Book Review: Shop Class as Soul Craft

I recently finished the book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford. It has been sitting on my bookshelf waiting for me for months, and it was well worth the time it took me to pick it up and read it. The book has some things in common with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, to which it is often compared, but is a much more focused and polemical book. I don't mean "polemical" in a negative way, but it is true that Crawford has a point to make: manual trades are just as important as "knowledge work." Further, denigrating trades as though they were for those who are less smart or couldn't hack it in the new "knowledge economy" is seriously flawed from pyschological, economic, and philosophical points of view. We are poorer in every way when we misunderstand the nature of physical work. This seems like common sense, and yet the trend in education and other social fields has been a pernicious erosion of the value of manual work.

All I can say about this book is "yes, yes, yes." I agree with virtually every point Crawford makes that I can possibly critique, and I found much of his rich historic analysis (he does have a PhD in Political Philosophy) fascinating. Like many good books, he often finds a way of naming things that I only intuitively perceived. For example, he does a great differentiation between a "crew" and a "team." For the sake of his argument he was talking about "teams" as they commonly form in the office environment. He picks apart the vague and unmeasurable goals, the petty politics of power and influence, and all the other common pathologies of office work. Then he defines "crews" as groups of people focused on accomplishing a concrete task (such as building a house). There is a transparency to the work--you either hang a door correctly or you failed, and everyone who encounters the door knows it. In a crew, there is instant and obvious accountability to all the other people on the crew. Influence and power accrue by default to those with the most skill and expertise. You can't bluff your through as part of a crew.

Maybe this is why I like being a part of a crew that races sailboats, or a crew that builds canoes. There isn't much political nonsense in those endeavours. You shape a rib correctly or you don't. You hammer in a tack correctly or it must be redone. You call a lay-line right on the skipper has to tack and tack at the pin (wasting precious time and distance). Meanwhile, the vast majority of my work in church land is impossible to evaluate in a meaningful way. Sometimes I get an "attaboy" when it's a particularly visible or successful project or event. When I preach a particularly good sermon or something like that. But the vast majority of what I do can't be evaluated. This is just the nature of the kind of work I do, and I learned long ago that I would have to rely on self-validation, or perhaps the consolations of the Holy Spirit, rather than rely on exterior sources. So when I get a nice letter from a parishioner I file it away. When a colleague compliments me I enjoy the warm feeling, but I don't rely on either.

So how does the Holy Spirit give me feedback? That's a great question (and is far beyond what Crawford would be comfortable exploring). I'd say it starts in prayer. When I'm praying, really praying, by myself and according to my own tastes, I often feel that God is present and that I am aligned with God's purposes (at least for those minutes of prayer). That's very comforting to me. Occasionally I'll receive a stronger "showing"--perhaps a VERY strong feeling or a vision/impression of some sort. Maybe a dream. Just as often, the feedback will come in the form of a seemingly random event that confirms an impulse. Often these involve other people. For instance, one particularly dark time many years ago I was very unhappy. Then, out of the blue, I received a sextant that my father sent me. It was a WW II vintage aviation sextant of the sort my grandfather once used to fly back and forth across the pacific. The imagery of "The Navigator" is one of the metaphors I use to think of myself, so the sextant has always been a powerful symbol of my identity and calling. At the time I was praying heavily, and that helped, but receiving this sextant seemed like a wonderful answer to those prayers.

A more recent example would be how I've been praying that God would send me guidance about where lead Church of The Messiah. I believe those prayers have been answered by a very strong "leading" and some new people coming into the extended life of our church. When God sends me people like DS and BS (I don't want to embarrass them), I take it is as a celestial pat on the back.

Matthew Crawford

Anyway, back to the book! Crawford argues (successfully, IMHO) that we have come to emphasize, in our school system, one career track. The notion that everyone should go to to college (and perhaps graduate school) and work with their mind in just nonsense. Good plumbers are essential to making civilization flourish, and the work they do requires just as much excellence and intellectual engagement as anything done in front of a computer. So we need to advocate for including the manual arts in all levels of education, otherwise we're going to raise a generation that can't even assemble Ikea furniture on their own!

