On Receiving Gifts

Just as a brief follow-up to my last post about gift-giving, there are a couple of things I really want to say.  First… I received some incredible gifts this year, many of the very non-tangible sort.  Having friends and family go out of their way to make sure that I could celebrate with them (despite no little difficulty) was a great experience; more than once it meant that theyhad to catch me when I fell, quite literally, or lend me their strength to make a difficult climb.  Some even traveled hours just to spend a little holiday time together, which was fantastic.  That kind of willingness to give, that kind of generosity, is the kind that doesn’t fit under a tree and is the kind that I think we need to see more of in the world. :)

Secondly, though, I got some incredible gifts of the kind that do fit under a tree (if you have one!). :D     It’s less than a month until my birthday, now, and I’m pretty sure that the stack of DVDs, books, and games that I acquired is enough that there won’t be anything left for birthday presents!  I’ll certainly still be busy with ’em all!  I’m excited about them in their own right (who wouldn’t be thrilled to own Hook on DVD?!), but I’m honestly elated by what they represent, too.  Several of these things I received are very difficult to find, and even the easier ones are meaningful because it means I know the gift giver wants to go out of his or her way to make me happy, to see me smile.

Gifts are like that, I think.  To the recipient, it shouldn’t matter that much what the gift is in actuality.  (The biblical story of the widow and her coins should teach us a  bit about that.)  Gifts are symbols, representations of the heart of the gift-giver — be it your aunt, your next door neighbor, your spouse, or even God Himself.  Whether it’s wrapped with a bow or imprinted on our very spirits, we should recognize gifts for what they are: statements of love (of whatever kind) and expressions of the gift-giver’s heart.

Gifts and Giving

As of today, it’s  been more than two months since my last post.  I’m really sorry; I want to keep up better, but… haven’t.  There are a lot of reasons for it, none of them are terribly important, so I’m gonna skip the excuses and just say what I want to write about. :)

There are a TON of things that I’ve wanted to write blog posts about since my last one.  That’s part of the problem — I can never decide between all of my ideas to just sit down and write one.  Several things have happened in the last few days that have highlighted one particular theme, though, so it seems like time.  I started this blog with the goal of exploring my values, of trying to figure out what really is and isn’t important to me.  With the onset of Christmas and gift lists, I’ve been looking at some of those values.

My parents alays wanted me to write them a list of things I’d like to get for Christmas (that I’d like “Santa” to get me for Christmas).  That’s never a problem for a kid; most of them were several pages long, typed.  Eventually, the lists got smaller but the presents got bigger.  I was fine with that.  At some point, my parents just knew what I wanted and I got it.  It was exciting, I still loved opening gifts even if I could pretty well guess what was in them.  It wasn’t until I got married that I started having to make Christmas gift lists again.

My inlaws (and their entire family) takes the Christmas gift-giving thing seriously.  Not because they care about the stuff, but because it’s a big part of their family tradition.  They like giving, and sharing.  And they brought me in to that tradition as soon as I was part of the family — probably even earlier, actually.  It’s really nice, honestly.

This year has been a little harder for list-making, though.  They wanted my list pretty early on, which isn’t unreasonable, but I’ve spent so much time at home lately that I feel like my house is already too cluttered with unnecessary things and that I have too much stuff.  There were a few obvious choices for my list — you know, things like the last movie of a trilogy when I already own the first two — but I had a genuinely difficult time coming up with purchasable/craftable/giveable.  I’m not really even playing video games much anymore, so there weren’t really any games to put on my list, and that’s my old standby! :)

I found this year that I really just… don’t want any more stuff, or the only things I want are biiiig gifts that require significant amounts of saving.  Every time I would ask myself, “Okay, Nathan, what do you want?”  The answers were always things like, “money” or “a house” or “to know about that job I’m still waiting to hear about” or “time to do all the things I feel like I have to get done” or “children” or “the chance to choose what to do with an afternoon and play games for no good reason.”  But those aren’t things you can put on a Christmas gift list, even though I know my family would give me any of those things in a heartbeat if they could.

The things that are on my list now are… different.  When you’ve literally laid in bed and asked God why you have to go through the things you’re going through, it really changes the things that seem important to you.  I don’t need movies or books or games on my shelves (although shelves might not be a bad gift idea, since I do have so much stuff to put on them already!); in fact, I don’t really want many of these things because they just take up the little bit of space left in our apartment.

