The Complex Christ

Noise Mapping | Sound Pollution | Aural vs Visual

Via TimeOut, the London Noise Map.

It's a pretty sophisticated resource, with maps produced by postcode, time of day, major roads excluded or included etc.

What's interesting about the article that accompanied the piece in TimeOut is that it showed that Londoners find road noise to be their great source of irritation. In a world obsessed by anti-social behaviour laws and apparently over-run by block-parties and noisy-neighbours, it's actually traffic that is the most anti-social beast in town. I doubt I'd get very far trying to put in an ASBO on cars and scooters, but research like the London Noise project - funded by DEFRA - does give designers and architects the tools to try to reduce the impact road noise has on our lives.

On another point, I think it's also fascinating that even though we have become such visual beasts - spending so much of our time staring at screens - anti-social behaviour is still essentially a majority aural problem. It's very easy to close your eyes. It's bloody hard to close your ears. One feels that there perhaps needs to be a rebalancing of effort here. So much time and money is spent improving the 'look' of our cities - the visual environment - but given this fact that it's the aural that affects our perception of calm and peace, perhaps more ought to be spent on the 'sound' of our cities too.

Technorati Tags: Antisocial Behaviour, Architecture, London, Noise, Science, Technology

The 3rd Economy: Gift, Market and Plunder [2] | Individual Ownership and The Root of Warfare

In the previous post I began to set out some further thoughts on gift, springing from my reading of Thorstein Veblen's 1899 satire Conspicuous Consumption. I want to continue to develop the thoughts outlined there about the 'leisure class' that Veblen describes.

Essentially, we might now see them as the aristocracy, or celebrities. They are those who do not feel they ought to work. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson is perhaps the best example I can give for a UK readership. I'm sure there are similar figures in other countries. These people are allowed to work, but classically only in 'governance, sport, priesthood and warfare.' *

Veblen notes:

Technorati Tags: Consumption, Leisure, Technology, Veblen, War, Work

The 3rd Economy: Gift, Market and Plunder [1] | Christian Leadership and the Leisure Class

As some of you may know, I've been working on a novel for the past few months, playing with themes, among others, of the links between identity and consumption. One of the books I've picked up to feed the furnace has been Thorstein Veblen's 1899 satire Conspicuous Consumption (an excerpt from his longer work The Theory of the Leisure Class, available as part of the lovely Penguin 'Great Ideas' series), and I'm glad I did, as it's nudged me to re-thinking some of the ideas on gift within The Complex Christ. These are unrefined thoughts, but I wanted to set out a few posts on what I've mulled over.

Firstly, an outline of Veblen's ideas.

His thesis begins with an examination of what he calls the 'leisure class' which 'is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture; as, for instance, in feudal Europe or Japan. This leisure class is basically what we might now call the aristocracy, but his labeling is quite deliberate and, I think, rather contemporary. What obviously separates them - and Veblen gets us to think about this in more ancient cultures, rather than just in terms of stately homes etc. - is their employment:

'The upper (leisure) classes are by custom exempt from industrial occupations, and are reserved for certain employments to which a certain degree of honour attaches. Chief among the honourable employments in any feudal community is warfare; and priestly service is commonly second to warfare.'

Actually, Veblen continues to list four main lines of activity for the leisure class: government, warfare, religious observance and sports. And, as World Cup fever truly grips (perhaps for only 4 more hours as England face Ecuador at 1600) it is interesting to note our continued fascination with the leisure class - we might call them celebrities now I suppose - who play for £120000 a week.

I want to explore the links Veblen identifies between warfare, consumption and leisure in another post. What interests me briefly here is whether Christian leadership is still seen as part of the 'leisure class' -  a get out from real work, an escape of some sort.

Perhaps I'll do no more than present the question; what I would like to add is this fascinating quote from a letter a great friend and critic of Thomas Merton wrote to him. It talks of 'the monastic', but made me think on the insularity of some full-time Christian work:

"The point of being a Christian in the city is to try to humanize modern technology and modern society, and you [Merton] are trying to escape this. Let us admit that at the outset I am radically out of sympathy with the monastic project. […] All monasticism rests on a mistaken confusion of creation with this world, and so they suppose that by withdrawing in some symbolic fashion from creation they are leaving the world. But creation is precisely not the world, but its antithesis, and so what they do is essentially the opposite of salvation. They withdraw from creation into the desert taking ‘this world’ with them and then they dwell apart from creation, but in a newly erected kingdom of the prince of this world. You have not withdrawn from this world into heaven, you have withdrawn from creation into hell."

