprisingly, McDonald’s is – at least mostly – doing the right thing, here.)

3. Bjørn Lomborg, Cool It

A list like this wouldn’t be complete without a nod to the discussion about global warming, although Lomborg is probably a more polarizing figure than he presumably set out to be. Most of the ruckus surrounding Lomborg is due primarily to his first book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, which caused a fairly impressive brouhaha when it was published.

As a result of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg seems to automatically invite ridicule from anyone involved in the environmental movement, which is a shame: Cool It is an interesting read, even if no one at all agrees on any of the specifics. Lomborg’s main point in Cool It is that we can learn how to think more clearly about global warming by looking at it from a cost-benefit analysis – how much would implementing the Kyoto Protocol cost, for example, and how much good would it actually do? (According to Lomborg, “too much” and “not enough,” respectively.)

Thinking about saving the planet in terms of cost-benefit analysis seems wrongheaded, somehow, but as Lomborg points out, our society does this all the time already. Take, for example, all the deaths that are the result of traffic accidents – according to the NHTSA, 37,261 fatalities last year. Then consider that all (or at least nearly all of them) are completely preventable: all we have to do is set the maximum speed limit for the entire country at, oh, 5 MPH. Possible? Sure, but it’s never going to happen – something like that would completely kill the economy, and it’s not worth it to our society to do that in order to save that 37,261 lives. Would we consider lowering speed limits? Probably, but it looks like it would take more fatalities than we’ve got in order for this to happen.

If there’s a weakness of this way of thinking, it’s that it’s much more difficult to pin down the benefit – in terms of the cost-benefit analysis – in terms of the ecosystem, as opposed to human lives. That is: what’s the cost (or benefit?) of environmental damage if the action that does that is the same action that saves lives or pulls people out of poverty? Lomborg pretty clearly (and correctly, I believe) assigns a higher value to human life (and pulling people out of poverty) than he does having a pristine environment in which polar bears do not have to change their feeding habits to survive. Still, it’s pretty clear that the benefit of having a ecosystem that is less disturbed is a benefit, albiet one with a cost that’s difficult to pin down.

Still, Cool It presents a more coherent way of looking at climate change than what we’re getting from most places, and it would be worth reading in parallel with Eban Goodstein’s Economics and the Environment in order to contrast Lomborg’s analysis with a similar analysis (at least, as far as I can tell – I haven’t read Goodstein’s book, only Lomborg’s) from someone who sees climate change as more of a problem that Lomborg does.

Over on salon.com, there’s an interview with Lomborg by Kevin Berger, who pretty clearly doesn’t like what Lomborg has to say, but the resulting discussion is still civil and enlightening. There’s also a review of Cool It elsewhere on the website (by the previously mentioned Eban Goodstein, another economist) that’s makes for fascinating reading, if for no other reason that the conclusions that Goodstein says that Lomborg comes to are not the conclusions that Lomborg says that he comes to in both the interview and the book.

The only real downside of the entire season, so far, is that the Yankees are in first place, but nearly all of us around here are still all hoping that will pass. (In that division, most of us down here are pulling for Tampa Bay, even though they’re a long shot, at this point. We’ll also settle for Boston. I think it’ll take at least a few more generations, though, before your average Alabamian can pull for any team called the Yankees.)

*****

It’s about this point in the summer – this is a yearly event, just after the All-Star break – where I start to seriously contemplate the completely irrational belief that I could have been pitching in the major leagues if life had just been a little bit different. Most baseball fans, I suspect, will identify with this belief more than most of us are probably comfortable admitting in public. The majority of us blame the situation on a shoulder injury, a coach that didn’t like us, or the bad luck to perform poorly in front of scouts – otherwise, obviously, all of us would have made it all the way to the majors. Personally, my excuse is that I should have gone to a high school with a better baseball program. If this had happened, I’d probably be sitting in someone’s bullpen right now, chewing big wads of bubble gum and waiting for the starting pitching to collapse.

This belief is, of course, completely and utterly ridiculous, and yet I’ve found that it’s a belief that I’m almost entirely unwilling to give up. I would guess that until the time I’m in my mid-forties, I will still, on some deeply subconscious (and completely idiotic) level, believe that I’ve still got a shot at this. If I just go out in the backyard and throw a couple times a week, hit the gym on a more regular basis, and seek out the advice of local high school coaches, I’ll have a pretty good chance of being able to walk onto a team sometime early the following spring.

Of course, it’s much easier being an athlete in my mind than it is in reality, and my being able to confuse the two only lasts as long as I’m in a different zip code than anyone that has actually seen me pitch. Delusions of athleticism are also difficult to maintain when I recall that the last couple times that I pulled a muscle, it was a muscle in my neck, which I pulled when I was yawning too enthusiastically. Still, eternal optimist that I am, I can’t help but notice that it wasn’t like I pulled a muscle in my throwing arm. I mean, that would have been bad, right? The arm’s fine. Really.

These happy delusions are further encouraged by the fact that I live in a town with a minor league team – specifically, the Huntsville Stars, for those of you that aren’t local to the North Alabama area. Minor league ball typically means smaller stadiums that are never very full, tickets that are never very expensive, and star players that no one has heard of.

Still, the overall quality is quite a bargain for the price – the players are good enough that watching minor league ball is, by and large, entirely enjoyable – I’ll take good seats at a minor league game over upper deck seats at most major league parks, especially when considering how much the tickets in both places actually cost. Also, it’s much more fun to yell insulting things at the umpire and have him actually be able to hear you. I’ve sat behind a few fans that wrote down the umpires’ names when they were announced before the game, as to be able to harass all of them personally. Last year, I sat a few rows behind a guy that would yell “We respectfully disagree” at the umpire whenever there was a (perceived) bad call. It was the most polite harassment any of us had ever heard, presumably including the umpire, who started laughing the first time that this happened.

All that to say: minor league baseball is great. The only problem, though – at least from the standpoint of the ability of my mind to grasp objective reality – is that without the trappings of a major league stadium and the accompanying paraphernalia, it’s quite bit easier for my mind to convince itself that I could fit right in with the players on the field. This is less of a problem when watching major league baseball, at least in my mind.  I’m not entirely sure why.

Honestly, though, it’s taken me awhile to realize that just because I’m watching a minor league baseball game, this doesn’t make the attitude of “Hey, I bet I can do this” any less ridiculous. The fact is, I’m never going to make it even to the minors, and when I finally realized this, I did what thousands of nostalgic baseball fans do every year when it finally penetrates their thick skulls that they are never going to play professionally: I joined a softball team.

This isn’t really a serious softball team, in the sense that everyone on the team has matching pants, is willing to slide while baserunning, or even knows all the rules about tagging up when there’s a fly ball. And if one of the outfielders forgot to bring Gatorade, and instead only brought beer, it’s not like anyone would want our forgetful teammate to go thirsty, unless, of course, he did not bring enough to share. On the other hand, though, to show our dedication, we draw the line at drinking the beer while actually playing in the game. (Unless, of course, we’re talking about someone that is playing right field, in which case it would be okay. Let’s face it: there is nothing else to do out there.)

The situation with the refreshment seemed quite a change from any sporting even that I’d been involved with before, but I only became deeply suspicious when I figured out that they also let women on the team. Now, I consider myself to be a fairly progressive guy, and I have no problem with women being, oh, the President of the United States, the Speaker of the House, or even having some sort of important job like being a gourmet chef. It’s also not a question of athleticism -  I’ve been passed by enough women joggers to realize that many of them are in better shape than I am.

But a woman playing second base? I mean, I’m just not sure I would trust her priorities: as Dave Barry put it, if a woman was offered a choice between, oh, catching a fly ball and saving an infant’s life, I doubt if she’d even stop to consider if there was a runner on base.

Women on the team notwithstanding, softball is still the perfect sport for maintaining my deeply treasured misconceptions of my own baseball skill, for various reasons:

When I repeatedly demonstrate that I’m not that good at softball, it’s perfectly possible to convince myself that the problem isn’t that I’m not good at baseball, but that I’m not good at softball. Obviously, if the ball was smaller, everything would be easier, but only for me. Messing up on the softball field can be done safely, as it doesn’t interfere with my carefully constructed delusion that I’m a competent baseball player. On the other hand, on the rare occasion that I do something that’s impressive, it’s easy to associate that with I deem to be my obviously superior baseball skill.