All I want is to sleep in the same bed as my wife, to play games and hang out with my friends, and not to have to worry about paying next month’s bills.  Responsible things; useful things; “grown-up” things, and very intangible things.  But those things don’t go on Christmas lists.  Those are the things that I value, but they aren’t things that can be given or purchased.

I tried to find some things for everyone, because I really do like that generosity and giving are important parts of my family’s culture.  Renee was a big help in expanding the list, but I’m pretty sure the list came up short even still.  I’m sorry.  So for those of you who might be (or might end up) shopping for me — I want you to know that I really, really don’t care about the stuff, if you’re having a hard time.  I do care about you, and your life, and our relationship, and all the gifts we share with each other that just… aren’t giftable.

The Importance of Seeing Orange

At this time last year, I was half-way through a six week long stay in the hospital.  I had been through one round of chemotherapy, and I was starting a second.  I had a window, but I didn’t often get out of the bed to go look through it, and the view was mostly concrete and asphalt.  The only way that I could tell that the seasons were changing was by my friends’ wardrobes — I began to see heavier jackets and scarves that had still been packed away before I entered the hospital.

I love autumn.  I always have.  There’s a kind of energy in the air that you just don’t experience at any other time.  There’s something special, something promising… I feel like autumn is charged with potentiality that even spring, with all of its growth and reemergence, doesn’t possess.  The shift from autumn to winter is one of the saddest moments of the year for me, not because I hate winter (although I’m not a huge fan…) but because I love autumn so much.

So last year, the fact that I spent basically the entirety of autumn in a hospital bed with nothing but weather.com and my friends’ scarves to reveal the season… it was hard.  I missed autumn.

But the other side of that experience is important to note, as well.  On the day that I was released from the hospital, I bundled up in a jacket and stocking cap and climbed into a wheelchair to head outside for the first time in a month and a half.  Most of the trees outside had lost all of their leaves by that point, and the only remnants of autumn were the piles of brown, crunchy leaves that had collected against houses or in the gutters.  Just outside the hospital door, though, is a carefully cared-for bit of landscaping, including a small tree.

That tree was the brightest orange I had ever seen.  It was vibrant, living orange, shot through with sparks of brilliant yellow.  It was absolutely beautiful, and I cried.  I hadn’t been outside for so long, I had just had six weeks of my life stolen by a sickness none of us expected, and I had missed my favorite season.  But here was this tree, like God’s personal promise to me that He knew what I had missed, and that He cared.

I keep remembering that tree this year.  Everywhere I drive, whether it’s through the Ozark hills on my way home or down the interstate to St. Louis for more medical checkups or even just between my house and campus, I can see the changing seasons.  I’ve always loved autumn, but I don’t think I ever appreciated it as much as I do this year.

Next time you think, “Wow, the leaves on that tree are gorgeous,” I hope that you’ll follow it up by saying, “And I’m so lucky to get to see it!”  Because you are. :)

Rights and Responsibilities

I’ve spent a lot of time in hospitals and doctors’ offices lately, and one of the things that I’ve started to actually enjoy looking for is the requisite poster outlining the “Patient’s Rights and Responsibilities.”  They’re always worded a little bit differently, and different institutions emphasize different things, but they all basically come down to: “Here’s what you can expect from us, and here’s what we expect from you.”

As I’ve been immersing myself in the ongoing conversation about education reform (see my last post for more on that), I’ve seen a lot of rhetoric based on the universal right to education.  Everyone has a right, the basic argument declares, to be educated, so systems (whether governmental/public or corporate/charter) that support that right are good and systems that do not are bad.  In other words, every child can legitimately say, “I expect to be given the opportunity to obtain a formal, certified education,” and every parent can legitimately say, “I expect my child to be given the opportunity to obtain a formal, certified education.”  The source of the education reform debate is that this opportunity can be given in any number of wildly varied ways.

I’m starting to think that I disagree with the premise itself.  Perhaps this feeling of entitlement isn’t actually doing us any favors in our efforts to provide better education.  It seems like it would be much more profitable for us to replace the “education is my right” with “education is my responsibility“.

It should be noted immediately that this is not at all the same thing as saying “education is a privilege.”  Privileges are optional luxuries, and education is of much greater importance than mere privilege suggests.  Responsibility, on the other hand, assumes right–you can’t be responsible for something you don’t have a right to.  By shifting our foundational understanding of education from “my right” to “my responsibility,” we can shift our dialogue, our policies, and our pedagogy away from self-serving notions of entitlement to educational handouts and towards personal engagement.

