On the weekends, CSPAN2 has various authors speaking about books they have written. I love it though I don't get to watch it all that much for various obvious reasons (no one in my family wants to sit through a lecture on TV). But it is the perfect combination of my natural desire to sit on my butt and watch TV with my professional obligation to be literate. It's a poorly kept secret that I don't really like to read. I have a lot of books and read a good deal because I think ministers have an obligation to be well read. But there are hundreds of activities I enjoy more than sitting down with a book.
So, this morning (the Friday after Thanksgiving) I listened to part of Steven Johnson http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/ talking about his new book, Everything Bad is Good For You. In the book, he argues that today's television and video games are complex and being complex they enable levels of problems solving and decision making that you don't find in other forms of media. The argument by itself is compelling enough as it goes but, I found the question and answer discussion that followed much more interesting. He was speaking at a Barnes and Nobles. In the lecture, he said he believed in literature and was making no argument against literacy. But the first four comments that the audience made were defensive statements about the value of reading. It revealed sense of moral superiority among these readers--who were all over 40 and probably over 50. It was clear--if only to me--that they had so thoroughly rehearsed they scripts which said TV and video games reduces intellectual capacities while reading develops that they simply couldn't comprehend the argument Johnson was making. They revealed, in that, a certain deficit in their own literacy as we was making arguments from well known cognitive psychological works on multiple intelligence.
A second thing that the audience revealed was what I perceive to be part of a generation gap in the way we think. They, being an older audience, had a hierarchical view of intelligence where in there is one path to intelligence (one that involved a good does of reading) and anything that suggested other paths to intelligence seeks to dismiss the value of reading. Again, Johnson repeatedly affirmed the value of reading. His argument was not that gaming and TV represented a superior for of intellectual exploration. He simply wanted to argue that they were indeed getting smarter and not necessarily making people dumber.
The reaction he was getting from the audience is one I've seen before. People who've been thinking for a long time will often trot out arguments from older debates in response to new ideas. They shortcut the listening process required to understand a new idea and set up defenses rather quickly. I have tried at other times to do similar things in pastoral ministry.
(1) I have tried to suggest that the liberal vs. conservative argument is now bankrupt. Despite the fact that many people still talk about it a great deal, what people now classify as "liberal" is hardly cohesive enough to be described with one term. Yes, we still have what people would rightly describe as "liberals" but there are other varieties that are not conservative but are not quite liberal--older versions like Kierkegaardian existentialism (a Christian existentialism as opposed to later non-Christians manifestations) and neo-orthodoxy, and more recently things like narrative and other social constructionists, post-liberal, socially located theologies. I haven't gotten very far in the argument as inevitably it breaks down into old conservative vs. liberal epitaths.
(2) I have tried to suggest that the way to build is church is through Christian education. Whenever we use the word "evangelism" people have a wealth of images from Billy Graham Crusades to cold calling with tracts in hand. Trying to suggest that despite all the images they have, there are still other ways to do evangelism is an uphill battle.
Needless to say, I empathized with Johnson who seemed to be struggling with an audience who wanted to argue with him but hadn't really heard what he said.
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