Awake O Sleepers
By Charles Rush
August 31, 2008
Matthew 26: 42-46
[ Audio
(mp3, 7.8Mb) ]
ake, O Sleepers”… These are the actual last words of Jesus to the disciples before he is executed. It is true that there is some more communication after the resurrection but these are Jesus' parting words. I've long thought that too little has been made of this fact.
There
are many levels of moral and spiritual sleep but what strikes me are the subtle
ways that we become anesthetized through processes and routines that make up
our day. Most of them are absolutely banal which is why we don't really pay
attention to the way they are structuring our consciousness. I don't need or
want Microsoft auto-correcting my prose but it just comes with the territory.
And perhaps you saw the article in the Atlantic Monthly this summer ‘Is Google
making us dumber?' which points out that the sites you are first directed to
are the most popular, least academic, and most obvious.
A decade
ago, before we all became fluent in new idiom of Starbucks, I was in line with
a dozen other sleepy commuters at 6:30 in the morning, looking for a shot of
joe. My turn comes and the overly perky barista says to me, ‘what can I get you
sir'?
I said,
“I'd like a small coffee.” I didn't want to learn the whole idiom, I just
wanted some joe.
She
says, “You mean a tall?”
Loud
enough for everyone to hear I repeated, “No I mean a small.”
Still
perky, she says, “Sir, tall is small”
I'm
perplexed so I respond, “and War is Peace” to the amusement of all the
commuters that could recall George Orwell's propaganda slogans from Big Brother
in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. (By the way, the other two slogans from Big Brother were
‘Freedom is Slavery' and ‘Ignorance is Strength).
When
historians review the last century, they generally date its beginning around
the onset of the First World War. And they do that because that war turned out
to be qualitatively different than all wars previous to it. It was the first
war where our accumulated processes of organization, which had been gathering
force since the advent of the Industrial age, actually came together to unleash
a force of destruction that had never been witnessed before. We estimate that
more people actually died fighting in World War I than in all previous wars in
the West combined dating back to the Roman Empire. Moreover, the uncontrolled
use of mustard gas and chemical warfare exterminated soldiers impersonally and
this very motif we would later see tragically systematized in the holocaust in Germany, in the Gulag in Russia, in the
25 million people starved in Mao's Cultural Revolution. It was really here that
the virtue of our organization became concentrated as a moral threat such that
we needed to be saved from ourselves. We need to be saved from the systems that
we create for ourselves that structure us in ways we could not have predicted
and cannot actually corral.
I was
reminded of that last February, standing in the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, looking at a photo I hadn't seen
in years. It was a simple photo of Adolf Eichmann taken during his trial, an
unassuming man you would likely not notice watering the grass in his neatly
manicured lawn. He was symbolic of the era because his trial was covered
world-wide in the early 60's. Eichmann was in charge of running the train
system for Nazi Germany, so a good part of his job description was to
co-ordinate the trains that would take Jews from all across Europe
to the death camps. Nazi hunters finally caught up with Eichmann in Argentina and with great fan-fare, he was
extradited to Israel
for trial. Everyone the world over was curious as to what kind of monster he
would turn out to be.
Hannah
Arendt covered his trial for The New
Yorker and what she described was actually more disturbing that an
ideological fanatic or a sadist of Hannibal Lecter proportions. Mr. Eichmann
was a man of typically German organization. He was neat in appearance and
polite, almost to a fault. He answered all the questions put to him by his
Israeli interrogators and actually described in vivid detail the process through
which the German transportation system worked during World War II and the
logistically challenges that his department had to face.
They
asked him about running low on fuel during the latter years of the war, when
the Allies effectively cut off outside shipments of petroleum to the Nazi war
machine. They would ask him, ‘how did you keep the trains running?' He would
answer something like, ‘Whew that was really tough… We had to go to this
ministry and that ministry and trade or barter just to keep our office open.'