The same sort of logic also applies if beer has been used instead of Gatorade: obviously, any skill at this point just demonstrates that I’m good enough to play competently after a beer. On the other hand, any errors can be blamed on the beer – obviously, it’s not due to any lack of skill on the diamond. If I hadn’t had the beer, it’s a no-brainer that I could have made that play, whatever it was.

Softball, when approached with this sort of attitude, is a win-win sort of situation. Except, of course, from the standpoint of curing me of my delusions. To do that, I’m learning, may take more than a sport.

I’m guessing, honestly, that the best cure for this is time. A few years ago, I realized that a disturbingly high percentage of the players that I see are younger than I am, which was a completely unexpected realization that wasn’t really all that pleasant. On average, I guess, the age of the players that I watch has stayed more or less the same, while my age, on the other hand, has not. Still, I’ve fond, even as I’ve gotten older – and as I continually bump up against the reality that I’m never going to play baseball professionally – this realization hasn’t decreased my enjoyment of watching the sport, which bodes well for my ability to continue to enjoy baseball in the future. I’ll keep following the Tigers, and I’ll probably be cheering for the local minor league team for a long time, no matter where I live.

Nostalgia, as Yogi Berra observed, ain’t what it used to be. Most of the time, Yogi’s right about this sort of thing. But give me good seats at a minor league stadium, on a night when the weather’s nice, and the home team comes from behind to win it, and then nostalgia – just sometimes – is everything that it’s cracked up to be.

Even for those of us that are only watching.

That’s all pretty abstract, so let’s start off with a few examples:

(a) First, here’s an example of how to misunderstand the application of a statistic: it’s often quoted (to me, anyway) that most accidents occur within 5 miles of the driver’s home. Multiple authority figures have pointed this out to me, and the conclusion that they draw is that people have a tendency to be more careless while driving when they’re almost home (or just leaving) and therefore, if I’m going to be a safe driver, I should make sure that this is not happening to me.

I have no idea if people drive less carefully when they’re close to home, though, because this is not what this statistic tells us. It doesn’t really tell us anything, actually, because the average driver does more of his driving within a 5-mile radius of his home than he or she does in any other given location. If you go out to by groceries, for example, you’re more likely to go to the grocery story that’s closer – likely within a 5-mile radius. Even if you’re going somewhere farther away, the trip will still will always involve an element of driving within a 5-mile radius of your house.

Maybe the authors of this study took this into account, though. I frankly have no idea; I’ve never seen the study. In the form that it’s popularly quoted, in any case, it doesn’t tell us as much most of us would like to think that it does.

(b) Here’s how to misunderstand cause and effect: it’s a frequently cited statistic (within the Christian subculture, anyway) that couples that live together before they get married are more likely to end their marriage in divorce.

Again, I can’t cite the exact study from which this information comes, but for purposes of this discussion, it doesn’t really matter anyway. If whatever study conducted this survey found out that divorce is statistically more likely to follow for couples that live together, it just tells us that there’s a correlation. What it doesn’t tell us is that living together before marriage actually causes divorce, which is the implication that everyone that has quoted it to me has wanted to draw. This study doesn’t tell us this: all it tells us is that these things seem to correllate – it doesn’t imply anything about what is causing something else.

Here’s why: what if the people that are the sort of people that are likely to live together before they get married just happen to be the sort of people that are more likely to give up on marriage when the going gets tough? What if there’s some factor that hasn’t been analyzed in the study – let’s call it “Factor M” – that actually causes both living together and divorce? If divorce is caused by M, then the M people (for lack of a better term) would be just as likely to get a divorce even if they didn’t start living together before they got married. The most we can say is that living together before marriage is an indicator of M – which is the actual cause.

So what’s “Factor M”? I have no idea, but there are lots of other things that it could be. A few off-the-cuff examples, just for fun:
(a) Couples that live together before they get married may be lower-income couples that are living together for primarily financial reasons. If that’s true, then poverty could be a contributing factor. Are couples that are below a certain income level more likely to get a divorce?
(b) On the other hand, couples of any income level that are living outside their means may be using their comparitavily high housing as a rationale for living together. Are these couples more likely to have money problems in the future? Are these sort of people more likely to get a divorce?
(c) What if it’s just that extremely religious people are less likely to live together, and couples that are extremely religious are less likely to get a divorce? (In a related question: does the lack of divorce in extremely religious couples mean that there’s a higher percentage of successful marriages, or just a higher percentage of couples that are unwilling to get a divorce but are willing to stay unhappily married?)
(d) What’s the impact of couples whose parents had a divorce? Are they more likely to move in together before marriage? Or get a divorce? Or both? What if that’s causing both?
(e) What’s the impact of age on this study? Are couples that get married younger more or less likely to live together before they get married? Are they more likely to get a divorce?

Obviously, this can go on and on. The point, though, isn’t to say that any of those reasons explain this correlation to any reasonable degree; it’s likely that none of them do, and we’ll need the ruminations of an actual sociologist to come up with more accurate ideas. All that I’m pointing out here is that we don’t know. The only way you could actually find this out is to do controlled experiments in a lab, and let’s face it: when you’re dealing with a question like this, it’s not going to happen. Very few couples that I know of are going to be willing to be ordered around by a sociologist to see if what the sociologist tells them to do is going to cause them to eventually get a divorce. Probably all you’re going to have, as a result of the study, is a bunch of sociologists that have been punched in the face, not that there aren’t some possible benefits that could be derived from this.

On the other hand, it’s also something of a universal law of human nature that we are what we have been becoming. That is – who we are isn’t a constant, but is continually shaped by the choices that we’ve made in the past. So – just possibly – this cause that could be implied by this study (but what isn’t actually shown) may actually be true. The choice that a couple makes to live together may be likely to turn them into the sort of people that have a higher probability of getting a divorce.

That may be true. It also may not be true, but the point of this is that if we’re looking to this study to give us something in terms of cause and effect, it doesn’t tell us anything at all.

*****

Once you know where to look for the correlation-to-causation error, though, it seems that instances of it start cropping up everywhere. Over the next couple posts, we’ll jump into a few more examples, that are – to me, anyway – far more interesting, as they deal with church growth and how society propegates ideas. Here we go:

The church in the New Testament was a movement that started in cities – places like Jerusalem and Antioch. In nearly every record that we have from the New Testament era, where planted and where churches grew was something that took place in a primarily urban environment. (This is, it’s worth noting, more statistically significant in the times of the Roman Empire than it would be if the same thing happened now: right now, comparatively more people live in cities than did then. In the modern era, practically every movement takes place in cities, because there’s where the vast majority of the people are actually located. In the Roman Empire, a much higher percentage of the population was agrarian. This is far more statistically significant than it would be if the same situation happened today.)

Then, just like now, culture has a tendency to flow downhill: prepare for some disclaimers, here, but as a generalization, cities have nearly always been the cultural centers of most societies in history, so (some of) the culture and society that starts in cities (eventually) ends up in the the countryside. As a result, the fact that Christianity became culturally influential in the cities is at least one of the significant reasons why the the entire empire eventually became – at least socially – more or less uniformly Christian over the next several hundred years.

That’s all pretty well established and fairly uncontroversial. It gets more interesting, though, when church planters attempt to apply lessons learned from this to planting churches now. Here’s why:

More than a few church planters have looked at this observation and concluded that what is needed is more strategic church planting in terms of geographic location. That is to say: if culture flows downhill, and if what will naturally flow to rural and suburban areas is whatever is in urban areas now, then churches that want to take advantage of this phenomenon can do so by meeting in what’s considered to be a culturally relevant area. For example, a church that is planted somewhere in downtown Manhattan is more influential, in terms of long-term strategic value, than a church that is planted just outside the city limits of, say, Courtland, Alabama or Paducah, Kentucky. The cultural influence of the church in Manhattan will inevitably reach more people in the future – i.e., a church in Manhattan will be more likely to result in eventual churches in both Manhattan and Courtland (and a bunch of other places, like Paducah) at some point in the future; whereas a church in Courtland will likely result only with a church in Courtland. The people in Paducah are just out of luck.