The ministry analogue, btw, would be people who start in a parish and I have no idea how lead a group in any kind of brainstorming process, who can't manage conflict, and who have no idea how to hire a person, update a website, or do any of the other hundreds of tasks necessary to make a church run. I'm surprised by the number of seminaries I've met who haven't even heard of Family Systems Theory, the Alban Institute Church Size Topology, or many other practical bits of knowledge that I use constantly.

If you are involved at all in education, especially of young people, read this book. If you care about your stuff and where it comes from, read this book. If you want to know more about knowing, read this book!

Sermon - Pentecost 2011

In this sermon for Pentecost I explained a new way of approaching the "problem" of church. Rather than looking at it as though it were a recipe with some missing ingredient, I looked at it like a piece of Origami. Church-as-folding problem means that we can assume that we will still have all the same elements, but we seek to arrange them in a new way. Folding is getting a lot of attention in the world of science because it is a fundamental piece of conceptual architecture necessary for understanding String Theory in physics and protein formation (DNA) in biology. In turns out that that "folding" is something that happens a lot in our universe, and working with that knowledge has born fruit in the "hard" science.

So what does our theology (particularly our understanding of liturgy and ecclesiology--that is, worship and church itself) benefit from this framework? Well, for one thing, it helps move us past the confetti of post-modernism: the bits and scraps and fragments that we, in church land, keep trying to arrange into some kind of mosaic that makes narrative sense our a fragmented world. The old prayerbooks and bibles have been shredded, and we put the pieces together to create a meaningful experience by taking a little from this book and little from this other one. The problem is that in liturgy, to take one example, the effort to create a mosaic sometimes devolves into "Fraken-Liturgy"--a grotesquely imbalanced creature whose un-natural origin is evident to all. In an Origami approach, it is understood that the entire tradition is still present, only it's been folded around into a new arrangement.

For example, imagine an origami leaflet. The congregation receives, when they arrive at the church site, a single piece of paper that has been folded into some kind of a shape. As they unfold it, the liturgy itself is revealed. But perhaps this is not a linear liturgy like we are used to. Maybe instead of flowing, temporally, from gathering to word to table, people flow physically from one area to another. This kind of stational liturgy is in our church DNA, actually, and certainly evident in larger churches where you might find little chapels and prayer areas and votive stations and displays set up. This is worship as environment rather than worship as event. The secular analogue would be architecture rather than drama. People have plenty of experience encountering spaces and inhabiting them, even spaces with a strongly pedagogical intention (think of class rooms, museums, and art galleries).

So once this origami leaflet is completely unfolded and laid flat it functions as a map of both the conceptual and physical space. Suddenly the unity of the liturgy becomes available in a new way. Rather than merely repeating a cyclic story attempting to create drama by suspending our own knowledge of how it ends, the participants are never asked to surrender that knowledge at all. The power comes not from the sequential build-up of tension and then climax as in drama, but in the depth that comes from going down, down, down deeper into knowing a space on its own terms.

Epistemologically speaking, we might expect more change out of people with this approach. There is much more discovery in it, much more participation as the group cooperatively makes worship together. It moves us in the exact opposite direction of movie-theatre style worship with its hierarchies of knowledge and provider-consumer dialectic.

Another appeal of this approach is that it lends itself to adapting another important conceptual framework: fractals. Fractals are a phenomenon where the smaller parts of something resemble or repeat the pattern of the whole. For example, if you look at branch of lightening, you will see a similarity between a very small branch and the entire structure. Snow flakes are also a common example. When we start talking about the Holy Trinity, we quickly get into fractals as we grab examples from nature to show that the fingerprints of Trinitarian thinking are everywhere.

Another thought has to do with the way that mutation works. As we disassemble and reassemble the Gospel, we are actually encoding it and decoding in such a way as to produce variations and mutations. Most of these will be dismissed as noise in the process, but a few of these mutations might be good enough to spur evolution.

