You Have to Fight

“If you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. You have to fight.”

Photo by David Guliciuc on Unsplash

I was listening to a church discussion of how we relate to culture, and this perspective was expressed by one of the participants. The specific example that prompted it, chosen more or less at random, was Starbucks’ choice to not put “Merry Christmas” on their holiday cups.

There were - and are - lots of good arguments on both sides, but I’m more interested in the implication that we haven’t fought, that we have somehow given inches, that we need to do more or do different if we don’t want to continue to lose miles. In my lifetime, I’ve seen the American evangelical church fight abortion, LGBTQ rights, music with explicit lyrics, music with unintelligible lyrics, Democratic presidents, drinking, gambling, playing cards because of their association with gambling, drugs, smoking, Dungeons & Dragons, Pokémon, Harry Potter, sex in video games, violence in video games, blasphemous art, R-rated movies, movies that fail to promote “family values,” the theory of evolution, saying “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas,” universalism, theological liberalism, political correctness, Satanism, tattoos, child pornography, communism, socialism, critical race theory, and K-Mart selling Playboy.

And this is nothing new. In the early 20th century, for example, evangelist Billy Sunday preached his famous “booze” sermon in Boston, Massachusetts:

It is my opinion that the saloonkeeper is worse than a thief and a murderer. The ordinary thief steals only your money, but the saloonkeeper steals your honor and your character. The ordinary murderer takes your life, but the saloonkeeper murders your soul.

The saloon is an infidel. It has no faith in God; has no religion. It would close every church in the land. It would hang its beer signs on the abandoned altars. It would close every public school. It respects the thief, and it esteems the blasphemer; it fills the prisons and penitentiaries. It despises heaven, hates love, and scorns virtue. It tempts the passions. Its music is the song of a siren. Its sermons are a collection of lewd, vile stories. It wraps a mantle about the hope of this world to come.

It is the moral clearinghouse for rot, and damnation, and poverty, and insanity, and it wrecks homes and blights lives today. The saloon is a liar. It promises health and causes disease. It promises prosperity and sends adversity. It promises happiness and sends misery.

His preaching was a significant factor in the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting alcohol in the United States, in 1917.

In the 1960s, to our shame, we fought against civil rights. Philip Yancey writes in Soul Survivor of growing up in Atlanta:

[Martin Luther King, Jr.] was our number-one public enemy, a native of my own Atlanta, whom the Atlanta Journal regularly accused of “inciting riot in the name of justice.” Folks in my church had their own name for him: Martin Lucifer Coon. (p. 17)

During my adolescence I attended two different churches. The first, a Baptist church with more than a thousand members, took pride in its identity as a “Bible-loving church where the folks are friendly,” and in its support of 105 foreign missionaries, whose prayer cards were pinned to a wall-sized map of the world at the rear of the sanctuary. That church was one of the main watering holes for famous evangelical speakers. I learned the Bible there. It had a loose affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination founded in 1845 when Northern abolitionists decided that slave owners were unfit to be missionaries and the Southerners separated in protest. Even Southern Baptists were too liberal for most of us, though, which is why we maintained only a loose affiliation…

After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, our church founded a private school as a haven for whites, expressly banning all black students…

The next church I attended was smaller, more fundamentalist, and more overtly racist… There I learned the theological basis for racism. The pastor taught that the Hebrew word Ham meant “burnt black,” making Noah’s son Ham the father of Negro races, and that in a curse Noah had consigned him to life as a lowly servant (Genesis 9)…

If anyone questioned such racist doctrine, pastors pulled out the trump card of miscegenation, or mixing of the races, which some speculated was the sin that had prompted God to destroy the world in Noah’s day. A single question, “Do you want your daughter bringing home a black boyfriend?” silenced all arguments about race (p. 21-23).

Many years later, Yancey attended the “burial” of this second church (“After moving to escape a changing neighborhood, the church found itself once again surrounded by African-Americans, and attendance had dwindled. In a sweet irony, it was now selling its building to an African-American congregation” (p. 4)) and reflected on the poisonous legacy of the church and how people such as Yancey’s brother turned away from the faith as a result.

Looking back over this history, it’s hard for me to imagine what “If you give an inch, they’ll take a mile; you have to fight” should even look like, because it seems to me that we’ve been fighting non-stop, with very mixed results.

Sometimes these fights are successful. Crime rates, for example, are significantly lower than they used to be — 60% lower in 2020 than in 1980. (However, the fact that this decline in crime rates can be credibly attributed to the removal of lead paint, rather than moral renewal led by the church, may shake our confidence in the church’s ability to bring moral change to the broader culture.)

Sometimes these fights are still ongoing. The June 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization removed federal protections around abortion rights, a decades-long goal of pro-life activists, but pro-life activists would be the first to say that we still have a very long way to go in creating a culture where abortion is unwanted, where life is consistently valued, where unborn babies and expectant mothers are protected and provided for.

Sometimes, in hindsight, these fights seem to have been misguided. I don’t hear anyone too concerned about Pokémon or playing cards nowadays, and church youth groups enjoy the occasional game of Dungeons & Dragons.

Sometimes, we may realize, like Philip Yancey, that the fight was simply wrong, that reading the Bible and professing to follow Christ is no proof against sin, and that great evil can be rationalized in the name of following God.

And sometimes, perhaps, we stop fighting too easily. Liquor usage doesn’t appear to be a front-and-center concern for many contemporary Christians, as it was in Billy Sunday’s day, but too many people can still testify to the devastation that alcoholism can cause - over 140,000 deaths in the U.S. per year, not to mention the damage done to relationships, families, jobs, finance, and health.

What would it mean to not give an inch? Looking over that list, can we say we haven’t fought enough? Did we somehow fail to let secular Americans know that we disapprove of what they’re doing? Was there some tactic or measure that we failed to employ that could have compelled culture to go our way?

Despite how it may sound, it’s not my intention to criticize these combatants. We are all, I trust, trying to faithfully follow God in a world with many temptations and snares; for me to say that “I, unlike these others, know exactly what this should look like” would be the height of arrogance. Following God sometimes means speaking out against immorality or error and standing up for the victims of injustice - in other words, fighting. The issues that we fight over often come out of a commendable and correct desire to see Christ as Lord over every aspect of our lives, to leave no activity or item unexamined. God may call believers to different battlefronts and give them passion about different causes, and I believe that God can use even misguided zeal of someone who truly seeks to follow him. Conflicts that seem unnecessary or even silly from the perspective of our current time period or setting may be more important than we realize in another. (Paul wrote that idols are nothing while also recognizing that, in the setting of the Corinthian church, eating meat offered to idols could cause Corinthian Christians real spiritual harm.)