This whole theory would actually sound pretty good – if correlation implied correlation. But as we’ve already determined, it doesn’t, and as a result, this way of thinking ends up seeming a little odd. Culture doesn’t flow downhill because there’s anything particularly spectacular about living downtown. Culture flows downhill from cities because – in the modern day, anyway – the culture that appeals to people that influence it and the jobs that are held by culturally influential people (newspaper columnist, college professor, etc.) are more likely to be located in a city than they are in a suburban or rural area.

It’s just a guess – but a logical one – that culturally influential people that were living in the Roman Empire fell more or less into the same category. If that’s true, then the churches in the New Testament had to be in cities to be the cultural influence that they were, but they didn’t influence culture only because they were in cities. They influenced culture because the people that were going to going to influence culture anyway became part of the church. Those people just happened to live in cities, but the church also had something that made it appealing to people that could be culturally influential – i.e., the sophisticated, educated citizens of the Roman Empire.

If I’m right about this, then churches that change nothing but their geographic location aren’t really accomplishing that much. Changing locations, if it’s going to work, has to be part of a larger strategy in which the current Christian culture – which, let’s be honest, is not that appealing to a pretty large percentage of the culturally influential demographic – is going to have to undergo a profound change.

Moving to a urban area may be a good start, but it’s going to be the easiest part of this. It’s also the least likely to be effective if it’s done by itself.

*****

Let’s back up for a minute, though, and contemplate if I’m even right about this: if this is true, then you could take someone who influences culture and put them in a place that is not a city, and they will still influence culture. This can be tested (possibly) in a statistically exhaustive way, anyway, by noting people that would normally influence culture, and checking to see whether or not they live in urban areas. Even though, this isn’t really going to tell us much, if we see a bunch of culturally influential people that live in cities. Most people live in cities, after all, and just showing that these things correlate (to continue to beat the dead horse with another dead horse) doesn’t show that one of them causes the other.

However, the reverse may give us data that would indicate that our theory of causation isn’t true: if we find enough culturally influential people that do not live in cities, then we can hazard a guess that living in cities doesn’t cause people to influence culture – or, at least, that it’s not the only thing that causes people to influence culture.

To pull a few examples from the Christian subculture:   undoubtedly, the two most influential Christian apologists of the 20th century – in terms of communicating Christian theology to non-Christians – are C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. Neither one of these guys lived in what we would consider a heavily urban area. Schaeffer’s the more obvious example, because he actually intentionally took himself out of society and went to live in the middle of the Alps. Lewis, on the other hand, lived in what was a pretty obvious cultural center (Oxford, England) but it wasn’t what many of the church planting guys would consider a strategic urban area. Oxford isn’t anywhere the same category as downtown New York – the population of the city today is pretty comparable to the bustling metropolis of Huntsville, Alabama.

Still, even though Schaeffer and Lewis were located in what would be considered by church planters to be a geographically inconvenient place, both of these guys were still able to influence culture – arguably, more than any other Christian theologians and philosophers that were living in the entire 20th century.

My suspicion is that there’s more than just geographic location at play, here: Lewis and Schaeffer were able to influence society because they were able to make Christianity appealing to people that influenced society while, at the same time, still hanging onto what was essential in terms of orthodox theology. (Successfully finding this balance is another huge topic that we won’t even begin to discuss now.)

If these examples are any indication, making Christianity culturally influential is going to require more than just moving churches into downtown urban areas. It’s going to require a general reformation of the Christian culture at large. Otherwise, if the only thing that is changed is the location. A church that doesn’t influence culture, even if it’s in a urban area, is strategically the same as a church that is planted in a suburban or rural area. All you’ve done is to move to an area that probably has higher real estate prices and property taxes.

*****

What follows is, more than anything, a series of guesses and observations: what sort of things can (and should) be modified about the Christian subculture in order to make this experiment work? As we’ve already noted – picking out any one of these as a cause to explain church growth (or the lack of it) is something of a dicey proposition, and there’s no real way to prove any of this. Really, they’re just guesses, so keep that in mind:

>> Christianity, as a cultural movement, is not intellectually respectable. Unfortunately this is mostly because of the efforts of those that are a part of the movement itself. Lewis, for example, was one of the most well-known Christians during the 1940′s. He was also a professor at Oxford University. Probably the most well-known Christian today (defining this in the broadest possible sense), on the other hand, is . . . Joel Osteen. This doesn’t really count as any sort of progress as far as I can tell.

Or, for another example, take Ken Ham. Ham is, at the moment, probably the most well-known young earth creationist today. He’s the founder of Answers in Genesis and writes books on the subject with titles like D is for Dinosaur. He has also built a young earth creationist museum that has an impressively large collection of animatronic dinosaurs. Leaving aside, for now, the debate over young earth Creationism, it seems a bit odd that an allegedly scientific movement like Answers in Genesis would spend the entirety of their time and energy aiming for a demographic of people that are not scientists.

For anyone that’s trying to take these folks seriously (and believe me, it takes some effort), it’s impossible to not be a bit disappointed that there’s not more effort invested in, say, post-doctoral work in physics or astronomy. When it’s all animatronic reptiles and the leader of the movement is writing D is for Dinosaur, it’s not surprising that this isn’t really taking off in, say, the biology departments of major state universities.

The most baffling part of the entire thing (at least to me) is that Ham has recently written a book (which we’ll discuss in a bit) that expresses disapointment that the younger generation is leaving the church.

I’ll confess, that at this point, I don’t really have any response to this.

Moving along – here’s another example: I subscribe to two magazines: Commentary and The Objective Standard, neither of which, unfortunately, I can really recommend. Commentary is the flagship magazine of neo-conservatism, and TOS is a journal that’s written by a bunch of Ayn Rand-style objectivists.

I do not consider myself to be a neo-conservative or an objectivist, but the reason that I continue to read them is that they both lengthy and in-depth analysis of what’s going on in politics, culture, and the arts. They’re both written from a worldview that I don’t agree with, but that’s something that’s possible to filter. Even then, there’s useful information that both of these have in them even after any sort of filters have been applied. (I think that I sleep better at night, honestly, just knowing what neoconservatives are up to.)

The problem is that if I want to find a magazine in which this sort of in-depth analysis is done from a Christian perspective, I can’t find one. (If you know of one, please let me know.) About the only thing that I’ve found that’s close is Christianity Today . . . which doesn’t quite cut the mustard. What I am not looking for is a discussion of Christian subculture from a Christian point of view. Those are relatively easy to find, especially if you’re not looking for anything extremely involved. What I’m looking for is a discussion of culture at large from a Christian point of view, with the same sort of intellectual rigor that these publications have.

To quote the depressing beginning of Harry Blamires’ classic The Christian Mind: “there is no longer a Christian mind.”

>> Lewis and Schaeffer were not beholden to any particular political party, and other than Schaeffer and the issue of abortion, not even close to any political issues. About the most political position I’ve ever found that Lewis took was the position that England should not, as a national policy, practice pacifism instead of fighting World War II. This was fairly uncontroversial position to adopt at the time, if for no other reason than bombs were falling on London.

This is an immense contrast to the way that Christianity seems to conduct itself in America today. The rise of the religious right (or the Moral Majority, or whatever term you’d like to use) has led to the first time in our country’s history where Christianity became heavily associated with one of the two political parties. The backlash from this (which, I suspect, we haven’t even begun to see the full effects of) means that the stereotypical Christian subculture – automatically – is something that half the population is completely willing to consider just because of its political and social associations.

>> There’s been a tendency in recent years of the Christian subculture to – and I’m not entirely sure if this is a word, but we’re going to try it out – ghettoize. It’s the tendency of many Christians to absorb books, music, movies, and artwork that was produced in the Christian subculture specifically for Christians.

Given the state of most popular culture today, this isn’t a completely unexpected reaction, but it can easily be taken too far, which is the situation that we’re in right now. There are unfortunate side effects: given that the audience that’s absorbing the Christian subculture is neither the largest nor the most culturally educated (see the previous point), so the authors of the Christian culture aren’t going to be, as a general rule, the best artists. (The common – though cynical – observation is that there’s a depressingly high percentage of Christian musicians that are only Christian musicians because they wouldn’t be able to make it in the secular music world.) Because Christians, are, as a result, absorbing music (or movies, or novels, or whatever) that are second-rate, they impair their own ability to be astute in the way they analyze culture.