Rosemary Ruether writing to Merton. In Merton: A Biography, Monica Furlong, p 287

Technorati Tags: Books, Consumption, Leisure, Merton, Ministry, Ordination, Religion, Veblen, Work

Not At My Table

"What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor?"

Does anyone actually want this?

Would a vegetarian eat it on absence-of-animal-cruelty grounds?

Can they really replicate that bacon-sandwich smell?

Technorati Tags: Science, Technology, Vegetarianism

Don't Listen To Music | Emotional Sound-spaces | (alt)Worship

Had a great time chatting to Barry Taylor yesterday - who's over in the UK 'writing a film score' (yeah right Barry - we believe you ;-)

We got on to talking music. I'd recently heard John Bell talk about protest music, and, harking back to the good old days of Dylan and Joan Baez, he complained that there wasn't really any good protest music around these days. I took him to task on this afterwards, and challenged him to think again.

Barry is in an excellent position to talk on this, and he talked about his theory that 'no one listens to music any more'. The basic idea is that music creates an emotional space, out of which actions and thoughts are born. As he said, no one really knows what Thom Yorke is singing about, but, regardless of the words, the emotion of the music resonates with strong messages of protest. According to Barry, most bands begin by writing the music, and the words come after. So perhaps the message of the music is located somewhere else than the lyric.

I like this idea for a number of reasons. Firstly, I think it affirms that, while there is less 'obvious' protest music, there is still a lot of music that is there to challenge, if we let ourselves encounter fully the emotional spaces the music creates. Ironically, the folk/protest movement of Dylan's hey-day could be seen as a failure. While the shallow, glitzy rock-fest of Live Aid was, in many ways, an enormous success.

Secondly, I think this has something to offer in the debate on Christian music. Worship is an emotional space. We need to affirm that, and need to realize that we don't need obvious lyrics to make music 'Christian.' Moreover, where obvious lyrics are put in, they actually tend to detract from the emotional space, making the music too fixed and preachy... And, personally, leaving me cold. Connectedly, I think this is why ambient music has really been embraced by the alt.worship community. It's often been a criticism that it's 'not really worship' because the words aren't there. But that is missing the point, and the key truth that alt.worship seemed to pick up on was precisely that it was the emotional space that music created that was the space within which worship was offered.

Technorati Tags: Baez, Dylan, Language, Meaning, Protest, Worship

Surface Tension | Lost Worlds

"One of the great losses of the Information Age is texture. Consider the pre-computer desk: a litter of papers, large and small, handwritten, printed and typed, course and fine; letters in varying hands, envelopes of various sizes bearing stamps from all over the world. Here are books, annotated and bookmarked; here is a typewriter with its ribbon and its heavy steel frame. Here are photographs and drawings, coins and banknotes, documents bearing seals and counter-signatures, pristine originals and faded carbon copies... Papers lie in piles, navigable vertically according to what has been most recently consulted; some are turned sideways-on to mark the stack.

"Now consider today's equivalent. All is stored on the network and accessed via mouse-clicks on a clean glowing screen. Everything is the same: an image seen through glass. We touch nothing, mark nothing, smell nothing. In the new world of I.T., it is not just the desktop that is a metaphor: everything is a metaphor, where nothing yellows with age and everything is clean and new. We are become creatures of sight alone, our whole attention focused on a hundred and fifty square inches of expensive glass.

"We have lost something in the process. Not just texture. Something more. The computer makes everything retrievable; but it doesn't retrieve everything. Only the surface. Scratch the surface and - look! - more surface. The rest is lost."

From Michael Bywater's excellent Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost, & Where Did it Go?

Technorati Tags: Books, Lost Worlds, Technology, Work

When Web2.0 Doesn't Work | Blogging 2.0

Perhaps I'm being professionally defensive here, but having looked at RateMyTeachers.co.uk I was left wondering whether this was actually a project that had any use. Part of the beauty of the 'ratings' section of sites like Amazon and Flickr is that they actually allow you to make decisions - which seller is reliable, which photos are 'interesting'. But there appears to be no end use for rating teachers. Children cannot decide who is going to teach them, and parents' choice about which schools they send their children to is often very limited.

There are also other problems. For ratings sites to work there needs to be an element of trust in the rating. Having messed about with RateMyTeachers (ie putting stupid comments and shockingly bad ratings about other teacher friends ;^) it appears to be a total free-for-all. No questions are asked to prove you were actually taught by the person, nor could any proof be given. Sites also rely on the number of 'negative' users being outweighed by the number of 'positive' ones. And as [ this ] article in the Telegraph recently showed, there are naturally a lot of mischievous kids out there looking to have a bit of fun. Who wouldn't. (Then again, when a parent logs on and writes that a teacher is 'evil' there is perhaps something more worrying.)