So this is something I'm puzzling through right now. Not abstract at all, since I can easily how these concepts find application in parish life. If I want to create a transformational experience of church community, than I need new tools to configure the elements that I've got. I can't assume that some magic element is going to be added into the mix!



-t

The Power of PowerPoint

When this PowerPoint slide meant to illustrate the complexity of the war in Afghanistan was first shown to a room full of American and Allied Commanders, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal quipped, "When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war." Everyone laughed. According to a NYTimes article, this slide has become emblematic of how the U.S. Military has become PowerPoint obsessed. Now there is a brewing backlash within the U.S. Military against PowerPoint:

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.” (Source)

I love that line coming from a General--"Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable." No kidding. If, as the old adage goes, "To a man with a hammer every problem looks like a nail," then we must beware of how tools like PowerPoint can overly determine our perception of reality.

This is why I sometimes worry about tools in church land like NCD (Natural Church Development). I think it's a great place to start (and I look forward to doing it at COTM), but does it oversimplify the complexity of parish life? I would like to hear from churches that have done two or three cycles of NCD and see if they feel they have run into the limitations of the NCD paradigm, yet.

Back to PowerPoint. There have been several essays in military science journals about the epistemology of PowerPoint--that is, how one thinks with PowerPoint. This one by Starbuck (Capt. Crispin Burke) responded to an earlier essay by retired Marine Colonel TX Hammes. The title of the Hammes essay, Dumb-dumb bullets: As a decision-making aid, PowerPoint is a poor tool, pretty much says it all about how some people feel in the military. What seems to bother people the most is "fuzzy" bullet points that lack actual information. Indeed, PowerPoint is more about persuasion than data.

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.” (source)

It is sobering to consider that one of the significant causes of the Shuttle Columbia disaster, according to the Accident Review Board report, was the improper use of PowerPoint by NASA. "The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA" (source). One slide in particular (prepared by Boeing--sorry dad) earned the ire of the Accident Review Board:

• The vaguely quantitative words "significant" and"significantly" are used 5 times on this slide, with de facto meanings ranging from "detectable in largely irrelevant calibration case study" to "an amount of damage so that everyone dies" to "a difference of 640-fold." None of these 5 usages appears to refer to the technical meaning of "statistical significance."
• This vague pronoun reference "it" alludes to damage to the protective tiles,which caused the destruction of the Columbia. The slide weakens important material with ambiquous language (sentence fragments, passive voice,multiple meanings of "significant"). The 3 reports were created by engineers for high-level NASA officials who were deciding whether the threat of wing damage required further investigation before the Columbia attempted return. The officials were satisfied that the reports indicated that the Columbia was not in danger,and no attempts to further examine the threat were made. The slides were part of an oral presentation and also were circulated as e-mail attachments.

(source)

Basically, as these slides were passed up the chain of command, people glossed over them and took the tone to mean, "don't worry," rather than, "everyone might die." According to the ARB's Report sidebar titled "Engineering by Viewgraph," a more accurate title for the slide would have been "Review of Test Data Indicates Irrelevance of Two Models."

Of course, no one is likely to die in the Diocese of Toronto because of inappropriate PowerPoint use. For one thing, I don't see a lot of use of PowerPoint in the Diocese of Toronto. Some, but not much. Generally people prefer simple paper handouts (which are often too long to actually read in the meeting, anyway). In fact, the only white board I've seen in the whole building (Dio. Toronto HQ), is the Archbishop's Office. I'm a visual guy, so I really appreciated when I was in a meeting with him once and he started using it as our group brainstormed.

