Notes from my Knapsack 5-12-22
Jeff Gill
How we got where we are
___
There's a quote often passed around credited to Ed Deming or Peter Drucker, that appears to go back to a Procter & Gamble executive named Arthur W. Jones. It fits all of the above, and is useful to think about.
"All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get."
In other words, if you don't like your outcomes, you need to change your processes, your operations, even your leadership.
This gets trickier with communities and even, I'll venture, cultures. But I think it's a truth, or at least a truism, we should engage with. If our community is perfectly designed to create the results we're getting, what does that mean?
One thing I keep coming back to is the continued eruption of "self-storage facilities" across the country. We have so much stuff (and yes, I could use a different word for stuff) that we pay people a deceptively small amount to build a cheap enclosure with a lock on the door and let us use it by the month or year. If you have a storage unit, I invite you to multiply your monthly rental times twelve and contemplate it. I can wait.
Yeah, that's more than you thought? Wait until you multiply that figure times five or ten. Then compare that amount to the value of the stuff. Hey, I'm not saying storage units are a scam, I'm not blasting the rates charged, I'm asking about the outcomes we're creating.
Our culture is perfectly designed to cause us to purchase and hold onto more stuff (ahem) than we can keep in our living quarters, which themselves are on average double the square footage of the generation before us. Interesting to consider, no?
Likewise, as I shuttle frequently between Columbus and Indianapolis, I see the expansion of vast inhuman structures all along our expressways. I'm not saying the businesses in them are inhumane; I don't know enough to have an opinion. But the lack of human scale along our highways, the building of vast expanses on concrete pads with tip-up concrete walls with steel supports propping up trusses and light metal roofing, each with a small somewhat human scaled habitation of sorts wedged into one corner . . . oh, I get it! Way stations for stuff, on its way from manufacture to sales to consumption.
Then we store it in a vast distribution of units as well as attics and basements and garages around the country. Our society is perfectly designed to cause us to consume and squirrel away and . . . hmmm. If this isn't the outcome we want, how do we change it?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's thinking out loud is all. Tell him about your relationship with stuff at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Monday, May 02, 2022
Faith Works 5-6-22
Faith Works 5-6-22
Jeff Gill
Worrying about the wrong thing wrongly
___
First, let me just lay some scripture down as a marker: "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." That's in Matthew.
Also, "Do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes." That's in Luke.
Then there's Paul in Second Timothy: "Don't have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels."
Yeah, I know.
What I am willing to stick my oar into is the maelstrom around "critical race theory," or perhaps you say "Critical Race Theory" but we can all just save me the typing and put CRT. We're being told we should worry about CRT. It's become a topic for legislation and educators and preachers and churches, and that's kinda in my wheelhouse. So here goes.
Before I got right with God, if not with seminary, I spent some time in college wandering in the wilderness of pre-law courses and over the years around a great many lawyers, most of whom are lovely and charming individuals. Likewise for judges. And I'd say anyone thinking about theological study in particular or ministry in general would be blessed by a couple of classes in Constitutional Law. It's a marvelous discipline, and a model for theological thinking except I believe the influence actually runs the other way. Anyhow.
There is, emphatically, a field of study called "critical legal theory." CRT is a subset of that concept; critical legal theory looks at matters of legislation and jurisprudence and asks (or interrogates, if you're being all academical about things) where we got ideas like the three-fifths compromise, and how those adaptations, while void in strict application today, are still playing a role in our governance and social interactions through the practice of law.
No shock here, race plays a role in stuff like how the Constitution (salute!) got written the way it did, and how it has played out with amendments and the stray Civil War and various Supreme Court rulings. Hence, critical legal theory has produced a stream of thought called critical race theory. Or, CRT.
In the contentious politics of our day — and I'm writing this is what I anticipate will be a blessed interlude after the primaries are over, but before the fall midterms get roiling in a boiling — CRT has become the cart into which we put all our preferred dislikes. If we don't like it, says a hearty contingent of conservative elected officials, it's CRT, so let's ban it. As many wiser than I have already tried to outline, the big problem is making almost any discussion of race or racism equal CRT is just asking for trouble. Likewise, if you want to argue that racism is over (we elected Obama, etc.) I think that's simply not going to hold up. Nor would I agree with someone who says racism is "worse than it ever has been in this country," a discussion in which I tried not to spit out my coffee.