In our current cultural and political climate, it seems unhelpful for students and parents to simply say to educators, administrators, and politicians, “You owe me an education, now hand it over!”  The response has been the evolution of an educational system that has no method for holding the learner (or the learner’s environment outside of the school, including parents) accountable for contributing to or working towards what they perceive as a gift to which they are entitled.  In this system, only the gift-givers can be to blame for any educational failings, and so teachers point fingers at administrators and administrators point fingers at politicians and politicians point fingers at teachers.

Let’s reframe the conversation, basing our system and its strategies on responsibility rather than right.  Students need to recognize their role in advancing their own education.  (That means that they need to be given a voice in their own education, by the way, and not just treated as repositories for standardized test answers, another unfortunate consequence of this gift-giving style of education.)  As almost everyone agrees, parents need to recognize their role in their children’s education and act in support of it.  Educators, administrators, and politicians need to recognize their roles in the educational system–but even more importantly (because most seem to be generally self-aware of their own duties), they need to be aware and supportive of each other’s role.

Education as a right has only created a something-for-nothing culture in which demands are made without any requirement of personal investment or accountability.  If we’re going to improve the quality of education in our country, then at every level of involvement we have to replace entitlement to education with engagement in it, beginning with our discourse.

The Heart of Education

I’ve recently been approved as an Online Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Religion, so I’ll start teaching online courses at a local community college in the Spring.  I’m pretty excited about it, even though I recognize that it’s pretty much the lowest of the low on the totem pole of higher education.  Still, it’s a job in a field that I care a lot about, and I’m willing to hold on to my youthful hope and naivete as long as possible. :)

As a result of the new connections and relationships I’ve been building with this college, I’ve immersed myself in education-related blogs and twitter feeds for the past couple of weeks, learning the field and some of its major players.  The timing has been serendipitous, I think–NBC put together a week-long “Education Nation” conference, a series of panels and reports about reforming the American education system from Kindergarten through College.  With all of the press this week, and all of the responses to it, I feel like I’ve gotten a pretty good feel for how various groups of people believe education should work.

To vastly over-generalize: celebrities tend to favor the charter school approach advertised in the new documentary “Waiting for Superman;” journalists promote an increase of financial and technological resources, combined with higher teacher accountability; politicians want to refocus education on the “marketable” subjects like math and science and redesign American education to reflect methods used elsewhere in the world; and administrators (who, let’s face it, are often more politicians than educators) want to see higher standards and more accurate assessments of student and teacher success.  There’s always some mixing and matching, some blending of these various goals, but that seems to be a general breakdown of the most commonly-ascribed paths to a better education system in America.

You notice that I didn’t mention anything about how teachers want to improve education.  I also didn’t say anything about students’ opinions on reform.  That’s because their voices were given such a small role in the discussion this week — one town-hall style meeting, and that was pretty much it — that it’s obvious how little the decision-makers in our country care for anything they might have to say.  So even though they’re the ones who are actually affected by any changes that might be made to the educational system, they’re the ones who would implement and experience the reforms, their voices have been all but ignored by the people calling the shots.

At the beginning of the week, teachers were highly involved in the conversation.  There was some fantastic dialogue on Twitter about the Education Nation presenters, with lots of thoughtful insight and reflective critique.  As the week wore on, though, and the panelists drifted farther and farther away from the values and priorities expressed by faculty members, the Twitter feeds slowly dried up.  In essence, the teachers gave up.  They weren’t being heard, they weren’t being listened to, they weren’t being treated with any degree of respect–despite the oft-repeated refrain of teachers being at the heart of the classroom.

What was it that the teachers said that was so thoroughly ignored?  In essence, it was, “We don’t teach subjects, we don’t teach books, we don’t teach tests–we teach people.”  With everyone else focused on assessment methods and financial resources and technological innovation and schooling styles, the teachers were the ones who had the audacity to claim that education is about more than increasing the production efficiency and market value of the product of our education system, graduates.  The teachers were bold enough to say that the way to reform education is to focus it on the people it affects–students, teachers, parents, and so on.