The end result is that no matter how well any of this is intentioned, eventually the result is something that is completely incomprehensible to someone that isn’t part of the self-defined ghetto. Take, for example, the example of the Christian bookstore, and imagine the appeal that it has to someone who is not already part of the Christian subculture.

*****

It’s worth noting that quite a few of the churches that are interested in being culturally influential are already going putting practices like this into place. In most places – I hope, anyway – moving a church to an urban area isn’t the entirety of the plan.

While it may be a necessary part, my guess is that it’s probably not the most important part – in our current hyper-connected society, location may in the process of becoming less and less important anyway. Reforming the Christian subculture is going to take an immense amount of work, but it seems likely to work on a level that just changing zip codes is probably not going to.

This is probably worth investigating further.

We’ll continue to do that in the second part of this post, so stay tuned.

This doesn’t really qualify as a selfless decision: Sacramento is within a few hours drive of Yosemite National Park, which is one of those locations that I’m always enthusiastic about visiting. To have the privilege of a weekend out there without having to pay for a plane ticket is a wonderful perk of my job for which I should probably be more thankful.

National parks, just in general, are a great place to get away if you’re looking for some solitude, although Yosemite may not be so great for this if you’re driving between overlooks during the busy summer tourist season. To get any solitude at all, it’s necessary to get off the road and onto the trail where the ratio of car noise to good views is more satisfactory – which I have a tendency to want to do this anyway.

This weekend, I’ve actually gotten up past Tenya Lake into Tuolumne Meadows. As many times as I’ve been in Yosemite, this is – surprisingly, perhaps – the first time that I’ve made it this far up into the High Sierra. Tuolumne may lack the majesty and grandeur that Yosemite Valley has in spades, but it makes up for by being beautiful in its own unique way. The word “sublime” comes to mind, sticks around, and doesn’t seem to want to leave.

Tenya Lake is strikingly beautiful for (among other reasons) the sharp contrast between a flat blue lake and the gray granite domes that seem to start rising right at its edges. Tuolumne is a similar effect, really – it’s an enormous meadow, thick with wildflowers and tall grasses that paint a vivid green, and surrounded by the same sort of granite domes and peaks that are all over the place in the High Sierra. While seeing most of Yosemite makes me want to hike to the top of whatever I’m looking at, Tuolumne seems the sort of place that invites more leisurely activites. Meandering around with a camera seems like a good idea, or plopping down in a comfortable chair with a good novel a favorite collection of poetry. It’s peaceful until the mosquitoes show up.

Old habits of getting onto some sort of trail die hard, though, and I set out to hike to the top of Lembert Dome – it’s the highest point that’s close to Tuolumne, and a spectacular place to watch a sunset. After the hubbub of driving up to Yosemite, a little solitude seemed like a good idea.

As it turned out, I got more solitude than I had originally set out to find. There’s a fine line between solitude and just being lonely, and it’s not that easy to stay on the right side of the line, especially in a National Park. Hardly anyone in a National Park – except for me, apparently – is there by themselves. This is apparently so unusual that the park ranger asked about it when I arrived:

” . . . and you’re traveling by yourself?”
“Ah . . . Yeah, I guess so.”

I’m not entirely sure why she asked; she could see the rest of the car. Maybe she thought I had someone hidden under the seats. All it did, really, is remind me that I was by myself. These thoughts, once encountered, aren’t easy to shake: even after I started hiking, the surroundings didn’t help, either: of the few groups that I met on the trail, everyone was hiking with another person or two.

The family-style seating at Tuolomne Lodge Restaurant helps. Even if you’re by yourself, you’re guaranteed to get seated at a full table with 9 or 10 happy strangers, most of whom are anxious to tell you where they’ve been hiking or ask you where you’ve been hiking. But if you’ve gotten to the point where you’re willing to pay the cost of the meal because it provides a socially acceptable way to talk to someone for an hour, then probably you’ve had about as much solitude as you can take for the moment. Maybe it’s time to get back to civilization.

*****

The thing that’s absurdly easy for me to forget is that solitude is actually a spiritual discipline. Realizing this changes my perspective to a certain extent: maybe there’s something that I should be learning from this. Maybe I’m supposed to be alone right now. Thinking this way is a welcome change – as I haven’t been doing that well actually practicing solitude so far. Just because I’m by myself doesn’t mean that I’m actually participating in any sort of spiritual formation. (Most of the time, when I’m hungry, it has more to do with the fact that I don’t want to clean up any dishes than any sort of spiritual discipline that is gained by fasting. Obviously, fasting is more than not eating, and solitude is more than just not having anyone else around.)

It seems to me that solitude is hardly discussed as a discipline in the church; I can’t remember the last time I heard a sermon about it. Even if it’s mentioned, it seems like it’s always as a vehicle to something else. Use the solitude to pray or read the entire book of Romans, for example, and as good as these suggestions are, the applications are limited when I have an entire weekend to hike.

I think that Pascal said that all of the problems of humanity could be traced back to the fact that no one has the ability to sit quietly in a room by themselves. He may have been onto something.

Now – much more than when Pascal was around – parts of our culture seem to be designed to keep us away from solitude, and I wonder if that’s not because on some level, we’re deeply afraid of it. Earlier this year, I did a 7-hour hike with an iPod before, and that didn’t really strike me as odd until I started thinking about it just now. (I wonder what Pascal would have thought of the Walkman, iPod, cell phone, or Blackberry?) In our current culture, solitary confinement is seen as one of the worst punishments. I’m not entirely sure that earlier societies would have seen this as a punishment; the example of some of the Christian saints and mystics that actively sought solitude seems to suggest that at least some in earlier societies would not.

Solitude shouldn’t be punishment to those who are at peace with themselves . . . at least for an extended period of time. On the other hand, it seems that it’s not worth pursuing as an end in itself. A few examples, to illustrate:

• Any time Jesus was after solitude, it always seemed to be a time where he was able to get his energy back up before something exciting happened, or to recover after the same sort of event: teaching a large crowd of people, for example. Clearly, solitude is something that he sought, but it’s also equally clear that it’s not something that he sought all the time or saw as an end in itself.
• If there was anyone in history that should have been able to pull of solitude, it should have been Adam. No people around, so there’s ample opportunity, and also we’re dealing with someone who did not have to deal with having to deal with a sin nature. Perhaps it’s significant that God placed Adam with other people (well, okay, with one other person) before the fall. Being in community isn’t something that happened as a result of or after the fall, and there’s no reason to assume that we should take withdrawing from community (as an end in itself, anyway) as a sign of spiritual maturity.

All that to say: I’m still trying to wrap my mind around this whole solitude thing, and maybe now that it’s something that I’m at least thinking about, I’ll have better results trying to practice it in the future. I guess we’ll see. At least for awhile, though, I’ll have to work at it without the benefit of hikes and sunsets in Yosemite.

Alabama – up until today – had some of the most antediluvian beer laws of any state in the union – the size of bottles was limited, as was the ABV percentage of the beer that was sold. Today, the activism of the folks over at Free The Hops finally succeeded in getting Alabama’s beer laws changed.

This has been an ongoing saga for a few years, now, but hopefully this means that we’ll start to see more high-gravity beers in Alabama. Quite a few world-class beers – Belgian Trappist Ales, and the like – are now legal to sell.

What was true in terms of chemistry in the year 1700 may have been true about nuclear physics up until the first atom bomb went off, and was probably true about gene therapy, for example, until even more recently. There are still be topics like that, but as the field of knowledge increases, the topics are getting narrower and narrower. It’s difficult for us to remember that, at one point, Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire was practically the only book on the subject.

For people that are fascinated by the big picture, this may seem depressing; however, it’s a necessary by-product if we’re going to keep pushing the bounds of knowledge. No one’s going to be able to do any new research in chemistry, for example, if they try to attempt to absorb all the meaningful information in the entire field; furthermore, this is true in just about any field. They’ll have to specialize. Organic chemistry or inorganic chemistry? New Testament theology or Old Testament theology? History of the Roman Empire or the history of the British Empire?