What I worry about as a Christian preacher and leader is actually not that churches or schools might talk too much about race and racism, let alone about CRT however defined. Our problem is that as CRT is derived from critical legal theory, critical legal theory is itself a subset of critical theory, and there's the real problem.
Critical theory has been around quite a while, plenty of simple primers online you can read to sum it up, and I ran smack into it during college myself which was (off) a few decades back. In brief, critical theory says that reality is socially constructed. Yeah, just about all of it. How we see everything is entirely artificially generated by the Matrix, and . . . wait, different topic. BUT: those movies are riffing on this set of ideas, that we are perceiving differently than things actually are, and by changing language we change perceptions on one level, and reality on another.
Here's the thing. I worry about critical theory, but I do not want to ban it. I want to argue with it. I dispute both its epistemology, and its application to life in general. More to come!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working on interpreting reality like we all do. Don't we? Tell him how you refute Bishop Berkeley at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Worrying about the wrong thing wrongly
___
First, let me just lay some scripture down as a marker: "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." That's in Matthew.
Also, "Do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes." That's in Luke.
Then there's Paul in Second Timothy: "Don't have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels."
Yeah, I know.
What I am willing to stick my oar into is the maelstrom around "critical race theory," or perhaps you say "Critical Race Theory" but we can all just save me the typing and put CRT. We're being told we should worry about CRT. It's become a topic for legislation and educators and preachers and churches, and that's kinda in my wheelhouse. So here goes.
Before I got right with God, if not with seminary, I spent some time in college wandering in the wilderness of pre-law courses and over the years around a great many lawyers, most of whom are lovely and charming individuals. Likewise for judges. And I'd say anyone thinking about theological study in particular or ministry in general would be blessed by a couple of classes in Constitutional Law. It's a marvelous discipline, and a model for theological thinking except I believe the influence actually runs the other way. Anyhow.
There is, emphatically, a field of study called "critical legal theory." CRT is a subset of that concept; critical legal theory looks at matters of legislation and jurisprudence and asks (or interrogates, if you're being all academical about things) where we got ideas like the three-fifths compromise, and how those adaptations, while void in strict application today, are still playing a role in our governance and social interactions through the practice of law.
No shock here, race plays a role in stuff like how the Constitution (salute!) got written the way it did, and how it has played out with amendments and the stray Civil War and various Supreme Court rulings. Hence, critical legal theory has produced a stream of thought called critical race theory. Or, CRT.
In the contentious politics of our day — and I'm writing this is what I anticipate will be a blessed interlude after the primaries are over, but before the fall midterms get roiling in a boiling — CRT has become the cart into which we put all our preferred dislikes. If we don't like it, says a hearty contingent of conservative elected officials, it's CRT, so let's ban it. As many wiser than I have already tried to outline, the big problem is making almost any discussion of race or racism equal CRT is just asking for trouble. Likewise, if you want to argue that racism is over (we elected Obama, etc.) I think that's simply not going to hold up. Nor would I agree with someone who says racism is "worse than it ever has been in this country," a discussion in which I tried not to spit out my coffee.
What I worry about as a Christian preacher and leader is actually not that churches or schools might talk too much about race and racism, let alone about CRT however defined. Our problem is that as CRT is derived from critical legal theory, critical legal theory is itself a subset of critical theory, and there's the real problem.
Critical theory has been around quite a while, plenty of simple primers online you can read to sum it up, and I ran smack into it during college myself which was (off) a few decades back. In brief, critical theory says that reality is socially constructed. Yeah, just about all of it. How we see everything is entirely artificially generated by the Matrix, and . . . wait, different topic. BUT: those movies are riffing on this set of ideas, that we are perceiving differently than things actually are, and by changing language we change perceptions on one level, and reality on another.
Here's the thing. I worry about critical theory, but I do not want to ban it. I want to argue with it. I dispute both its epistemology, and its application to life in general. More to come!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working on interpreting reality like we all do. Don't we? Tell him how you refute Bishop Berkeley at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
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