Connectly, I had a very interesting conversation with a guy (a psychologist by trade) who works in the web research department of the Open University. He was saying that the stuff they are working on is 'Blogging 2.0'. What he meant by that was, how to create a system that goes beyond tagging and comments and actually allows interesting posts to come to the fore more easily - using some kind of distributed rating system. I think this connects very well to the previous posts [here and here] on the problems the blogging is facing: the massive volume of posts, and the enormous task of sifting through to find the good conversations. They are currently running initial experiments, but I look forward to the final product.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Complexity, Education, Technology, Web 2.0

Wise Words | Dost Thou Blog Too Much? (2)

In response to the previous post, a link from Daniel to a wonderful cartoon at 'Gaping Void':

Mike commented on the last post that we all just need RSS readers. I don't think the volume of information is the problem; I do think this cartoon is right on the money.

It reminds me of the story of two Hindu women who tried to get round their alms giving obligation by simply giving alms to each other, back and forth... And 'became a well so bitter that no one could drink from it.'

The problem has gone beyond dealing with information, but the massive volume of guff, and the incestuous insularity of a lot of it.

It seems to me that there is a whole lot of posting, and not a lot of reading/reflecting. Everyone gabs on about this great Emerging Church 'conversation' when it often really feels like a small room full of people all talking at once. Posting less means we shut up for a bit and let others talk, let words sink in and let proper content get some air to breathe. This is what you do in a conversation: speak a bit, listen a lot, reflect and respond. I think we need some more of that. [So now I'll shut up.]

Technorati Tags: Blogs, cartoons

Wise Words ¦ Dost Thou Blog Too Much?

Wise words from Eric Kintz on why frequent blog-posting is unhealthy. Discussed here on TSK.

In summary:

#1 Traffic is generated by participating in the community; not daily posting
#2 Traffic is irrelevant to your blog’s success anyway
#3 Loyal readers coming back daily to check your posts is so Web 1.0
#4 Frequent posting is actually starting to have a negative impact on loyalty
#5 Frequent posting keeps key senior executives and thought leaders out of the blogosphere
#6 Frequent posting drives poor content quality
#7 Frequent posting threatens the credibility of the blogosphere
#8 Frequent posting will push corporate bloggers into the hands of PR agencies
#9 Frequent posting creates the equivalent of a blogging landfill
#10 I love my family too much

Certainly confirms how I've been thinking recently, and clearly how others have been too. I think we're entering the 'norming' phase of the blog revolution. Thank goodness.

Post-Christian Dirt | Physical and Unspoken Boundaries

If you've read the book, you'll have picked up on the theme of 'dirt', and its place in forming communities. Deciding what's acceptable or unacceptable, what's 'in' or 'out', what's 'dirty' or 'clean' is a way that a society creates its identity... And we only need look at passages like Leviticus 12ff to see just how involved some of these dirt issues could get.

Moreover, once dirt boundaries have been set, the mechanisms of controlling them - monitoring who has fallen foul of them and how they might find cleansing - is a hugely powerful position. Control the dirt mechanisms, and you control society. The Pharisees knew this, and Jesus felt the full force of their anger when he challenged their right to be the dirt-meisters.

I've recently been reflecting on how these issues work themselves out in a post-Christian / post-religious context. Is is any different? And I really don't think much has changed at all. We only need to consider the angst over asylum seekers, gypsy traveller communities, sex offenders living in the community and panic over 'terrorists' to see that dirt issues are alive and well.

We live in an increasingly liberal world where physical boundaries are tumbling - the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, cheap flight access to the world. What is interesting is that the decrease in these physical boundaries may appear to be matched by an increase in the experience of unspoken dirt boundaries. And the result of this is increased turmoil and unrest within communities.

People know that they need to be inclusive, non-racist, liberal, and that the law defends all of these things... but they feel uneasy, feel ignored and threatened by 'dirt' amongst them. Dirt issues that the tabloids are happy to exploit.

It was precisely such a society that Jesus came in to. Occupied, oppressed, integrated into a huge empire that brought peoples from round the world into their safe, clean society. The mechanisms for cleansing were tightly controlled by the religious right, and messianic panics regularly swept people into chaos.

I wonder if what we see in the popularity of John the Baptist's ministry is a society crying out for the mechanisms of cleansing to be renewed. Crying out for some new order. A new order that Jesus brought in by challenging the very way people classified what was dirty and clean, thus giving people a new framework upon which a new sort of community could be built. I think it's a message we need to hear again.

Technorati Tags: Asylum, Gypsy, Terrorist