So what is PowerPoint good for? TX Hammes explains:

PowerPoint is not entirely negative. It can be useful in situations it was designed to support — primarily, information briefs rather than decision briefs. For instance, it is an excellent vehicle for instructors. It provides a simple, effective way to share high-impact photos, charts, graphs, film clips and humor that illustrate a lecturer’s points. Here, the bullet can function as designed by providing a brief, simple outline of the speaker’s material that facilitates note-taking and even (one hopes) student retention. Yet even in a classroom setting, it is not appropriate for developing a deep understanding of most subjects. For that, additional reading is required. There is a reason students cannot submit a thesis in PowerPoint format. (Source)

By extension, I think PowerPoint works reasonably well for some sermons. Especially sermons that need some kind of visual element. For instance, I used PowerPoint when I preached about how church architecture shapes liturgical experience. But most of the time I'm looking for as much of a relational moment as possible, so I would rather have people looking at me than a projection screen.

Still, I thought this whole debate about the use of PowerPoint in organizational decision making is worth thinking about.

-t

Plagerism and Self-Persuasion

Remember that guy Neale Donald Walsch that wrote the "Conversations with God" series? He is being accused of plagiarism for using a well-known anecdote from another popular spiritual writer, Candy Chand (Chicken Soup for the Christian Family Soul). He was writing a Christmas essay for Beliefnet and told a heart warming story about a Christmas pageant he says he saw. Oops. Turns out the story he claimed happened to him was written 10 years ago by Chand and has made the rounds on the web ever since and appeared in the Chicken Soup series as well as elsewhere. It's even officially copyrighted.

Now, Walsch says he convinced himself that this happened to him 20 years ago and that it was an honest mistake. But that fails to explain why his version of the story matches Chand's almost verbatim. He offered this explanation:

All I can say now — because I am truly mystified and taken aback by this — is that someone must have sent it to me over the Internet ten years or so ago,” Mr. Walsch wrote. “Finding it utterly charming and its message indelible, I must have clipped and pasted it into my file of ‘stories to tell that have a message I want to share.’ I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized ... and then, somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience. (source)

Chand doesn't bite: "Quite frankly, I’m not buying it," she told the Times. It's not the first time people have tried to claim the story as their own, but it the first time a professional writer has done it. "As a professional writer, when someone appears to plagiarize, they damage the industry, they damage other writers’ credibility and they hurt the reader because they never know what to believe anymore."

Quite right. But the best line was her zinger that ended the NYTimes article about the situation: "Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not lie, and thou shalt not covet another author’s property." Lol.

But I think the real question is whether it is possible to absorb a story and make it your own in this way. Answer: "of course it is." In the television version of This American Life, there is a true story of a husband and wife where the husband has convinced himself of something that actually happened to his wife, not him. (Episode 11: "Every Marriage is a Courtroom"). I think it's perhaps quite common for people to appropriate anecdotes in this way. Of course, it's impossible to notice oneself.

So understand Chand's anger as well as how Walsch could have persuaded himself in this way. Now, are some people more prone this kind of self-suggestibility than others?

-t

Mad Scientist or False Suspect?

The New York Times ran a fascinating seven page article about Dr. Bruce Ivins, the FBI's main suspect in the anthrax letter attack back in 2001. Under scrutiny by federal investigators, Ivins committed suicide last year.

Although there is compelling evidence that Ivins was the attacker, there is no "smoking gun" that proves it conclusively. One of the interesting things to emerge, however, is his "darker" side concealed from family and co-workers. He was obsessed, for example, with College Sororities to the point where he actually stole a book of secrets and cipher device from a Sorority house. One minute he is ranting in e-mails in a way that borders on paranoia, the next he's a musician at his church.

Another thing that is interesting is how investigators became fixated on another suspect earlier in the investigation (also a scientist) and only reconsidered Ivins after a change in investigation leadership. But they were cautious to fall into the same trap and hound an innocent man. Reading the article, you get a sense of the FBI was really struggling with the massive amounts of information generated by a case like this. Putting it all together is nearly impossible. Cf. the famous Zodiac Killer case, which was also left in an unresolved state after the main suspect died.