Eichmann
appeared somewhat confused through the whole trial. He repeatedly claimed to
have no personal antipathy for Jews remarking occasionally that some of his
friends were Jewish (although he couldn't remember their names). He would
occasionally apologize to the prosecutors over the fact that he hadn't risen
any higher in the S.S. than he did. He cited hard luck, the fact that his
administrative skills were never sufficiently appreciated by Himmler. He was
actually proud of the job that he had done.
When the
prosecutors would lead him to reflect on the wider significance of his job,
teasing to the edge, his eyes would grow blank. If he were asked to make some
moral judgment on his role in the Nazi genocide machine, he would regularly
regurgitate phrases in German that no one really understood until they realized
that he was repeating propaganda slogans from posters that adorned Nazi offices
during the war. Hannah Arendt said that it appeared that he was trying to
re-invoke the ideological world-view of Nazism so that he could go back to a
place and a world where his job and his role all made sense. Being unable to
actually step out of that world and reflect on it critically, Eichmann turned
out to be something actually worse than a raging demon everyone feared. He was
a faceless bureaucrat that really didn't think at all about the wider
significance of his place, his role, in his time.
After he
was pronounced guilty, he was given one more chance to speak. And in that final
speech, he rambled about, sporadically quoting these poster-board clichés from
the Nazi regime, finally sitting down just flummoxed.
Hannah
Arendt sat there dumbfounded listening to it. She realized that here, and on
into our foreseeable future, we will have far more to fear from a sleeping
bureaucrat than we will from an uncouth barbarian like Attila who attacks
civilization from without. He would have been a fine manager at GM, AT&T or
IBM in the 60's. That is why she said he embodied, in a memorable phrase, the “word and thought defying banality of
evil.”
Awake, O Sleepers
But
isn't this what we see repeated over and over in our world, on issues both
great and small? I was reading an article in The Economist about the secondary market in mortgage debts that
were re-packaged and sold as a lump. Unfortunately too many of our investment
banks only sold half of them and had far bigger liabilities on their books than
they ever imagined. Once the loans defaulted, questions were asked over and
over ‘why didn't you sell the whole fund?' ‘Didn't you realize that this were
exposing the bank to huge risk?' ‘Didn't you think about the bigger picture?'
One
mid-level salesman had an answer written in the nearly perfect idiom of our
present syntax of banality. He said, ‘we
weren't incentivized to ask why.' We don't get paid for asking why, so
asking why is only something for losers to review.
Awake, O Sleepers!
This
summer, I got some instructions on how to get to the hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia
where my father was to have an operation. I'm driving him to the hospital. I
open up the instructions and this is what I read. “After a while, you will see
a strip mall on your right with a CVS. Right after that you should see a KFC on
your left. At the next light, turn right. If you get to Wall Mart, you've gone
too far.”
You've
had this experience. I pass 5 such strip malls on the way into town. There is a
CVS here, the K-Mart across the street, the Wendy's, MacDonald's, another Wall
Mart, Home Depot, Borders Books, Chipotle, Appleby's, Pizza Hut, KFC, Baskin
Robbins, Gap, Subway, DQ, Old Navy, Fridays, Dunkin Donuts, blah, blah, blah…
With
these directions, I not only can't tell my way around a small town, I can't
actually tell what town I am in any more. I remember in the early sixties when
the franchise-chain became normative. It was originally said to ‘smooth the
nerves of the anxious traveler who could be assured that they would find the
same quality bed at a Holiday Inn in the nation'. It was more efficient. It was
cheaper. It was easier to train unskilled employees to run. 50 years ago, it
made New Jersey, New Jersey. But today, every single state is
New Jersey.
Actually, I hate to break it to them, but even New Jersey
isn't as New Jersey as Georgia.
No,
there are these forces at work in our culture, regularizing forces that
encourage the development of routine, and inevitably they raise conformity to a
new kind of civic virtue. And as the we conform to the rationality of routines
and they work efficiently, we increasingly resign ourselves to what Hannah
Arendt used to call ‘the mere administration of things'.
It is far less challenging than the realm of freedom but it works well enough
that we slowly become bored, so bored that we slowly, slowly begin to fall
spiritually asleep. It is like a small gas leak in your house that you don't
really notice. Indeed it is indetectable, until, until almost the end.