But fighting can become a substitute for following - maybe because we become so convinced of our own rightness that we decide we can judge others, or maybe because straightforward standards of right and wrong are easier to understand and control than pursuing an infinite God whose holiness we can never live up to, or maybe because fighting obvious immorality that we personally don’t struggle with is easier than facing our own sin. Or maybe it’s simply that we’re afraid - afraid to see a society that’s changing and falling away from religion, afraid of hostility and harassment and losing cultural clout, afraid of whether our own churches and families and children will be able to remain faithful - and so we fight in the only way we know how, instead of trusting Jesus’ promise that the gates of hell will never prevail.

Because, ultimately, we do have to fight - but it’s a fight against our own sinfulness, vigorously training our own bodies rather than merely shadow-boxing (1 Cor 9:27), a struggle against spiritual forces (Eph. 6:12), an assault against the gates of hell (Mt 16:18), a battle to “snatch others from the fire” (Jude 23), as we’re watched by angels (Eph. 3:10) and cheered on by those who’ve gone before us (Heb. 12:1).

Not just an argument over Starbucks Christmas cups.

Bible Stories

Why do we study Bible stories? We touched on recently in looking at the lives of David, Saul, and Solomon, but it’s worth a closer look.

There are a few reasons. First is simply that they’re history, and (as high school students toiling through AP US History can attest), we’ve concluded as a society that history is worth studying. It lets us know the causes and effects that brought us to our current state of affairs; it gives us understanding and precedent to guide our future actions (“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” - George Santayana); it helps us understand and appreciate our own culture and traditions; it broadens our perspectives, giving us a window into the lives and cultures and perspectives of people, times, and cultures different than our own; it offers good stories, and as humans, we enjoy and draw value from good human stories.

Bible stories aren’t just history, but they are history, and they can help fulfill all of these roles.

Second, we can learn moral lessons from them. There’s biblical precedent for this; for example, in 1 Cor 10:11, Paul talks about the Israelites’ rebellion in the desert and writes, “These things happened to them as examples and were written for our instruction.” In Psalm 95:8, God gives the Israelites in the desert as a negative example. Heb 11 lists numerous biblical characters and holds them up as examples of faith.

This is where many of our modern Bible studies spend their time. However, it’s possible to overdo this. In Joseph and the Gospel of Many Colors, Voddie Bauchum talks about delivering a sermon series on Genesis and, afterwards, receiving a letter from a Jewish visitor to his church thanking him for his sermon. He writes,

As I read her letter, my eyes filled with tears. However, these were not tears of joy because the Lord had used my sermon in the life of a Jew. On the contrary, these were tears of horror and shame! As I read her words, all I could think of were Paul’s words: “But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:23-24). So why wasn’t my message a “stumbling block” to this Jew? Was it because she was “being saved”? No. It was because I had not preached Christ! (p. 16)

He goes on to argue that viewing stories through the lens of moralism misses the gospel - the good news that Christ offers salvation apart from our moral acts. If we read Bible stories only for moral lessons, we risk reducing them to the level of one of Aesop’s fables or moral-of-the-episode pop culture, rather than pointing us to Christ.

Third, and deeper, the stories tell us who we are. Let me illustrate with an example from the workplace. When I joined a previous company, a software development consultancy, my knowledge of them was limited to what I read from their website and a few conversations with them over the interview and hiring process. And, since it was a fully remote position, my interactions with them were limited. However, I quickly heard the story from before I joined of how they had lined up a major contract, only to have it canceled at the last minute, and how they navigated the resulting challenges. This was a major event in the life of the company and became a part of their identity and DNA. This story told me such a wealth about who they were - the inherent uncertainties of their line of work, how they sacrificed to take care of their contractors during this trying time, the frugality and caution with which they approached finances and negotiations as a result. And, as a new member of the team, it told me a wealth about who I was expected to be - and it instilled those values in me far more effectively than any corporate onboarding training or employee handbook could.

This dynamic applies in personal relationships as well as corporate. Russell Moore writes,

New friendships are often made from stories. Whenever you meet someone new, that person may ask you, “So what’s your story?” Even when it’s not directly said, it’s an unspoken question. We tell pieces of our life stories to each other and are often happy to find those stories overlap… When you tell something of your story to a new friend, you are saying something akin to “Here’s who I am. What about you?”

Children grow up hearing stories of their parents and grandparents and learn about their family, what their family values, where they came from, and how they fit in. Growing up in a small town lets you hear stories of the town’s colorful characters and memorable events, filling this same role at the level of the community; the stories that we tell in civics and history classes serve the same role at the national level. Someone meeting their boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s parents for the first time likely hears stories from their childhood, learning more about the person who they’ve chosen to give their affections to.

Bible stories do this for us within the community of faith, because God isn’t merely saving us individually and honing our individual moral characters. He’s working throughout history to form a people for himself, and so the stories help us to see how we fit into this broader purpose of God, and the stories of God’s people in the past tells us what it means to be a part of God’s people now, and we recognize that part of the purpose of the stories of the past is so that we can be a part of God’s people now.

Or, as Rich Mullins put it more poetically in “Sometimes by Step,”

Sometimes I think of Abraham
How one star he saw had been lit for me

Fourth, and deeper still, the stories help us better know God himself. In Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller describes teaching a Bible college class.

This year I asked the students to list the precepts a person would need to understand in order to become a Christian. I stood at the white board and they called out ideas: Man was sinful by nature; sin separates us from God; Jesus died for our sins; we could accept Jesus into our hearts… and so on. Then, looking at the board, I began to ask some questions about these almost universally accepted ideas. I asked if a person could believe all these ideas were true and yet not be a Christian… The students conceded that, in fact, a person could know and even believe all the concepts on the board and yet not be a Christian. “Then there is something missing, isn’t there?” I said to the class. “It isn’t watertight just yet. There must be some idea we are leaving out, some full-proof thing a person has to agree with in order to have a relationship with Christ.”