From a purely philosophical point of view, I'm struck by how having more information in an investigation is not necessarily a good thing. In his book Blink, Malcome Gladwell argues that the human capacity for judgment is overwhelmed by too much data, and that the key to good decision making is 1) developing expertise, and 2) exposing that expertise to the right pieces of data (and not too much of it). Emergency room Doctors, for example, more accurately diagnose heart attacks when they are limited to five datums rather than be allowed to exhaustively test every possible indicator.

I believe that one of the primary skills necessary for good leadership (Pastoral or otherwise) in our time is simply managing information. Rather than assume that more and more information on a subject is a good, I think it's important to ask instead, "What do I need to know?" I think it's worthwhile to look at situations like these massive investigations to understand how to organize group thinking and leadership thinking.

-t

Decisions, Decisions

Someone (I don't know who) e-mailed me a link to this article in the New York Times about how people make decisions when those decisions affect future options. Essentially, people are loath to lose their options even when they can gain a clear good. This is more proof that how you frame a decision has a lot to do with the quality of the answer.

This also explains why people often have trouble letting go of opportunities, even when they know they can get a superior outcome by doing so...

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious — wasted time, missed opportunities. If you are afraid to drop any project at the office, you pay for it at home. (source)

-t

TMI

There is such a thing as "too much information." I'm not just talking about the "over-sharing" of personal information that makes us cringe with embarrassment--I'm actually thinking more philosophically about what goes into good decision making. You see, the popular but incorrect idea in our culture seems to be that more information means a better decision, but in fact there is very little correlation between having information about a matter and making a good decision regarding it.

The most well known explanation of this phenomenon is Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink. It's a study of how people make decisions and how, almost inexplicably, snap judgments based on limited information are more accurate than more deliberative ones. It seems that what's important is not having lots of data, but rather having only the right data.

Here's a good application of this principle--some priests coming into a parish would seek out their predecessors right away for in-depth heart-to-heart. And although I've had a few conversations with significant figures from Messiah's past and present, I'm not looking for an earful about the place. Or, at least, I didn't want to get all that information up front. Instead I wanted my first impressions and initials decisions to be based on what I found in my encounter with the parish rather than my encounter with well-meaning and informed friends of the parish.

The hard part about this is that it means turning down opportunities to "learn more." It means deliberately deciding not to ask certain questions because I'm not ready for more data--it would just confuse me!

I sometimes run into people that seek a deeper intellectual understanding of their spiritual or psychological problems because they believe (often erroneously) that understanding equals control. It does not. Although a certain amount of insight is helpful, it is not, by itself, transformative. This is one of the reasons why I've gotten increasingly impatient with insight-based preaching. It's intellectually pleasant to be surprised by "ah-ha" moments while listening to a sermon, but it doesn't actually change anything!

So far the only things that I'm really sure consistently transform and grow people are relationships, environment, and intentionality. By "intentionality" I'm really talking about the kind of mental and spiritual attention paid to something or someone. This is way beyond curiosity--it's nearest equivalent would be something like "listening."

For example, I once had a person come to me with depression. They kept wanting to talk about the reasons for their depression. But I quickly realized that this rationalization of his illness was simply a perverted attempted to have a relationship with it. But while he kept trying to talk to his depression demon with thoughts and words, it shouting back with somatic symptoms like weight gain and insomnia. I tried to tell him that he should stop trying to tell his body how it should feel and instead simply feel. If he simply took the time to listen to his own body I'm sure he would have learned something important, but instead he just kept feeding the cycle of his own depression by creating a bigger and bigger rift in his psyche.

Here's another interesting example. Back when I studied Karate I learned that it was a mistake to look at an opponents arms or legs to determine what he was trying to do. It's simply more information than is necessary or tactically useful. All you really have to do is attend to the center of your opponents body--a point just behind the belly button. It's impossible for him to make any move that does not involve some shift in this part of the body. So ever since then I've looked for that point near the center of a thing that will reveal what's going on in the rest of the system. Malcolm Gladwell calls this "thin slicing." If you want a fancier word you would call it an application of the principle of Metonymy--parts represent the whole.

All this theory is very useful when trying to decide what questions I should ask about COTM....

-t