Brady Bowman

Keturah Hickman, on the allure of being irreplaceable and the deeper joy of becoming replaceable:

When you make yourself irreplaceable, you put a time stamp on that which you love. You become a cog in the wheel. Yes, while you live you are viewed as necessary. The wheel turns and everyone is nourished. And then you are gone, an irreplaceable cog in the wheel … it stops turning. The glory days are remembered well – but what good are they when that which you offered is no longer accessible? Your gift has expired, because you lacked what it took to become a conduit – the vision clogged, stopping with you instead of flowing through you from God to others. […]

It is not an easy task to make oneself replaceable. One must deny the desire to be praised, and must commit to the hard work of instilling skill into those who are our protégé – be they students or offspring. By our witness and instruction, we can guide them to do as we see must be done. It would be easier to clean the house and bake the bread and cook the meals without interruption – and yet what good is a clean home and a full stomach if nobody can continue the good work tomorrow without you? However validating it may feel to be indispensable, our true mission is to have those under our wings become our apprentices. Instead of offering your guest a glass of water, tell your child to carry it until your child is naturally hospitable on his own.

Neil Postman:

One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.

Neil Postman:

Norbert Wiener warned about the lack of modesty when he remarked that, if digital computers had been in common use before the atomic bomb was invented, people would have said that the bomb could not have been invented without computers. But it was. And it is important to remind ourselves of how many things are quite possible to do without the use of computers. […]

Technological immodesty is always an acute danger in Technopoly, which encourages it. Technopoly also encourages insensitivity to what skills may be lost in the acquisition of new ones. It is important to remember what can be done without computers, and it is also important to remind ourselves of what may be lost when we do use them.

Along these lines, I often marvel that we sent humans to the moon in 1969 (!!). That seems utterly preposterous given the technology of that day (or, at least, what I imagine it to be).

Neil Postman, on the computer as Technopoly’s dominant metaphor:

The computer redefines humans as “information processors” and nature itself as information to be processed. The fundamental metaphorical message of the computer, in short, is that we are machines—thinking machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless. It is for this reason that the computer is the quintessential, incomparable, near-perfect machine for Technopoly. It subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and supports its claim by showing that it “thinks” better than we can.

Neil Postman:

In Technopoly…subjective forms of knowledge have no official status, and must be confirmed by tests administered by experts. Individual judgments, after all, are notoriously unreliable, filled with ambiguity and plagued by doubt, as Frederick W. Taylor warned. Tests and machines are not. Philosophers may agonize over the questions “What is truth?” “What is intelligence?” “What is the good life?” But in Technopoly there is no need for such intellectual struggle. Machines eliminate complexity, doubt, and ambiguity. They work swiftly, they are standardized, and they provide us with numbers that you can see and calculate with.

Evening, Honfleur (1886) by Georges-Pierre Seurat:

Currently reading: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel 📚

James Wood, in a strange article on evangelical preferential treatment of those on the left, repeats the common misinterpretation of James Davison Hunter’s book:

In To Change the World, sociologist James Davison Hunter argued that broad social change is driven by elites. Since that group was overwhelmingly left-liberal at the time of the book’s publication, it is easy to see how many evangelicals concluded they must show evangelistic deference toward the left. This made sense in the neutral world context. Today, however, those on the left are especially hardened to Christian teachings, and evangelicals’ overtures yield radically decreasing dividends. In the negative world, preferential treatment of the woke is less a strategy for changing the world than for signaling one’s obeisance to power.

I cite it here because I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen this (mis)interpretation offered. It only “made sense” to prioritize elites on the left if you put down Hunter’s book before the end, which I’m quite sure Wood did not…so I’m left to scratch my head. If cultural change happens, as Davison argues, not by changing individual hearts and minds “from the bottom up” but through overlapping networks of elites operating at the centers of cultural power and influence, then the obvious strategy (for those wishing to change the world) would be to “infiltrate” those sectors with Christian elite who could guide the culture in their preferred direction. The problem with this reading is that Davison does not offer this strategy—and, in fact, counsels Christians away from such a strategy. The final part of the book is his alternative: appropriately titled “faithful presence.” It is miles away from encouraging strategic targeting of “elites,” whatever their political leanings. Perhaps we ought to return to his proposal afresh; we seem to have missed it on the first go around.