Awake, O Sleepers!
I
was reading a book about the very first settlers to the America's when they landed here in 1587 and started
those early colonies in North Carolina and Virginia. Our family
vacations on those beaches and I've actually made pilgrimage to see the remains
of the settlements. Like most people, I tended to think that our world must
have been their world, only no roads. But I was surprised to learn that one of
the major concerns of those first English parents was having their children
play in the woods. This was absolutely forbidden. The reason? The woods, even
on the coast were so thick that you couldn't actually see the sun and it was
much, much easier to become disoriented, not able to see direction from the
placement of the sun, and they lost many children this way.
I also
learned that our original skirmishes with the Indian tribes were over cleared
land. The Indians migrated and planted their cleared fields every few years.
Until one year, they came to their cleared fields and found that the English
had already planted them. Clearing land was an incredible amount of work. So
much so that the English would rather fight the Indians than withdraw and clear
their own turf. Those must have been seriously dense forests.
So that
got me interested in how we forested the east coast. And forest we did. I
learned that we actually cut down the original growth forest all the way across
the country to the Mississippi.
It turns out that the only original growth forest are the small stand of trees
to be found in the Joyce Kilmer National Park
in western North Carolina.
So I went down to hike there and see them. Astonishing! It looks like Sherwood Forest must have looked when Robin Hood was on
the loose. They are huge.
In this,
as with so many technological wonders, we became so successful clearing the
land that we now need to be saved from our own success.
Awake, O
Sleepers!
Even in
the past century, our world has become so much more complex and interdependent
that we have increased routine to an extent that we really live in a different
world. When I was in graduate school, librarian at Princeton Seminary showed me
a letter that a professor sent to the State department in 1913, a short hundred
years ago.
The
professor was asking about traveling abroad. He was planning on taking a trip
the University of Uppsala in Sweden
and also to visit Tubingen in Germany and the University of Heidelberg,
all great departments of religion. He was asking whether or not the trip was
safe and what the State department would advise because even in 1913, we were
already in quite tense times with Germany. Should they make the trip
or not?
What was
interesting was the reply. It was a handwritten note from the Secretary of
State explaining that while there would be no prohibition on the trip, he
didn't think it would be entirely wise given the gathering storm over Europe. Nowadays, if I sent a note like that, I'd
probably get a computer generated email thanking me for my interest in the
State department.
A
hand-written note… in legible script… ‘Yes' said the librarian. ‘You know in
1913 the entire State department could be housed in one small building right
next to the White House.”
Awake, O
Sleepers!
When I
was in my early thirties, I went to see one of my fraternity brothers, who was
working for an investment firm in the World Trade
Towers. This was just
before the era of heavy security that we know today, so I got off the elevators
and was wending through the maze of those nearly endless cubicles that made up
the interior part of the floor plan. To the uninitiated, this self-directed
tour can produce a certain vertigo of rationality.
I
finally find him and he begins apologizing for his diminutive turf. Apparently
he had actually been promoted and was due to get an extra 3 ft. of space. Again
to the newcomer, looking out over the hundreds of cubicles that look the same
to the untrained eye, I'm wondering how you would know you had three more feet.
He says to me, “I know, I'm out of college 15 years and still worried about the size of
my cubicle…”
It is
strange and subtle but it is hard for us to see the structure around us and to
reflect on that. We don't really notice the way that it focuses our attention,
the way it incentivizes what we come to value. We don't really notice the way
that it begins to define for us.
I'm
watching the Olympics, reflecting on how this is going to grow as Thomas
Friedman keeps reminding us, as long as we have to compete head up with the
Chinese, and thinking that my grandchildren will likely be forced to channel
their efforts through a production that is sufficiently vast that they will
feel helpless as individuals to do much more than nudge this sophisticated
organization they are simply a part of. And since we are so well rewarded for
keeping things running smoothly, Hannah Arendt is probably right that in the
next century we will become overly focused on ‘the mere administration of
things' which probably does not bode well for our moral and spiritual
alertness. I can imagine that we will become sufficiently enmeshed in the
actual maze of organization that we slowly stop asking questions about the
bigger picture- where we are going? Why? What does it mean? All of this social
routine may well start to put us to sleep like the automatic pilot that
actually flies the big planes across the Atlantic.