We sat together and looked at the board for several minutes until we conceded that we weren’t going to come up with the missing element. I then erased the board and asked the class a different question: “What ideas would a guy need to agree with or what steps would a guy need to take in order to fall in love with a girl?” The class chuckled a bit, but I continued, going so far as to begin a list.

1. A guy would have to get to know her.

I stood back from the board and wondered out loud what the next step might be. “Any suggestions?” I asked the class. We thought about it for a second, and then one of the students spoke up and said, “It isn’t exactly a scientific process.” (p. 153-154)

To fall in love with God, we have to get to know him. And, to get to know someone, we can spend time with him, and we can listen to him talk, and we listen to stories about him, because stories tell us what the person did and what kind of person he is and what’s important to him - through both the stories themselves and the choice of which sequences of events were selected and organized and retold. The stories of the Bible help us fall in love with God by showing us his love, his faithfulness to his people, his willingness to act on their behalf, his desire to relate to them, and his anger at sin - at anything that interferes with this relationship.

This may help explain why so much of the Bible is story, rather than theology treatise. Because I believe that God, in his omnipotence and wisdom, and in his inspiration of Scripture, isn’t merely relaying a sequence of events; he has chosen those events and how they’re told in order for us to better know him. And, because we’re relational, story-telling creatures, this may teach us more than a theology treatise would, just as my coworkers’ story of their canceled contract taught me more than any corporate training could.

And the stories themselves become a way of spending time with God - much the same as a family or old friends spend time swapping stories. Russell Moore, again:

When we spend time with old friends and tell remembered stories… we aren’t communicating information; we’re reliving our experiences. We’re saying things like “Can you believe we got to see that?” or “Can you believe we survived that?” or “Don’t you miss that?” or “Aren’t you glad that’s over?”

It’s just another way of knowing one another—and of being known.

And the stories become a way of praising God. By re-reading and retelling the stories of God’s actions on behalf of his people in the past, we’re communicating God’s power, his faithful promise-keeping on behalf of his people, his mercy, and his love.

Stating the Obvious

At the risk of stating the obvious, Nero was not a nice man.

The fifth emperor of Rome, Nero reigned from AD 54 to AD 68. He had a widespread reputation for being “tyrannical, self-indulgent, and debauched” (Wikipedia). He killed his mother and has been suspected or accused of killing his first wife, second wife (although this is questioned by modern historians), and step-brother. After his second wife’s death in AD 65, he had a young man who resembled his second wife castrated, married him, and started treating him as a woman. He was believed to have started the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64; after the fire, he rebuilt Rome, including a new palace complex, the Domus Aurea (“Golden House”), funded by heavy taxation and devaluing the Roman currency. After the fire, he was said to have tortured and killed Christians, perhaps blaming them for the fire, and had some early Christians burned alive. Later tradition said that Peter was crucified and Paul beheaded during Nero’s persecutions. When political winds finally turned against Nero (due in part to a rebellion against his taxation), he fled to a villa outside of Rome. He planned to commit suicide, lamenting, “What an artist dies in me.” He ultimately could not go through with the deed and instead forced his secretary to kill him.

Nero remained infamous after his death; a legend soon arose that he had survived and would return to conquer his enemies and lead Rome. At least three impostors, claiming to be Nero, organized rebellions, and the belief in Nero’s return, called the Nero Revividus legend, persisted in some places for centuries. Some scholars believe that Revelation’s beast from the sea, which received a lethal wound but was healed (Rev. 13:3), is an allusion to Nero Revividus. (John, or the Spirit through John, could have easily chosen imagery and metaphors that would be familiar and vivid to John’s first leaders.)

This forms the backdrop for 1 Peter, which evangelical scholars believe was perhaps written sometime around AD 62-64. In 1 Pe 2:13-17, Peter writes:

Be subject to every human institution for the Lord’s sake, whether to a king as supreme or to governors as those he commissions to punish wrongdoers and praise those who do good. For God wants you to silence the ignorance of foolish people by doing good. Live as free people, not using your freedom as a pretext for evil, but as God’s slaves. Honor all people, love the family of believers, fear God, honor the king.

Notice what Peter does not say: “Honor the king, as long as he isn’t tyrannical, self-indulgent, or debauched.” “Be subject to the king, unless he starts fires and blames you for it.” “Honor the king under normal circumstances, but if he starts killing family members or burning people alive, feel free to verbally attack him.” 1 Peter may have been written before Nero’s persecutions started, but even then, Nero’s character wasn’t the sort that an observant Jewish Christian would approve of. And, if Nero’s persecutions would have changed things, it’s hard to imagine Peter’s inspired instruction not including that caveat.

I think of this sometimes when I see a “Let’s go, Brandon!” sign or dip my toes in the constant stream of political jokes, memes, and insults on Facebook or Twitter. Because, if Peter didn’t write, “Be subject to and honor the king, unless he’s a self-indulgent, debauched tyrant,” he certainly didn’t write, “Be subject to and honor the ruler, unless he’s a senile socialist” - or an orange-skinned grifter, or a closeted Muslim from Kenya, or an American idiot, to cover a sampling of the insults from the last twenty years of American presidential politics.

This doesn’t mean that we automatically obey those in power. Peter earlier said that, if forced to choose between God and humanity, he would obey God (Acts 5:29). And this doesn’t mean that we can never criticize those in power. Even in this passage, Peter speaks of “the ignorance of foolish people,” and John the Baptist and Jesus both have pointed criticism for political leaders (Mt 14:4, Lk 13:32). And there may even be a place for vivid or even inflammatory language; both Jesus and Paul did that if the issues they were addressing are important enough (e.g., Mt 23:27, Gal 5:12). But I’m not nearly as wise or mature as Jesus or Paul. And I also notice that the New Testament speakers’ most pointed criticisms are reserved for people claiming to be members of the religious community - those who claim to share with us a higher standard, whose actions are causing genuine spiritual danger to fellow believers. I’m afraid that many of our political memes, jokes, commentary, and slogans aren’t about offering a moral challenge or applying God’s standards or protecting fellow believers. They too often feel like just complaining, venting our spleen about situations we have limited ability to change, bonding with those who share our views by tearing down those who don’t.