*****

In any culture, intelligence is commonly measured by the ability to command information. Because cultures change, the idea of commanding information isn’t a constant: in an ancient Jewish culture, for example, a premium was placed on an individual’s ability to memorize large parts of the Torah. It wasn’t unusual in this culture for rabbis to have the entire thing memorized, which, in our culture, is something that boggles the mind. (Come to think of it, it seems that this attribute of Jewish culture is at least a partial explanation for why Christians still see Scripture memorization as a spiritual discipline today. I’m not saying that it’s not helpful in our current society, but it seems far less likely that it would have been developed, at least to the extent that it was, after the invention of the printing press.)

Memorization means quite a bit less after the invention of the printing press and the card catalogue. It’s simply less necessary, and – given that there is more and more information – there’s no way that anyone could memorize it all anyway. This began to be true around the time that Gutenburg invented the print press (i.e., around the time of the Industrial Revolution) and is even more true now in the Information Age.

On the other hand, just because there’s too much information to memorize it, it doesn’t mean that the playing field is automatically leveled. Instead, there’s a different skill set that is necessary. What follows is a brief stab at a description of the skill set, but I’ll make the disclaimer that it is probably not anything close to an exhaustive list:

First, there’s the ability to find data quickly. If you can find it by memorizing it, fine, but it’s much more useful to learn how to use google.com or something like wikipedia. In addition, there’s also the ability to process quite a bit of information quickly and filter out data that is bogus, garbage, or just plain wrong. (Just because you’re using wikipedia, by the way, doesn’t mean that you can ignore this skill: see the Seignenthaler Incident article – ironically, on wikipedia – for more about this.) In a culture where everyone has to process a lot of information quickly, having a good baloney detector, so to speak, is a necessary skill, and to a certain extent all of us have it already: if you ignore the “Elvis Clone Weds Alien Baby” headlines in the supermarket checkout, or delete spam messages that tell you that you have won lotteries that you somehow failed to enter, then you’ve at least got the concept.

In addition, there’s one more skill that – as far as I can tell – isn’t discussed enough, and that is this: the ability to synthesize what various experts in multiple fields are telling us, and compile all of these into a coherent way of looking at the world. This becomes more necessary as knowledge gets more specialized, as the people that are actually on the bleeding edge of the fields – the ones doing the actual research – are going to be so specialized that they will be less and less likely to be likely to be an expert in more than one field.

The specialization of information spelled the death of the Renaissance Man, a category of people that has been on the decline since, well, he Renaissance. John F. Kennedy once commented, while addressing a group of Nobel laureates, that the gathering he was speaking to was “the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

It’s one of my favorite quotes, but concluding that Jefferson was smarter than any Nobel laureates today isn’t where we’re going with this. Jefferson was fortunate enough to live in an age where he didn’t have to specialize to the extent that we do today – and on some level, as extraordinarily gifted as he was, he never had to really make up his mind what he wanted to study. He could do it all. At some point, we may have a president that has just as an impressive a collection of talent and knowledge as Jefferson did, but we won’t, I’m sure, see another U.S. president make such valuable contributions in such a variety of fields, even if his talents and knowledge equal Jefferson’s.

What Jefferson had going for him, though, is that he could step back and look at all the fields in which he had some level of expertise. This is becoming more rare today; no such experts are quite as wide ranging as Jefferson was; consequently, there’s no particular reason that any experts in a given field will ever be able to reconcile their point of view with anything else that does not start from their same specific field. Just by default, it’s up to us – the non-experts – to come up with our own coherent view of the way the world works. We have no Renaissance Men (or women) to do it for us anymore.

(Just by way of side note: given that postmodernism seems to have developed so closely the heels of this specialization of information, it makes me wonder about the cause and effect: is postmodernism, in some way, the result of people not developing the ability to reconcile information from multiple experts in various fields? Or is the lack of that skill all that postmodernism actually is? I have no idea, but maybe it’s an interesting topic to discuss.)

I’ll throw out a few examples to show how this works, and then we can move on to the actual question:

Back around the time of Galileo, the church seemed to think that – based on some rather strange readings of some verses in the Bible – that Galileo’s theory that the earth orbited the sun was heretical. It’s now obvious, in retrospect, that the church was trying to fight good science with bad theology, but at the time (at least to the leaders of the church), that wasn’t clear. It’s difficult to tell if you’re fighting good science with bad theology or fighting good theology with bad science if you’re only an expert in either science or theology.

I’m drastically oversimplifying, but this is similar, on some level, to the current disagreement between scientists and some theologians with regards to the age of the earth. Is saying that the earth is only 8,000 years old an attempt to fight good science with bad theology? (As far as I can tell, it is, but that’s not really the point of this post, so don’t get to distracted here if we don’t agree.) Or is it fighting bad science with good theology?

The completely unsatisfactory answer is to pick the theologian (if you’re an evangelical Christian) or the scientist (if you’re anything else) and pick an answer based only on your preferred field. Unfortunately this isn’t making any sort of an attempt to take both fields seriously.

Coherently looking the entire body of knowledge is the goal, here. C.S. Lewis once pointed out that reality is that about which truth is, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll have to read that sentence a couple times in order for it to make sense. Where I think that Lewis is going with this, though, is that if science and theology are both fields that can tell us about reality, then we can’t just resolve the answer by tossing out all the considerations from whichever field we do not like. If we’re using Lewis’s definition of truth everywhere, then there’s an objective answer at which we should be able to arrive given a valid starting point from any field. On the other hand, this doesn’t mean that we’ll be able to determine any answer about anything from any field. Theology may not tell us anything about what planets orbit what, but there’s nothing that prevents us from reconciling our knowledge of theology with our knowledge in other fields. The body of knowledge is coherent.

The actual question that I’m currently puzzling over, though, is this:

Traditionally, most people in a democratic republic are, at least in principle, supporters of both (a) individual freedoms and (b) not harming other fellow-citizens. That is, you’ve got a right to swing your fist around, but that right ends at my nose. This is reflected (hopefully, at least sort of) in most of our laws: it’s perfectly legal to sit at home and smoke as many cigarettes as you want to, because that’s an individual freedom. You can’t, however, smoke them while sitting on an airplane, because secondhand smoke harms everyone in the vicinity. Likewise, you can sit at your house and drink as much tequila as you want, because that’s your individual right. If you do this and get try to drive on the interstate, though, this is a risk to everyone else there, so you can’t do it.

(This point of view is articulated extremely well over on Jeff Barnett’s blog, which prompted this post, and which I recommend you read.)

The assumptions behind this way of legislating laws are, generally, good ones:
(a) There is no attempt to legislate everything that is wrong, which is something that generally leads to a theocracy, which is not where anyone wants to go with this. Instead, there’s an attempt to legislate what hurts everyone else. Generally, confusing morality with legality is a pretty egregious error, and this way of looking at laws does make that error.
(b) There’s an assumption here that society does not have a responsibility to protect people from themselves. This is a nice libertarian ideal that has, for better or for worse, been adopted across the board. (If it hadn’t, by the way, smoking wouldn’t be legal. Odds are, neither would Whoppers.) In American society, although it would be nice to protect people from themselves, people are more interested in having freedom to do whatever they want – even if it’s harmful to themselves – rather than having the government tell them what to do. I can’t say that I’m unsympathetic to this idea.

But when we’re talking about something like what sort of laws (legality) it’s right (morality) to pass (legality), it’s not sufficient to consult political philosophy by itself. We’ve also got to consult morality, and – for me, that means dragging theology into the discussion. So what does theology have to say?

There’s nothing that I can find in the New Testament that suggests that what we should be trying to do is establish some sort of Christian theocracy. That was last tried in the Old Testament, and given that most theologians think that where the theocracy was established (Israel) corresponds now to the modern-day church – and not to our modern-day nation – leads me to conclude that attempting to legislate everything in the style of a theocracy isn’t approaching this in the right way. That option, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t even on the table as anything that is coherent.