If a student isn’t engaged in your art class, the answer might not be revising the curriculum.  It might be (as it was in the case of a teacher friend of mine) going to his football game and making a point to cheer for him.  Knowing that he has the support of his teacher, even in something seemingly unrelated, could be the difference between his withdrawal from or his participation in the class.

If a student is having difficulty reading, it should be alright for teachers to challenge parents about their home reading habits.  More importantly, though, it should be expected that parents will challenge themselves about their home reading habits, especially insofar as it influence the success of their children.

However many resources we throw at our current educational system, however many measurements we take and changes we implement, there will never be any successful reform if we fail to recognize that we teach people.  The trouble is, you can’t write a universal curriculum for that.  You can’t programmatize the human element–it takes people to teach people, not the robotic sources of prescribed (and proscribed) information that are often mistakenly called “teachers.”

That’s why it made me sad to see the voices of real teachers, the passionate and engaged educators who recognize the humanity of their students and not only their market value, slowly fade from this week’s conversation about education reform.  Theirs are the voices that need to be heard, declaring in both word and practice that the heart of education is not programs, plans, or resources, but the hearts of the educated themselves.

Keeping it Together

I have seven e-mail addresses that I use at least occasionally.  Seven, in three tiers.  Top tier is my main gmail account; it’s my primary address.  Second tier includes my university address, a more formal gmail account, and the address I give people that I know will send me junk mail.  The last tier is all of the various business accounts I maintain for specific purposes or relationships.  And then there’s a sort of “untouchable” caste of email addresses, consisting of all the accounts I’ve created over the years (I still have the passwords!) that are floating out there somewhere in cyberspace without me paying any attention to them.

Add to that all of the various accounts I have for Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, web development, forums, news sites, online games, and all the other things on the internet that require registration.  My digital life is pretty fractured, and I’m liking that less and less.

This has really been driven home to me lately for two reasons.  First, I’ve been putting in a few job applications with some very tech-savvy (and social media intensive) people.  I know that I’m going to be looked up on Facebook and LinkedIn, and that they’ll check out who I follow on Twitter.  I expect that, and I’m okay with it.  But the prevailing wisdom about online security and self-marketing says that you should keep personal and business identities separate–prospective employers don’t need to know which of my friends were partying last night (especially if I was there with them!), and friends aren’t interested in what edutech articles I’m reading.  So I’ve created separate accounts for my professional interests and contacts, only further fracturing my online identity.

The second thing that has made me realize how much I dislike this splintering is the research I’ve been doing for my thesis.  The majority opinion for the last decade has been that technology is destroying the social fabric of our society.  I firmly disagree.  Transforming, certainly, but not (necessarily) destroying.  In my thesis, I argue that technology can, when properly engaged, help people (specifically students) develop a strong sense of self, both as an individual and in relationship with others.  A major part of building that self-identity, though, is learning how to hold the disparate parts of one’s personality, interests, responsibilities, and values together as a united whole–the very thing that I’m failing at, currently.

The fracturing of self at the hands of technology, I believe, is a very real and very difficult obstacle that we’ll have to overcome in order to pursue integrity in a digital era.  But at the same time, even in our non-electronic lives we often divide and compartmentalize parts of ourselves, reserving some for professional situations, others for personal ambitions, and so on.  So I suppose what I’m trying to figure out right now is this:

Can and should we work to separate the personal from the professional?  Does that include matters of faith and core values, which are the foundation for all the aspects of our self-identity?  What might be the advantages to presenting these fractured parts alongside one another as pieces of an organic whole?  What might be the disadvantages and consequences?

Ultimately, how should we engage technology in our pursuit of integrity?

I have no answer, but it seems like a good question to ask.

How Could I Forget Tillich?

I started this blog, as you can see if you go back and read some of my earliest posts, with the intention of investigating my values and priorities.  I’ve explored some ideas along the way, and I’m sure that I’ll deal with more as time goes by.  This particular post, though, is sort of a meta-reflection on the language that I’ve used to describe the quest for values.  Here’s what spurred me to write it:

I remembered Paul Tillich.