Does this mean that there’s never a place for political humor? I’m not sure. Satire is a powerful tool. Humor can be healthy (especially if we’re poking fun at ourselves or those in our faction), and it can be a useful coping mechanism. And I certainly have laughed and shared the occasional critical joke. But, even if it’s not inherently wrong, I’m not sure that our constant stream of negative political humor and commentary is spiritually or psychologically healthy. If our fundamental mentality is to be one of honoring and respecting those in authority, it’s hard to reconcile that with some of the attitudes I see on Facebook and Twitter. And I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s warning in Mere Christianity about loving our enemies:

The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything - God and our friends and ourselves included - as bad, and not be able to stop doing it; we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred. (p. 91)

I’m not a fan of Joe Biden. I have from time to time complained about him. But this message from him happened to pop up in my Twitter feed sometime around Easter last year:

As we reflect today on Christ’s Resurrection, we are reminded that with faith, hope, and love — even death can be defeated. From our family to yours, we wish you hope, health, joy, and the peace of God, which passes all understanding. Happy Easter and may God bless and keep you.

This was an important reminder to me - regardless of what I think of the leadership and policies of Biden (or Trump, or Obama, or Bush), what’s far more important is whether they and I are following Christ. Paul writes about this in 2 Cor 5:15, in talking about what it means to live for Christ as ambassadors of reconciliation: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh” (ESV). Regarding our political leaders as partisan allies or enemies, as the butts of our jokes or as a means to the end of punishing our foes, is regarding them according to the flesh. Instead, let’s give them the same honor and respect that Peter gave Nero, while continuing to live as ambassadors of Christ.

80 Seconds

I recently saw an ad about an “earthquake bed” - a high-tech bed whose bedframe is actually a sturdy metal box. It has built-in sensors so that, if it detects an earthquake, it quickly drops you into the box and seals shut, protecting you from any falling debris.

There are actually two series of earthquake beds - one from Chinese inventor Wang Wenxi, and one from Russian company Dahir Insaat. Some of their iterations include built-in safety gear - food, oxygen, a fire extinguisher, etc. - to keep you safe while awaiting rescue. I can’t find the specific ad that I saw, but this CNN video shares Dahir Insaat’s concept video:

Neither creator’s bed appears to be commercially available; however, based on their specialized construction, limited development, heavy steel, and complex safety-critical devices, I’m guessing they’d cost tens of thousands of dollars if they could be purchased.

I’m sure that the ad I saw was making the rounds because of February 6’s earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. I don’t begrudge the ad or the inventions - I’m not sure how workable they are, but the goal of saving lives is commendable, and invention and research involves pursuing ideas that may or may not pan out, and trying to implement an expensive, impractical idea is often the first step toward making something cheaper and practical.

And yet there’s something so… human… about responding to tragedy by offering safety through technology, if only you can afford it.

My own response to the earthquakes is a bit closer to this song by Kimya Dawson, written in response to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake tsunami. (Warning: sensitive content.)

The earthquakes lasted 80 seconds. Over 50,000 people were killed. Since February 6, 9,000 aftershocks have been reported. Over 170,000 buildings - some of them centuries old - have been destroyed or severely damaged. Millions of people have been affected. As of Saturday, nearly 240,000 rescue workers continue to dig through the rubble, looking for victims, so they can at least give them a proper burial.

What’s an earthquake bed supposed to accomplish? Tens of thousands of dollars, times tens of thousands of people, just to be buried for weeks in the rubble of what used to be your home?

We’re quite good at controlling our environment and protecting against misfortune. Insurance, vaccinations, the Federal Reserve, building codes, sprinkler systems, irrigation, deep freezers, weather radar, floodwalls, and - yes - earthquake beds, to protect against disease, economic loss, famine, drought, fire, flood, storm. But 80 seconds shows the limits of our power.

What can we do? We call earthquakes “acts of God,” and there are rich resources within the Christian faith for developing our understanding of when and how God acts, why God allows these things to happen, and how we should respond. (“Those 50,000 who were killed when the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria fell on them, do you think they were worse offenders than all the others who live in the world? No, I tell you! But unless you repent you will all perish as well!”) But so much of the tragedy is human. From The Dispatch:

In 1999 an earthquake in western Turkey killed more than 17,000, setting off a nationwide push to demolish old construction and rebuild earthquake resistant buildings. Except many pre-1999 buildings in the poorer south remained, and many new buildings weren’t built to withstand the tremor.

[Turkish President] Erdoğan’s political rivals say shoddy new construction—encouraged by the president and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)—is in part to blame for the disaster. A recently resurfaced video from 2019 shows Erdoğan touting new construction in Kahramanmaraş following the passage of a law allowing contractors to pay a fee to spare their unlicensed buildings from demolition. “We solved the problem of 144,156 citizens of Maraş with zoning amnesty,” he said of the housing projects, some of which were destroyed in the quakes.

And some are blaming the Turkish government for playing politics:

In [Erdoğan’s] first public remarks [after the quakes], he threatened legal action against those who criticized the government… The day after the disaster, Erdoğan blocked access to Twitter, where criticism of the government was proliferating. Rescue workers quickly condemned that decision, because victims trapped under the rubble were using social media to communicate their locations to rescue teams… Demolition crews have been dispatched to destroy public records office buildings that housed building permits, along with the names and records of contractors and the public officials who approved such projects… Various aid workers also told press outlets they were pushed out of the way just as victims were being brought out of collapsed buildings, then replaced by government-affiliated aid workers who wanted to take the credit for the rescue in front of television cameras.

In Syria, the disaster has been complicated by the decade-long civil war, with the White Helmets, a volunteer group that operates in opposition-held Syrian territory, shouldering much of the burden of the rescue work.

There, too, leaders are choosing to play politics:

The United States Treasury announced a six-month freeze on sanctions against the Syrian government involving “all transactions related to earthquake relief.” Though U.S. officials insisted none of their existing penalties on Damascus targeted humanitarian aid shipments, the move followed finger-pointing from [Syrian dictator Assad’s] regime officials who wasted no time in blaming Western sanctions for their own deficient response to the catastrophe…

While his government complained about sanctions, the dictator of more than two decades has been stalling the delivery of life-saving relief for political gain. Until last week, the regime had insisted that all international assistance be routed through the Damascus government, delaying aid shipments to some of the hardest-hit areas in the country’s rebel-held northwest.