On the other hand, this isn’t to say that what we legislate doesn’t have anything to do with morality at all. This error is more common, and has lead to the oft-repeated claim that “you can’t legislate morality.” Not only is this a cliche, though, but it’s also pretty ridiculous, when you sit down and think about it: according to the law, I’m not allowed to kill anyone. That’s a moral law. I’m also not allowed to cheat on my taxes. Also a moral law. In fact, when you get down to it, if you’re relating things like safety (traffic laws, for example) and concepts of justice or fairness (tax laws, for example), not only can you legislate morality, but it’s also the only thing that you can legislate.

The only way that the “you can’t legislate morality” makes any sense at all is if it’s a rejection of the idea of a theocracy. “You can’t legislate all morality” may make more sense, because the truth is more complex: there is morality that can be legislated, and there’s morality that can’t – or shouldn’t – be legislated. (Another observation – this time, from political philosophy and theology both – is that unenforceable laws are generally a bad idea. Political philosophy points out that having an unenforceable law creates disrespect for the law if everyone knows that it cannot be enforced. Theology points out that human nature has a tendency to default to behavior that we’re told not to do; consequently; an unenforceable law is, in many ways, just an invitation.)

If we’ve bought into this way of thinking so far, we can conclude that we should only enact laws against those activities which are both wrong and which harm citizens of our country other then myself. This is fine so far, but this position assumes that there is an actual category of things that are wrong that shouldn’t be made illegal, because the harm that they do impacts only the individuals that do the action.

Orthodox Christian theology tells me that this category does not exist. There is nothing that anyone can do that is wrong that does not impact people in the surrounding community.

This is difficult to see for us, because we have this westernized ideal that Christianity (and hence, morality) are things that we pursue individually, and are not things that have anything – or at least, much – to do with community. But this doesn’t have any correspondence to the way Christianity is presented in the New Testament, where it’s mainly shown to be something that takes place in community (Acts 16:31: “You will be saved, you and your household”) and the fact that morality impacts more than just the individual making the decision is obvious to most astute observers anyway: calling into work when you’re not sick isn’t against the law, at least as far as I know, but if everyone in the United States did it tomorrow, we’re going to have a pretty big problem. If everyone decides to take up smoking, stop exercising, and eat as many Whoppers as they want, health care costs are going to go through the roof and we’re going to run out of hospital beds.

These are trivial examples, but the point remains: communities have to deal with the consequences of individuals doing wrong. As far as I can tell, this is why the religious right has come out using the FCC to sensor obscene, indecent, and profane broadcasts. The oft-repeated response to this – “If you don’t like it, just turn it off” – misses the point entirely. Even if I turn it off, I still have to live in a society that is impacted by what everyone consumes. If I’m going to be interacting with society to any reasonable degree, I’m going to be swimming around in the results, so to speak, unless I attempt to become a hermit or a monk.

The obvious problem, though, is that there is no longer a clearly defined category of wrongs that should be illegal and ones that shouldn’t be. If there’s an attempt to pass legislation against wrongs that impact the community at large, well, that’s all of them, which brings us back to the problem of both ending up with an inadvertent theocracy and having a bunch of unenforceable laws.

If you’re trying to balance good political philosophy and good theology, where do you draw the line? What should be made illegal and what shouldn’t be?

For the record, I have no good answer for this.

On the surface, it seems that there would be nothing to tie all three of these movements together – other than the obvious emergent/emerging split, there’s nothing immediately obvious that they seem to have in common. In terms of theology, relationship to postmodernism, etc., all these different movements are have fairly unique positions. The fact that they’re all over the map – and arguably moving farther apart – isn’t, by itself, an interesting observation. What makes this more interesting is that each of the movements have gotten to such different positions in spite of the fact that they’ve all initially claimed a similar goal: to return the modern American church to the way the church operated in the New Testament.

The only immediately obvious answer (at least, as far as I can see) as to why each movement supplies results that are so different is that each one of the movements started with slightly different assumptions about the church, about culture, or about the interplay between the two. Here’s my best guess as to how and why it happened how it did:
(a) The house church movement has been around for quite a few years, however, the visibility of the movement has recently increased, due largely to the efforts of George Barna. Barna has recently co-authored (along with Frank Viola) a fairly high profile book called Pagan Christianity, The starting point of this book is the assumption that many current church practices (such having paid clergy, owning a church building, and congregations that are large enough that they can’t meet in houses, among others) as imports from pre-Christian paganism. Barna and Viola conclude that to get back to the real roots of the where the church was in the New Testament, what we need to do is (among other things which are detailed in Viola’s sequel) have small congregations without paid clergy meet in houses. Other than the church’s theology of the church, really, Barna and Viola think that everything is pretty much okay. Other than the church’s understand of itself, there’s no other part of theology that they feel the need to change.

(b) The emerging and emergent church movements originally started as the same movement, but have developed in drastically different directions. The emergent movement – embodied, for our purposes, by Brian McLaren and the folks over at Emergent Village – purports to be to postmodernism what your typical conservative evangelical church is to modernism. How much you’re actually is willing to buy into this claim hinges on how much you believe that the modern church has been influenced by the modernism, defined (correctly, I think) by McLaren as the philosophy that has its roots in the enlightenment. This question doesn’t have an easy answer, and answering it is made more complex by the fact that none of us can step outside of our own worldview (postmodernism for McLaren, modernism for most of the rest of us, at least to an extent) to answer the question in a completely objective way. In McLaren’s view, the church in Acts existed in a culture that was similar to postmodernism that we’re seeing today; therefore, McLaren concludes that stripping the church’s theology of its assumptions that were brought on by modernism is the best way to return to the way the church believed and acted in in the New Testament. To an extent, I think that this is a fairly uncontroversial observation that just about any theologian will agree with this, at least in principle. The complications come when McLaren actually picks the assumption that he wants to strip out, at which point it becomes far less clear if McLaren is stripping out theology influenced by modernism or if he’s stripping out theology that he just doesn’t like. At least on the surface, it seems that the theology that has developed as a result of this synthesis actually resembles, at least in its conclusions, the theology that was associated with 20th century liberalism. Ironically enough, 20th century liberalism developed as a synthesis of traditional theology and modernist assumptions that McLaren claims to want to eliminate. The observation that these two worldviews so closely resemble each other leads to all sorts of interesting questions that we will not pursue right now. At the very least, though, McLaren should explain why the combination of traditional orthodox theology and postmodernism so closely resembles the combination of traditional orthodox theology and modernism.

(c) The emerging movement – which has been more or less headed by Mark Driscoll and the Acts 29 church planting organization, which Mark leads – is probably the only movement in the list that doesn’t propose a serious retooling of some section of traditional orthodox theology in order to leave a distinctive mark. Reading what Driscoll has written is – more than anything – like reading the theology of John Piper, Jonathan Edwards, or John Calvin – except translated into something that a normal person on the streets would be able to understand more easily. (Just to clarify: this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a negative comment about Driscoll’s writing: his latest books – Death by Love, Vintage Jesus, and Vintage Church – are some of the best books that I have ever run across in that they’re able to discuss theology deeply while still remaining fairly easy to read.) What Driscoll has done – and I suspect that he’s self-aware enough to realize that he has done this – is start a church movement that hasn’t differed, in terms of its theology, from the church at large – or at least parts of the church at large, anyway. What Driscoll has changed is the method by which the church presents that theology, and the results that Driscoll has achieved seem to suggest that what was keeping many people from being part of the church was, tragically, not the theology.

It’s probably obvious which of the previous movements is the one that I think is headed in the right direction, but for purposes of this discussion, that’s not really where we’re going with this, and hopefully we don’t have to agree on all of that in order for any of this to make sense. Regardless of which of the previously discussed movements you agree with (if any), I still think that the following observation holds: although all of these movements claim to be an attempt to get back to the New Testement church, this is probably much more of a goal for the movement now that it’s underway, and less of a reason as to why it was started in the first place. It seems that all of these movements have been spawned from discontent about how well the mainstream church is doing with the actual process of either (a) reaching people that are not in the church, or (b) making people that are in the church more like Jesus, or both (a) and (b). In fact, to make a sweeping generalization that most, or even all movements that aim at reforming the church all share a similar motivation is probably fairly accurate. At least as far as I can tell, theological change – at least in modern times – is only rarely pursued for its own sake. Most change in the church has its roots in some sort of disappointment that the processes of outreach and sanctification are not working very well. Some of the people that are involved in starting these movements are frustrated by the fact that they haven’t turned into the person that the church seemed to promise them that it would help them become. Others – the majority, I would guess, just because it’s generally easier to criticize others – are frustrated by the fact that this process hasn’t happened to everyone else. This is a serious problem: if you doubt that it is, ask your average ex-churchgoer – or even your average churchgoer – if they think that there are hypocrites in the church.

