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Pete Davis:

Why is commitment necessary to change? Because change happens slow, not fast. Everything that matters takes time—there are no shortcuts. Teaching a student, advancing a cause, healing a divide, rectifying an injustice, revitalizing a town, solving a hard problem, getting a new project off the ground—they all take time. If change happened quickly, we wouldn’t need commitment—our initial elation or anger would be enough. But when change takes time, we need something more—something that can get us through the boredom, distraction, exhaustion, and uncertainty that can plague any long-haul effort.

Commitment is also necessary to change because making change often looks less like designing and executing a battle plan and more like cultivating and maintaining a relationship. It is more organic than it is mechanical, more improvised than it is engineered. There are some processes we can’t “foolproof,” “scale,” or “automate.” Humans—and human institutions—are too complicated and varied to do so completely. The only way we can change institutions, communities, and people is by entering into relationships with them—by learning their nuances, by building a rapport, by having enough trust and flow to respond nimbly to unexpected circumstances. That’s why the best teachers are not the ones who have mastered the textbook—they’re the ones who have the deepest relationships with their students. It’s why the best mayors are not the smartest but the ones most faithfully committed to their city.

In his final book, Martin Luther King Jr. reflected: “The line of progress is never straight. For a period a movement may follow a straight line and then it encounters obstacles and the path bends. It is like curving around a mountain when you are approaching a city. Often it feels as though you were moving backward, and you lose sight of your goal; but in fact you are moving ahead, and soon you will see the city again, closer by.”

Indeed, what is static in successful movements is not the battle plan but the commitment to the movement’s vision and values. The sociologist Daniel Bell had a similar insight about belief. He wrote, “Gadgets can be engineered, programs can be designed… but belief has an organic quality, and it cannot be called into being by fiat. Once a faith is shattered, it takes a long time to grow again—for its soil is experience.” Again, change needs dedicated gardeners, not just clever engineers.

An addendum to the last post. Hadden Turner on “the Burdens of Speed”:

Speed, being a modern “invention”, is in one sense “unnatural”. Before mechanical time was invented (there is nothing natural about seconds, minutes, or hours - these are defined and created by the clock), speed was hard to define and impossible to quantitatively measure. Natural rhythms were determined by the sun, and by extension, the sun’s Creator. Such rhythms as the sun’s rising and setting and the pattern of the seasons were characterised by slowness, long cycles, and imperceptibility. Time was governed, it seemed, by different rules and a wholly foreign pace of life dominated the lives of our ancestors.

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Time is indeed a precious commodity - it is the ultimate limitation. We cannot make time, we can only use it up. Saving time is a misnomer - it cannot be stored, even if the advertising for time-saving devices begs to differ. We are well aware of this limitation - one of the most common complaints of the modern man is “I don’t have enough time” - which sadly is usually shorthand for, “I don’t have enough time to do all that the modern hyper-efficient society leads me to believe I need to do.”

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We need role models of slowness in our modern fast-paced age, men and women who are not afraid to go against the flow, remain in the slow lane, and who have mastered the art and virtue of slow, well-paced, and thoughtful living.

I’m also against speed in all its forms. Obviously, I don’t expect that I’ll be able to completely excise speed from my life. But I resolve to work against it with as much disciplined effort as I can muster. Slowness…that is the ticket.

William James, in a letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman dated June 7, 1899 (HT: Zena Hitz, who offered it as the concluding epigraph to her wonderful Lost in Thought:The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life):

As for me, my bed is made: I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of men’s pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, long after they are dead, and puts them on the top.

I one thousand percent endorse this sentiment. If there were a petition with these words, I would sign it. If a campaign with this slogan (admittedly not the most catchy), I’d support it. If a charity with this mission, I’d give to it. I make it my mission to oppose bigness and greatness in all their forms.

Martha Nussbaum:

There is a kind of striving that is appropriate to a human life; and there is a kind of striving that consists in trying to depart from that life to another life. This is what hubris is–the failure to comprehend what sort of life one has actually got, the failure to live within its limits…the failure, being mortal, to think mortal thoughts. Correctly understood, the injunction to avoid hubris is not a penance or denial–it is an instruction as to where the valuable things for us are to be found.

Ellen Davis (HT: Wesley Hill):

Cultivating unsettledness about biblical language and unsettledness about our own—these are good reasons for studying Hebrew and Greek. But perhaps the best reason is the most obvious: reading in the original languages slows us down, and reading the text more slowly is essential for learning to love the Bible. As we know from other areas of experience, giving careful attention is not just an outcome of love; it is part of the process of growing in love. We love best those for whom we are obligated to give regular, often demanding, care: a child, an animal, a sick or elderly person, a plot of land or an old house. Inching patiently through the Greek or Hebrew text is best seen as ‘an act of charity’—ultimately, charity toward God. Poring over every syllable, frustration notwithstanding, we affirm the ages-old conviction of the faithful that these words of Scripture are indeed ‘some molten words perfected in an oven seven times.’