80 seconds would be devastating under any circumstances. But it’s made so much worse when profit-seeking or short-sighted politics leave infrastructure unprepared; when tyranny and war decimate a region for a decade; when protecting yourself becomes more important than open, honest information; when aid becomes a tool in bolstering someone’s political position.

Human response, therefore, becomes important: people who are willing to build strong communities and social ties that can be ready to bear the weight when disaster hits. People who help out, who volunteer their time and donate their money, even at personal risk and sacrifice. (Over two hundred White Helmets have died performing their duties over the last ten years.) People and countries who send aid rather than put their own country first, who seek to protect the poor and powerless.

Last year, singer-songwriter Nick Cave wrote,

We must love each other. And mostly I think we do – or we live in very close proximity to the idea, because there is barely any distance between a feeling of neutrality toward the world and a crucial love for it, barely any distance at all. All that is required to move from indifference to love is to have our hearts broken. The heart breaks and the world explodes in front of us as a revelation.

There is no problem of evil. There is only a problem of good. Why does a world that is so often cruel, insist on being beautiful, of being good? Why does it take a devastation for the world to reveal its true spiritual nature? I don’t know the answer to this, but I do know there exists a kind of potentiality just beyond trauma.

A Tragedy of Kings

Last month, we looked at David. His life can be viewed as a tragedy. He was Israel’s “beloved,” a man after God’s own heart, possessed of military, musical, and poetic skill, with an unbroken stream of success. However, after a single grievous sin and his further attempts to cover it up, everything seemed to go wrong for him, and he died a greatly diminished figure.

How does he fare compared to the other kings of Israel and Judah?

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Saul (1878), by Ernst Josephson; King David, the King of Israel (1622), by Gerard van Honthorst; Portrait of Solomon, the Wise King (1670), by G. Pesaro

Saul, David’s predecessor, often gets a bad rap. We understandably focus on his failures as a king: his disobedience to God in battles, his brooding mental illness / spiritual oppression (1 Sam 16:14), his jealousy and violence toward David, and his final suicide in battle against the Philistines. This is an oversimplification, though; Ronald F. Youngblood notes,

Scholarly studies of Saul, the first king of Israel, have depicted him as (among other things) villain, tragic figure, flawed ruler, naive farm-boy, degenerate madman, fate-driven pawn, reluctant king—the list goes on and on. Such characterizations are at least partially true. Saul was surely one of the most complex persons described in Scripture… Although at times moody, impulsive, suspicious, violent, insincerely remorseful, out of control, and disobedient to God, at other times he was kind, thoughtful, generous, courageous, very much in control, and willing to obey God. (Expositor’s Bible Commentary)

He starts out well. From a human perspective, he appears to be an ideal ruler: handsome, physically imposing, from a wealthy family (1 Sam 9:1-2). He never sought the kingship himself; he acts with humility throughout his anointing, coronation, and early reign (1 Sam 9:21, 1 Sam 15:17); he demonstrates restraint and mercy when people oppose him (1 Sam 10:27, 11:12-13). God “changed his innermost person” (1 Sam 10:9) and gives him a spiritual experience of ecstatic prophecy (1 Sam 10:10-11). After his coronation, he goes back to manual labor on his farm (1 Sam 11:5), rather than seeking to amass power and wealth. When the city of Jabesh-Gilead is threatened militarily, he zealously rallies Israel to their defense (1 Sam 11:6-11), in the style of the judges, thus earning a loyalty from them that lasts even after his death. Despite the Israelites’ wrong motives in asking for a king, Samuel’s speech at the beginning of Saul’s reign offers encouragement as well as warning:

Now look! Here is the king you have chosen—the one that you asked for! Look, the Lord has given you a king. If you fear the Lord, serving him and obeying him and not rebelling against what he says, and if both you and the king who rules over you follow the Lord your God, all will be well. But if you don’t obey the Lord and rebel against what the Lord says, the hand of the Lord will be against both you and your king… The Lord will not abandon his people because he wants to uphold his great reputation. The Lord was pleased to make you his own people. As far as I am concerned, far be it from me to sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you! I will instruct you in the way that is good and upright. However, fear the Lord and serve him faithfully with all your heart. Just look at the great things he has done for you! But if you continue to do evil, both you and your king will be swept away.” (1 Sam 12:13-15,22-25)

Saul continues to defend Israel for the rest of his reign (1 Sam 14:47-48, 52). Even after the Lord rejects Saul’s dynasty and kingship, Saul is shown remarkable mercy: he’s permitted to live for many more years, with his eventual successor David as a trusted lieutenant and aide, rather than being immediately judged and replaced.

However, Saul’s fearfulness and distance from God leads him to disobey, offering sacrifice without Samuel at Gilgal (1 Sam 13), then fighting timidly and foolishly against the Philistines (1 Sam 14), failing to follow God’s commandments to destroy the Amalekites (1 Sam 15), growing increasingly jealous and violent toward David, and killing the priests of Nob. It seems that, having failed once due to impatience and insecurity, he compounds those failings at each subsequent step, instead of repenting and growing. He goes from acknowledging the Lord himself (e.g., 1 Sam 11:13) to referring to him as “your“ God in talking with Samuel (1 Sam 15:30), to being completely cut off from the Lord and his prophets (1 Sam 28). His reign and life ended with the military defeat of Israel, the deaths of his sons, and his own suicide to avoid capture.

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Solomon, David’s son and successor, starts out with enormous potential. At his birth, he is named Jedediah (“beloved of the Lord”), in response to a message from the prophet Nathan - the same prophet who condemned David’s affair with Solomon’s mother Bathsheba. He begins his reign with David’s support and acts quickly to secure and strengthen the kingdom, dispensing justice to wrongdoers who had avoided judgment during David’s reign. Solomon enjoys an unprecedented period of peace: vassal states of that time would typically withhold tribute or rebel at the death of a king, to test the new king’s rule, but he experienced none of that (1 Ki 4:21, 24). He marries the daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt; Egyptian rulers had formerly refused their daughters to any foreign land, and for a descendant of Egyptian slaves to marry an Egyptian princess showed Solomon’s blessings and success. He offers huge sacrifices to God in a display of his dedication to God, and God responds directly in a dream, offering Solomon whatever he wants. In Solomon’s answer, he thanks God for his love and promises, humbly recognizes his own limitations, and asks for wisdom to serve his people. God honors Solomon’s request, making him the wisest man to ever live, and also promising him a long life, wealth, and greatness.