Rethinking theological presuppositions isn’t really such a bad thing, especially if it’s done from a good motive, which I believe this is. The results of rethinking, though, can lead to conclusions that can be either good, bad, or a creative combination of the two. Just because a movement started off with a good motivation doesn’t tell us where it’s going to end up – it may be theologically robust and traditional (such as Driscoll and Acts 29 folks), theologically orthodox but somewhat shallow (for example, the “seeker sensitive” movement, which seems to have mostly died down), or what I’ll euphemistically call the truly exegetically creative (Joel Osteen).

Many people that reach this point of frustration do not respond by starting a new church movement. There are more commonly pursued options, as well:
(a) There’s the option of just deciding that it’s easier to go through the motions of pretending to be like Jesus even if you’re not, really, which is the sort of option that turns people into the hypocrites for which the church is so well known. This the only option that keeps them in the traditional church, and coincidentally, this is also the only intellectually dishonest option in this list, as far as I can tell. (This also leads to all sorts of potentially interesting questions about the credibility of the church that we’ll skip over for now.) This option, alas, fairly common – it’s so common, in fact, that Ray Steadman puts it like this: those that give up on Christianity and remain within the church – and choose a life of hypocrisy as a result – are so common. Those within the church that pursue Christianity – as it should actually be – are so rare, that “real” Christianity is identified (at best) as abnormal and (at worst) as some sort of heresy.

(b) You could pursue the previously discussed option, in which you find something wrong with the practice and/or theology of the church, and then change it in hopes that it produces people (yourself included) that are more like Jesus. This is intellectually honest but after watching these movements come and go for awhile, it begins to wear a little thin: how many times do you have to modify Christianity before coming up with something that works? The amount of times that it has been modified recently seems to suggest that we aren’t really much closer to any sort of comprehensive solution than when ol’ Martin posted a bunch of stuff on the church door in Wittenburg.

(c) Or you could just leave the church, which we’ve seen enough of in my generation that you can now buy books on how to prevent this from happening to yourself. (Or your kid, if the book is marketed to parents, who are generally a more reliable book-buying demographic.) This is at least being intellectually honest, and because it is, I’m convinced that some people that have left the church are doing a better job of chasing down a relationship with God than the people that pursued option (a) and are therefore still part of the church. They may be farther away, but at least they’re pointed in the right direction. Those of us that are still part of the church may well be closer, but if we’re pointed in the wrong direction, the amount of good that this does us, is – at best – debatable.

To pursue a bit of a digression, here, it’s worth noting that “sanctification isn’t working” is a bit of a different reason than why most leaders in the church think that people are leaving the church. Picking up one of the why-you-should-stay-in-the-church books suggests that it’s primarily an intellectual problem, in which case it can be largely be solved by having everyone, especially all our kids, read more C. S. Lewis. Certainly that’s not a bad idea, frankly, and there’s a valid point, here: if we can’t satisfactorily answer the questions – on an intellectual level – of why Christianity is likely to be true, the only people that are likely to stick around the church are the ones that don’t care about answering the questions. Not a good plan. On the other hand, theologians that think that good theology is going to save the world are probably just as out of touch as economists that think that properly managing globalization is going to save the world, or teachers that think that education will solve all of the world’s problems. While all of these things will likely improve something, expecting any of them to solve all of the problems of the world just isn’t realistic. As far as I can tell, the lack of intellectual rigor in the church is a problem, here, but I’m fairly sure that it’s not the only problem, or even the largest problem. Dan Kimball’s remarkable They Like Jesus but not the Church is based on discussions with people that have either left the church or not gotten involved, and Dan’s research seems to reveal, if only antidotally, that intellectual problems with the claims of Christianity do not top the list.

I can attest to this, by the way, from personal experience: a couple semesters with an atheist philosophy professor in college didn’t do anything to make me want to abandon Christianity. Being part of a church split in which Christians treated each other poorly, on the other hand, was one of the most disheartening experiences that I’ve ever been through.

End of digression: quite a few people are pursuing one of these options, and a substantial percentage of people that pursue any option, here, are doing it because they’re not seeing sanctification work like the church has told us it would. Either there’s (a) some sort of false expectation about the entire process of sanctification – i.e., the church has told people that the process of being made anew in Christ’s image is going to be easy, when it’s not; or (b) the church has been handing out incorrect instructions for how the process of sanctification is actually supposed to be done. The only other option would be that (c) Christianity, as a whole, just isn’t true at all – not because of a lack of theologic or philosophical apologetic, but because it just doesn’t work in the real world. At some point, whether or not a worldview can be lived out with any degree of success and internal consistency is the ultimate apologetic, really. (It’s also worth remembering that only test that Jesus gave for orthodoxy – that is, the way that everyone knows that we are following him – isn’t agreeing with any creed, but an action: if we love one another.) According to the claims of traditional theology, Jesus says that the church should be able to participate in the process of changing us into the people that we’re supposed to be. If we’re involved with the church in the way that it tells us to be, and we’re not becoming these sort of people, then something that is terribly important has broken.

I think that I can make a fairly good case that the problem is a combination of (a) or (b). Let’s put aside the discussion of (c) for some point in the future. I’m sure there will be a blog post abotu it sometime in the future, but if you’re anxious for that discussion, go read some Cornelius van Til or C.S. Lewis in the meantime.

Dallas Willard describes this problem wonderfully in up in his excellent book The Divine Conspiracy, which I’d recommend going out and buying right away if you haven’t already read it. Willard points out that Jesus seemed to expect us – quite literally – to become the sort of people that pray for our enemies, bless those that hate us, and generally be like Him in terms of the love he has for people and the spiritual disciplines that he practiced. If Jesus was actually God, like he claimed, it follows that he was the smartest person that ever lived and this isn’t just a pie-in-the sky vision of idealized life. This is how he meant us to actually live in the real world. Right now. Really.

As Willard points out, this is something of a contrast to the way your average American church operates: how many churches have a realistic plan that describes how Jesus will transform their members from what normal people are into what Jesus wanted us to become? How many have a plan at all? Not very many. Most everyone just seems to assume that if you hang around the church long enough you’ll turn into this sort of person by default, even if you don’t plan for it. This is, just by way of a side note, one of the oddities regarding how people think about spirituality, and that is this: most people (myself included, more frequently than I’d like) will exclude spirituality from any sort of logic for no other reason than it’s spirituality, and thus not something that needs to be regarded with any coherent thought. Trying to change what sort of person you are – in any other context – wouldn’t be something that anyone would just expect to happen with no planning, but in this instance, that’s how we have a tendency to see it. To make matters even worse, it’s also widely assumed in the evangelical church that the spiritual disciplines – at least judging by what is most frequently taught from the pulpit – have been reduced to a list of two: going to church services and (somewhat less frequently mentioned) spending devotional time daily talking and listening to God.

Both of these assumptions, it’s worth noting, are hardly ever stated directly, if for no other reason than they sound so goofy when you say them out loud. This doesn’t, however, keep them from being assumed. At some point in church, nearly all of us have heard some variant of the following sentence: “I don’t understand how [[name of some person]] could do [[name of some horrible thing]]. He’s been going to our church for so long!” The assumption, of course, is that if someone shows up at church once a week, listens to the sermons, and sings along with the music, that this is a guarentee that he or she will be like Jesus at the end of the process.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is absurd. Why does anyone in the church assume that being made in the image of Christ isn’t going to require any effort? I don’t find anywhere in scripture where the extent of spiritual formation is sitting in a pew. G. K. Chesterton once put it like this: “Christianity has not been tried, and found wanting, it’s been found difficult, and not tried.” On the surface, it seems that this thought only applies to people that aren’t currently part of the church, but the quote becomes far more interesting if we consider that it may be even more applicable if we use it to refer to those inside the church, as well.