It is harder and harder to stay alert, to stay awake… It is so somnolent really…
Jesus
last words… Awake O Sleepers!
In
the bible, when the Spirit of God moves, it is anything but predictable or
controlled or somnolent. The Spirit creates a new people out of slaves. The
Spirit brings a fresh word of criticism for the self-satisfied in the Kings of
Israel. In the words of Isaiah, the Spirit looks forward to a ‘new heaven and a
new earth'.
And the
characters in scripture who bump into the real Spirit, are often just going
through their routines. Moses was tending his sheep when he is astonished by a
burning bush. Paul is traveling the highway to Damascus when he is suddenly blinded. Peter
is fishing in his boat, when Jesus calls to him. In every case, they become
awake in the midst of their sleepy routine and they are forever changed.
38 years
ago this month, New York
State was voting on
legislation that would de-criminalize abortion. To show you how the world has
changed, that legislation was introduced by the Republican Governor of New York, Nelson
Rockefeller. It was thought to have a good change to pass because the
Republicans controlled the senate in New York
and the Republican Party was decidedly ‘pro-choice' in New York. The Democrats were almost
unanimously against abortion, probably because so many of them were representing
the considerable Catholic vote in our region. The bill passed the Senate with a
fair margin of victory and it came to a vote in the Assembly.
The
house was fairly well split down the middle, 50% Republicans and 50% Democrats.
And on this issue, they were making a political stand, each party voting the
straight party line. Representative George Michaels, a Democrat from upstate,
got a call from his daughter-in-law just before he was getting ready to vote.
She was asking what the outcome was likely to be.
Like a
lot of families at the time, the Michaels family had talked this issue over and
over. Representative Michaels told his daughter-in-law that it would probably
be narrowly defeated. There was a long silence on the phone. Finally, his
daughter-in-law said, ‘it's a shame what will continue to happen to those
women.' She hung up.
Michaels
went to the floor where they were having a roll-call vote and he voted ‘no'
along with all of his fellow Democrats. His aides were keeping a tally of the
vote as it proceeded along and it looked as though it was headed for a tie. As
so many of you know who have been in this situation, the pressure of your
ambivalence starts to rise when it looks like the social outcome might actually
be at odds with your conscience.
Michaels
began fidgeting and shortly he was asking some of his colleagues to change
their vote at the last minute. Democrat after Democrat explained that they
would not, indeed they could not without prematurely ending their political
careers. Finally, with only a couple of votes to go, the bill headed for a
certain tie, Michaels approached the microphone. “Mr. Speaker, I want to change
my vote… from Nay to Yea”. With those words, the galleries broth forth with
cheering and vitriol.
The reporters flashed a picture of
Representative Michaels gripping the microphone and his face was on the front
cover of every paper in New York
the next day. The bill passed.
What was
impressive about George Michaels is not how he voted as such. What was
impressive is that his conscience had been bothering him for some time on this
issue. He wasn't entirely comfortable with the position that his party was
taking on this issue. But everyone around him was moving lock-step. And you
know what kind of pressure that can bring to bear.
But that
day, he awoke from his political slumber and voted his conscience rather than
the predicted party line. He stepped out. By the way, it cost him. The next
November, the Democratic Party remembered his betrayal and they refused to
nominate him for the primary in his district. They blocked him and he was
finished in politics.
A few
years ago, a reporter called him up and asked him about that day. “Have you
ever doubted that you did the right thing?” asked the reporter.
“I've
never had any doubt about it.”
“Was it
worth getting barred from the party and having no future political activity?”
“Well”, he said, “I would have liked to
serve another term. But nothing would have made up for the rest that I have
gotten, knowing that on one day I did the right thing. I couldn't have lived
with myself otherwise.”
Awake
O Sleepers!
© 2008
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