Solomon enjoys a long, prosperous, and successful reign: he dispenses justice, sets up an effective bureaucracy to govern his kingdom, sponsors international trade and exploration, and receives international acclaim and fame. His wisdom goes beyond leadership and legal judgments; he’s known for his psalms, proverbs, and knowledge of animals and plants. His kingdom becomes so fabulously wealthy that silver is viewed as without value. He builds a palace to cement and symbolize his rule; expands the city of Jerusalem; fortifies the strategic cities of Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer; and builds a network of store-cities to supply his military.

He builds a temple to the Lord - the long-time dream of his father David, and the culminating physical symbol of God’s decision to live among his people. At the zenith of Solomon’s reign, he dedicates the temple to the Lord in a massive and magnificent worship service where he expresses his heartfelt devotion to God:

O Lord, God of Israel, there is no god like you in heaven above or on earth below! You maintain covenantal loyalty to your servants who obey you with sincerity. You have kept your word to your servant, my father David; this very day you have fulfilled what you promised…

God does not really live on the earth! Look, if the sky and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this temple I have built! But respond favorably to your servant’s prayer and his request for help, O Lord my God. Answer the desperate prayer your servant is presenting to you today. Night and day may you watch over this temple, the place where you promised you would live. May you answer your servant’s prayer for this place. Respond to the request of your servant and your people Israel for this place. Hear from inside your heavenly dwelling place and respond favorably. (1 Ki 8:23-24, 27-30)

Woven throughout all of this success and splendor, though, are hints of trouble. Solomon’s marriage to the daughter of Pharaoh shows his power and cements a valuable foreign alliance, and Jewish tradition states that she became a Jewish proselyte, yet the Israelites are warned against foreign alliances and relations with Egypt, and Solomon seems to recognize that the marriage falls short of God’s holiness (2 Chron 8:11). He spends seven years constructing the magnificent temple of the Lord - but thirteen years constructing his own personal palace. (The fact that he was aided by David’s preparations for the temple may explain some of this but perhaps not all.) The court and kingdom are incredibly wealthy, but that wealth is created in part through significant forced labor and taxation, which spurs a rebellion after Solomon’s death. His longstanding friendship and trade with Hiram, king of Tyre, helps him build the temple and palace, yet he repays Hiram by attempting to trade twenty towns (even though those should have been considered part of the Promised Land) that left Hiram feel like Solomon was ripping him off (1 Ki 9:11-14). Solomon’s splendor and power are shown through his treasure, his army of horsemen and chariots, and his many wives, and yet Moses forbids kings from amassing treasure, horses, or wives (Deut 17:16-17).

All of this leads to disaster as Solomon’s reign progresses. His 700 wives, 300 concubines, and numerous foreign alliances become entanglements and distractions that pull him away from God. It starts, perhaps, as mutually beneficial alliances and politically expedient nods toward other nations’ religious practices, but Solomon’s emotions become entangled by his many marriages and he starts worshipping other gods himself. Out of mercy, God postpones full judgment until after Solomon’s death, but Solomon ends his reign harried by enemies to the north, south, and within, with Israel only a short time away from rebellion and a division that never healed.

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What are we to make of the lives of these three men?

All started, to varying degrees, with promise, potential, and acknowledgement of God. All showed some measure of success and service to God and his people. David and Solomon in particular showed, for all-too-brief moments, what God’s people could look like, when gathered together in faithfulness to celebrate and worship the Lord and to enjoy his goodness. All three were later brought low - Saul by his insecurities and disobedience that led to a growing darkness and distance from God, David by the devastating choices and consequences that flowed from a single act of adultery, Solomon in a prolonged process of compromise and ensnarement that turned away his devotion to God.

All three are tragedies. Like any good tragedy, they’re good stories - as in tragedies since ancient Greece, we see the tragic heroes’ virtues and flaws, we watch their falls, we experience the catharsis of pity for them and fear as we reflect on the potential for flaw and fall within our own lives.

All three form a critical part of the history of God’s dealings with his people. Saul’s failures set up the path to David’s kingship; David’s devotion to God results in the epochal promise of 1 Samuel 7, that a descendent of David would always be on the throne, that was ultimately fulfilled in Jesus; Solomon built the temple that became the center of the worship of God for centuries.

And there are good moral lessons to draw from the lives of all three. We can see how Saul’s humility and zeal, from another angle or in other circumstances of his life, can manifest as insecurity and impatience, then we can reflect on how strengths can become weaknesses if not tempered and centered in a deeper commitment to the good. David’s affair shows us the necessity of fleeing temptation, the weaknesses that exist even within a man after God’s own heart, and the importance of heartfelt repentance. Solomon’s life prompts reflection on the differences between intelligence, wisdom, earthly success, and faithfulness to God and the paradox of how material blessings can tempt us to forget God. And so on.

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Is that all, though? If we want a good tragedy, we can read Oedipus Rex or Shakespeare’s Macbeth or see Anakin Skywalker’s fall in Revenge of the Sith. The lives of Saul, David, and Solomon give moral lessons, but so do the lives of Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Tony Stark. Reading about the Israelite kings has the not-insignificant advantage that they’re part of God’s people and their accounts are divinely inspired, and they teach history in a way that the lives of Stark or Skywalker don’t, but if all we gain is some catharsis and historical knowledge and some moral teachings, we’re not seeing the whole picture.

The Israelites were called to be God’s people. Moses promised that someday they would have a king (Deut 17:14-20). We see that the kings were to represent God as his regent on earth, to shepherd God’s people, to ensure justice, to provide protection and rest so that the people could enjoy the blessings of land and divine presence that God had promised them. Yet Saul, David, and Solomon show that no human is fully up to this task - whether humble beginnings or divine prophecies from birth, unqualified success in battle or unprecedented peace, physical stature or superlative wisdom, talent or wealth or eloquence, all ended in tragedy. If even the best of humans fails, then the only way that God’s people can have a ruler who faithfully follows God and guides his people is if God himself is that ruler.

The lives of Saul, David, and Solomon, give the historical facts around the prophecies and promises of Christ, but they also show our need for Christ. The potential of Saul, devotion and strength of David, and wisdom and splendor of Solomon all foreshadow the greater strength and wisdom and lasting splendor of the Son of David.