The point, though, isn’t to reduce this to just a matter of effort, as that’s only part of the problem. To illustrate: if there’s one demographic in the gospels that put enough effort into spiritual discipline – or discipline of any sort, really, it was the Pharisees, and in Jesus’ estimation, anyway, they missed the boat. They had plenty of discipline, but misdirected discipline – even if there is a lot of it – doesn’t result in sanctification going as it should. Their problem was rooted in a profound misunderstanding of the relationship between self-discipline and spiritual maturity, and similar problems plague the church today.

This is the root of quite a bit of the frustration that I have with the church, and I suspect that it frustrates more people than just me. It’s a huge problem that even a lot of time being involved in a church – and even doing the things that the church tells you to do – do not seem to result in sanctification in the way that church promises it will happen. If Christians that are part of the church join with the expectation of being made into the people that Jesus told them they could become, and they do what the church tells them to do, then expecting that they will actually become these sort of people is not an unrealistic expectation. And, by and large, it’s not happening. There are a couple reasons why this might be:

Some of the problem is that most churches will have a tendency – which they must always fight against – to tell their members to do what is best for the appearance of the church or how well the programs of the church can function, instead of the spiritual formation of the members. These interests, I’ve noticed, don’t always align like they would in an ideal world. For example: most every church that I’ve been involved with has small groups of people that meet during the week – typically for some sort of study, prayer for each other, discussion, food, etc. This is frequently a way that members of the church can connect with each other on a personal level, and it is vital to have groups like this if members are going to be able to live life together and develop relationships that go past Sunday morning pleasantries.

Some of these churches also meet in a building that is not the property of the church, which typically means that people will have to meet to set up chairs before the Sunday service.

If both of these groups do not meet in a given week, it’s pretty obvious which one is going to get more immediate attention on the following Sunday morning. Now, the point isn’t to say that setting up chairs isn’t important, or even that it’s something that can’t be a spiritual discipline. It can be. But it’s not commonly understood to be a spiritual discipline, and if the members that are doing it don’t see that it can be, it’s going to be harder and harder to find volunteers. The danger is that churches may have so much stuff that needs to be done that the people that are heavily involved with the church can miss the process of becoming like Jesus that – let’s face it – is actually the goal in the first place.

On the other hand, there are ways this can work. Brother Lawrence, for example, was able to find spiritual meaning when he was washing the dishes (see his classic Practicing the Presence of God for more on this), but it’s also clear that not everyone that washes dishes is able to take it as an opportunity to practice the presence of God. Looking at washing dishes or setting up chairs as a spiritual discpline would probably happen more frequently if the spiritual disciplines were better understood, which is a much larger part of the problem.

In many churches, the functions of the spiritual disciplines are misunderstood, and they are consequently presented as a goal instead of a means to an end. The goal is to be the sort of person that Jesus wants us to be. The goal isn’t to be extremely disciplined, though to be the sort of person that Jesus wants us to be is going to require some discipline. Discipline is what gets us there, though, it’s not where we’re going, and this is not made clear by most teaching in the church today.

Partly, this may be because it seems like a semantic difference, here, but I’m convinced that it’s important, as it impacts our entire method of approaching the spiritual disciplines. John Ortberg explains this well in The Life You Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People. Ortburg points out that St. Paul uses quite a few different metaphors and analogies for the Christian life, but one of the most helpful metaphors is when he refers to the Christian life as a competative sporting event. The Christian life, according to St. Paul, is a race, and we’re supposed to train so that we can do well in the race.

This is a helpful analogy for guys like me that (at least at some point) played sports, which was probably St. Paul’s intent. I suspect that he knew that it’s much easier for us to think logically about training for a track meet than it is to think logically about training for – to use his metaphor – a spiritual race. Here’s how it works: let’s say, to use Paul’s analogy, that I can currently run a mile in 10 minutes, and I want to be able to run a mile in, say, 6 minutes. Whether or not I can do this has relatively little to do with how much I want to be able to do it. It has much more to do with if I’ve been training for it.

Training, in this example, is not running a mile in 6 minutes, because I can’t do that yet. Training for this is doing an exercise that I can do right now so that I’ll eventually be able to accomplish what I can’t do right now. As part of training, I may decide to sprint short distances while wearing ankle weights, for example, but getting good at the sprinting with ankle weights isn’t the point of the exercise. The point is to be able to run a mile in 6 minutes. To mix metaphors rather catastrophically, here: the baseball game isn’t won but the number of hits that you get in batting practice, and the basketball game isn’t won by how many layups you hit when you’re in the gym by yourself. The exercises are important, to be sure, but they’re important because they help us perform in the actual game – or, to get back to St. Paul’s analogy, the race. To confuse the spiritual discipline with the end result is to be like a baseball player who makes his goal to lift more weights than his teammates.

Likewise, the point isn’t that self-discipline, right now, will enable me to go out and live like Jesus wants me to. What it will do is provide the means for some sort of exercise – what we’ll term “spiritual discipline” – that will eventually enable me to reach the goal of living like Jesus. This is good news for most of us that don’t have the ability to go out and live like Jesus wants us to right now. If I understand where St. Paul is going, though, that’s okay: what he’s telling me is that I’ll be able – with God’s help – to get there eventually.

If we see the spiritual disciplines in this way, we can see that it’s a bit of a jump to assume that everyone is going to have to go through an identical exercise routine to best prepare for whatever their race is going to be. Different people will respond differently to different disciplines, and to reduce the number of spiritual disciplines that the church takes seriously is to – if we’re sticking with the same analogy, here – reduce the number of athletes that the church will be able to successfully train.

There are all sorts of neglected disciplines that have proved helpful to many Christians over the centuries that aren’t talked about very much at all – it’s been awhile since I’ve heard a sermon on the discipline of solitude or the discipline of fasting. Sermons on the discipline of giving or service seem to be more common, although frequently they are unfortunately presented as goals, instead of as disciplines that will help to make us more like Jesus.

There’s quite a pile of spiritual disciplines that have proved valuable over the centuries, and it’s not particularly helpful to roll them all into the generalization of of prayer and Bible reading. (This gets just silly if the goal is to get back to the book of Acts, frankly: if how frequently you read your Bible is your particular yardstick for how well you’re doing, there weren’t very many people in the first and second centuries that did that well. They didn’t have Bibles.) Furthermore, it seems probable that the reason that these have been so valuable over the centuries is because they actually worked. To paraphrase Ortberg, the reason something is a spiritual discipline is because it brings transform us into the person that Jesus wants us to become, and therefore just about anything that is able to do this is a spiritual discipline.

A word of warning, however: this doesn’t mean that we can do whatever we want and proclaim that it’s a valid spiritual discipline just because it was fun. Just because we’re talking about spiritual formation, here, doesn’t mean that there’s not something objective to it. To equate “I’m feeling good right now” with “this experience is bringing me closer to God” is to miss the point of spiritual discipline. To get back to St. Paul’s analogy, that’s not something anyone would be likely to say with regards to their training regime if they were hoping to run a marathon.

*****

Even a cursory study of any complex system – say, ecology, for example – reveals that when people attempt to control the system by changing one variable, this hardly ever results in the anticipated outcome. Instead, something else changes – frequently lots of something elses – and all too frequently the entire system breaks in a way that no one anticipated and and occasionally stops working entirely.

This is largely true when you’re dealing with just about any complex system, it seems like, and I suspect that web of human and divine interaction that we refer to at the church is complex enough to lend itself to this sort of misdiagnosis.

I wonder if the approach of starting new movements isn’t something of this. If the root of the problem is that the church isn’t making its members like Jesus, then it seems to me that contemplating sanctification again can probably be done without founding any new movements.  Even if that’s necessary, it seems that the successful impact that such movements have can probably be measured by the degree to which they call members of the church to practice the spiritual disciplines that previous generations of the church have understood. Rethinking our theological conclusions, it seems, may not actually solve this problem. Furthermore, it may change more things – mostly unanticipated – than the founders of the movement would expect.