Black Dress

Will she walk slowly
Or will she come at all
I can’t believe that I was watching
Can’t believe I made the call

I can’t get a handle on my thoughts
now Guess I’ve already made my mind
He’s a soldier in my battle
I’m the king with too much time

Will she wear that black dress
Will she wear that black dress
As holy as the night
As holy as I want to feel
I want to feel all right

— The Normals, “Black Dress”

The story of David and Bathsheba is well-known. Godly King David sees Bathsheba bathing from the roof. He sends for her, and they have an affair. To cover up the affair, he attempts to induce her husband Uriah to come home from war and sleep with her, but Uriah refuses. David instead arranges for Uriah to be killed in battle so that he can take Bathsheba as his wife without further obstacle.

What if she is angry
I know that we’re both scared
Do I look her in the eye
Or do I even dare to care

I’m drowning in desire
I’ve been good for so long
I know I’ve got no right now
But no one can tell me that I’m wrong

Will she wear that black dress
Will she wear that black dress
As holy as the night
As holy as I want to feel
I want to feel all right

Although the story is well-known, the consequences are less so. Before Bathsheba, David appeared to lead a charmed life. As the beloved of Israel (“David” means “beloved”), he won the love of Saul’s daughter Michal, the loyalty of Saul’s son Jonathan, and the praise in song of Israel’s women. He killed Goliath, earned a position as Saul’s armor-bearer and court musician, won multiple battles against the Philistines, amassed a loyal and successful group of fighting men, and survived multiple attempts on his life from a jealous, insane Saul. He was crowned king first of Judah and then of the entire nation of Israel and won many more battles. He became famous for his poetry and songs. At the culmination of his reign, he brought the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem, amidst singing, music, sacrifice, and dance, making a joyous celebration of the Lord as Israel’s God and David as his regent. And the Lord made a covenant with David, promising that his descendants would always rule.

After Bathsheba, everything went wrong. His first son by Bathsheba died. His son Amnon raped his daughter Tamar. His son Absalom murdered Amnon. Absalom led a revolt against David. David’s trusted advisor Ahithophel (Bathsheba’s grandfather) betrayed David and joined Absalom. Absalom was defeated in battle and killed, despite David’s attempts to spare his life. David had hardly returned from the battle against Absalom when the northern tribes of Israel, led by a man named Sheba, started a second rebellion. David ended his life physically weak, seemingly impotent, with an fragile kingdom that his son Solomon had to act quickly to secure.

Maybe I’ll be good
I could be gone when she gets here
I’ve still got a chance to make this one all right

My temptation’s on the stairway
My temptation’s at the door
My temptation is before me
She is standing before me in that black dress

It’s an intriguing thought - what was going through David’s head as he waited for Bathsheba? Could he have “been good”? From my own experience with temptation and sin, I’d guess that the answer is no - “maybe I’ll be good” is true in the abstract, but in practice it’s a lie to silence a conscience that’s still kicking against the impending action, rather than any real possibility.

In 1 Corinthians 10:13, Paul writes, “God is faithful: He will not let you be tried beyond what you are able to bear, but with the trial will also provide a way out so that you may be able to endure it.” (This sometimes gets distorted into the popular but unbiblical saying, “God will never give you more than you can handle.”) Paul writes this to encourage the Corinthian believers, after warning them of the Israelites’ failures and rebellions in the desert: even though the Corinthians will face temptations, like the Israelites did, God will enable them to stand firm. And I believe that this promise applies to us as well as to the Corinthians. In my more melancholy moments, though, I wonder when God provides the way out. What if, by the time David was waiting at the top of the stairway, alone with his thoughts and his libido, the way out was in the past? Maybe the way out was to spend more time writing psalms the day before so that his thoughts would have been more heavenly-focused that night on the roof. Many people have observed that the story of David and Bathsheba starts “in the spring of the year, at the time when kings normally conduct wars” (2 Sam 11:1); if David had been in the battlefield, alongside his men, the affair could not have happened. Maybe David’s taking of multiple wives (polygamy was tolerated but never condoned in the OT, and see Deut 17:17) made it a bit too easy to take one more. Maybe living in a palace that (literally) raised David over his fellow Israelites (see Deut 17:20) made it a bit too easy to view them as merely a means to meet his wants; certainly it made it a bit too easy to spy on them. And all of this - the palace that rewarded his position and success, the wives that were expected of a king of that time, perhaps even the well-earned respite from battle - was understandable, but the consequences were catastrophic.

I’m afraid that many of our ways out are the same. How many of our angry outbursts, petty selfishnesses, white lies, or opportunities for good passed over due to cowardice or laziness or self-absorption - to say nothing of the bigger abuses and addictions and betrayals and failures - can we honestly hope to avoid in the heat of the moment? And how many of them instead have as the way out to read the Bible, to pray, to fellowship with believers, to practice a lifestyle of serving others rather than using or ignoring them, so that we have the strength to stand firm when the trial does come?

As I said, this is a melancholy line of thought. I’d like to think that I’m capable of doing the right thing, that all I have to do is muster enough willpower or find the right technique or make the correct New Year’s resolution. What if, instead, there are trials which I haven’t even dreamed of bearing down in me in the future, and I’ve already missed the way out due to my failure to pursue God in the past? “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:24)

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The Normals’ song “Black Dress” ends with David’s crushing sin with Bathsheba. But, in the song that immediately follows on their album, they sing:

Oh, we of little faith
Oh, You of stubborn grace

We are the beggars, we are the beggars
We are the beggars at the foot of God’s door

We’ve known the pain of loving in a dying world
And our lies have made us angry at the truth
But Cinderella’s slipper fits us perfectly
And somehow we’re made royalty with You

We are the beggars, we are the beggars
We are the beggars at the foot of God’s door
You have welcomed us in

— The Normals, “We Are The Beggars”

Cyber Damage

I hurt my back last week. I was carrying a heavy box and pivoted at the waist to try to manuever something else, and my back really didn’t like that. I probably would have been okay if I weren’t still recovering from an earlier back injury that resulted from leaning to move a bag of mulch.

By itself, this isn’t very interesting. “Middle-aged man’s body doesn’t work as well as it used to” is hardly newsworthy; “lift with your legs, not with your back” is not revolutionary advice. What’s more surprising to me is how quickly and easily the injuries happened. The box and bag were heavy but well within the limits of what I thought I could handle, and the actions only took a few seconds each, but the resulting injuries were felt for days or weeks. Engineers design their vehicles, machinery, and tools with safety tolerances to ensure that they’ll be able to withstand the forces upon them, and yet I suspect even a high school physics student could calculate the forces and leverage that I placed on my joints and realize that it wasn’t going to end well for me. It’s surprising how easily my strength to act exceeds my strength to handle the results of my actions.

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Wendell Berry is an American novelist, poet, farmer, and Christian. As an environmental activist, he’s spoken out against nuclear power, coal power, mountaintop removal coal mining, and industrial farming. In his essay “Damage,” he describes one of his efforts to improve his farmland:

I have a steep wooded hillside that I wanted to be able to pasture occasionally, but it had no permanent water supply.

About halfway to the top of the slope there is a narrow bench, on which I thought I could make a small pond. I hired a man with a bulldozer to dig one. He cleared away the trees and then formed the pond, cutting into the hill on the upper side, piling the loosened dirt in a curving earthwork on the lower.

The pond appeared to be a success. Before the bulldozer quit work, water had already begun to seep in. Soon there was enough to support a few head of stock. To heal the exposed ground, I fertilized it and sowed it with grass and clover.

We had an extremely wet fall and winter, with the usual freezing and thawing. The ground grew heavy with water, and soft. The earthwork slumped; a large slice of the woods floor on the upper side slipped down into the pond.

The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge. The fault was mine.

I was careful to get expert advice. But this only exemplifies what I already knew. No expert knows everything about every place, not even everything about any place. If one’s knowledge of one’s whereabouts is insufficient, if one’s judgment is unsound, then expert advice is of little use.

With a palpable sense of guilt, he goes on to reflect on how he caused “a lasting flaw in the face of the earth… that wound in the hillside, my place” that can heal only “in the course of time and nature.” He reflects on how art and culture can make a “map” or “geography of scars” such as the one on his hillside, reflecting the past damage caused by our lack of wisdom, in hopes that future people can learn wisdom and learn their limitations from them. He concludes by quoting poet William Blake:

Blake gives the just proportion or control in another proverb: “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.” Only when our acts are empowered with more than bodily strength do we need to think of limits…

But a man with a machine and inadequate culture-such as I was when I made my pond-is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

As I sat nursing a sprained back muscle, I questioned Berry’s reading of Blake; I’m not even convinced that I can be trusted with my own bodily strength. But this helps prove Berry’s broader point: if we can’t necessarily be trusted with our own bodily strength, then what makes us think we can handle a bulldozer, a power plant, an industrial farm?

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It’s popular to hate on social media nowadays. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that it’s helped make us “uniquely stupid” and contributed to rising polarization; Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen accused Facebook of prioritizing their own profits and growth over their users’ well-being; recent research provides further evidence that Facebook is harmful to users’ mental health; and so on. And that’s before getting into the more partisan debates and accusations (“They spread misinformation and conspiracy theories!” “They’re censoring our free speech!” “They’re helping the far right!“ “They’re pawns of the far left!“); the constant scrutiny, critiques, and foibles of their tech billionaires founders and would-be owners; or various cybersecurity concerns (such as the recent Twitter whistleblower, Peter “Mudge” Zatko, or concerns over the Chinese Communist Party’s involvement in TikTok).

The root problem might be more fundamental than that, though. On a recent podcast, author Cal Newport describes what he calls “Twitter’s cybernetic curation distribution algorithm,“ with “the effect of all of these individuals making retweet/non-retweet decisions, all pushing and pulsing through a power law graph / topology graph… [that] does a really good job of centering or surfacing things that are interesting or engaging or would catch our attention.” When I hear “cybernetic,“ I’m enough of a sci-fi geek that I start thinking of these guys:

S.C.F., by ptitvinc

In sci-fi such as anime, literature, and tabletop or video games, cyborgs are humans who’ve replaced significant parts of their bodies with high-tech equipment. Sometimes this is done to replace body parts damaged by trauma. Often, though, it’s done to enhance their abilities beyond normal human capacity - heightened strength and durability, electronic senses, built-in weaponry, and so on. (I don’t have much need for built-in weaponry, but a cybernetic spine would have saved me some pain.) In many fictional works, the replacements often come with downsides, such as a reduced sense of touch, or a psychological sense of alienation from other humans; some works do this as part of a Serious Examination of What It Means To Be Human, while more gaming-oriented settings might do it just to discourage players from tricking out their characters with every piece of cybernetic gear possible.

Speaking more realistically and more technically, “cybernetic“ is defined as “control and communication in the animal and the machine“ (Normal Weiner). As applied to Twitter, Cal Newport’s point seems to be that Twitter is the result of interaction between the “animal“ (humans decisions and actions to tweet, reply, and retweet) and the machine (Twitter’s servers sharing people’s tweets with each other and analyzing tweets to decide what are most interesting / relevant / shareable / viral, based on what people have revealed of their interests).

Just like a sci-fi cyborg, the result is strength well beyond normal human capacity: an endless stream of engaging, sometimes addicting, content; the ability to view in real time the shared thoughts of society’s elites, friends, strangers from around the world; the potential to have thousands or millions of people interact with what you have to say. And, just like a sci-fi cyborg, there are downsides: a reduced sense of touch and a sense of alienation from the people on the other side of the screen, as facial expressions and nuance and gestures are stripped away, as complex thoughts and discussions are crammed into 280 characters, as the platform’s incentives push people to forget the humanity of those they’re interacting with and engage in increasingly extreme behavior to get likes, go viral, and fit in with their similarly incentivized online peers.

And, if Wendell Berry is right, if we scarcely have the wisdom to handle a bulldozer or a power plant - if our own musculature can exceed what our strengths can sustain - then what hope do we have of handling the power law graph / topology graph of a cybernetic curation distribution algorithm?

Our online world is changing so rapidly; how can we possibly have a chance to build up Berry’s geography of scars to learn our limitations there?

Plenty of solutions have been proposed: Give up social media, get more government involvement, put the right person in charge. Many of these solutions are, I think, a bit facile. Maybe we should start smaller: Practice the humility of recognizing the limits of our wisdom. Don’t overexert our strengths - don’t do something just because we can. Be sensitive to the damage that our strength may be causing to others or to our environment. Be human more. Be cybernetic less.