Classes started last week, and I’ve gotten to go to several of the freshman-level courses and introduce myself to everyone.  (I’m a grad assistant, helping a professor with some of her more technologically-heavy courses.)  I love meeting students, and I love the conversations that happen in the first week or two — especially in my field of Religious Studies, where the nature of the subject encourages some very personal reflection and discussion.  We have to start by talking about what Religion is, why it matters, and the various approaches to studying it.  And those are almost invariably fun conversations for me. :)

In one of those conversations, Paul Tillich’s definition of religion came up.  Tillich says that religion is “the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern.”  Those last two words are how the definition is usually summarized — one’s religion is one’s “ultimate concern.”  It can be classically religious (like being most concerned with obeying the Bible or following Buddhist teachings), but it can also include things that we usually think of as secular: money, family, career, respect, drugs, technology, anything.  Whatever is your ultimate concern is your religion.

I kinda like that idea.  To me, it reflects what Jesus (and, especially in recent history, what the Church) tends to say about priorities.  To pursue money rather than pursuing God, for example, is idolatry.  It also seems to line up nicely with the way that I look at values; one’s life should be guided by the things that are most important, by the “ultimate” things.  Religion, in this broad sense, is thus a part of everyone’s life, even those outside of communities and practices that are considered “religious” in the more classical sense.

There is, though, one thing I don’t like about Tillich’s definition.  He talks about “being grasped by” values, as though we as humans are merely the subjects upon which “ultimate concern” is inflicted.  Though his theory as a whole isn’t interested in divesting humankind of their world-making and value-choosing power, this particular language suggests that idea.  And… I don’t buy it, I think we must make active choices about our values rather than simply allowing our values to fall upon us, making us victims of circumstance rather than empowered and capable shapers of our own destiny.

I much prefer, actually, the definition that is given by the author of the textbook that is used in the Introduction to Religion class.  The author uses similar language to capture similar ideas to those of Tillich, but he says instead that religion is “human response to perceived ultimacy.”  That is, we as humans look around us and see the things that are most important to us, and then we respond to that perception.  We examine the world around us in order to determine our values, and then we take action based on those choices.

So… this particular post doesn’t really address any of my values directly, it’s true. :)    But it does explain a little bit about why my Regenesis Project is built on the quest for values rather than on concrete steps or to-do lists.  There’s nothing wrong with steps or lists, but value-response is really how I see the world and live in it.

Flying the Wrong Flag

I don’t often take a strong stand on political issues. Sometimes that’s because I can see the validity of arguments on both sides of a debate, and neither one is demonstrably better than the other.  Other times, it’s because I don’t really try to keep up on all the current events and interpretations of news, and I don’t want to choose a side without  being properly informed.  Sometimes they just seem like silly things to debate about altogether, and I just don’t care. :)

I can’t ignore the current debate about what’s being called the Ground Zero Mosque, though.  (I’ll use the term because that’s become the common language, even though it’s farther away from Ground Zero than, for example, two strip clubs and a porn shop.)  While I understand the sensitive nature of the geographic area, and while I’m certainly in favor of honoring those who were killed on September 11 and respecting the feelings of their families, I cannot support any effort to deny an entire religious group the right to peacefully and honorably practice and teach their beliefs, simply because of the actions of a different religious group.

A friend of mine recently posted a picture of the American flag on her Facebook, with the note, “We are 1 nation under GOD!! Let us not forget this important fact our founding fathers put into place so many years ago.”  This was followed by the exclamation, “I’m flying this flag to oppose the Muslim worship center at Ground Zero.”  These two statements to me seem to be exactly contradictory to each other.

Our nation was founded by people seeking religious freedom, not prohibiting it.  Sure, I recognize the economic and political agendas that played a role, but ignoring the importance of religious persecution and flight from it throughout our nation’s history is myopic at best and malicious at worst.  Appealing to our founding fathers only calls to mind the wild diversity of religious expressions that have found a place in America throughout its colonization and nationalization.

How did our flag become a symbol of oppression and prejudice, rather than a symbol of opportunity and support?  If you’re flying an American flag — even one drawn badly and uploaded to Facebook — to deny the rights of any group of people to practice one of the central freedoms on which our nation was built, then you’re flying the wrong flag.

Gain to Give

In several of my recent posts, I’ve mentioned that the balance of power between large-scale organizations (such as corporations and government) and small-scale groups (like local offices or small businesses) has been appearing as a theme in my life recently.  As I’ve been wrestling through my thoughts on things like universal health care, factory farms and food preparation, and even the hierarchy of the institutional church, I keep finding myself wondering how the big groups and small groups can get along.

I had something of a realization the other night along these lines.  It runs counter to all of the things that our culture seems to intuitively accept.  But the more I think about it, the more I think that the solution to an appropriate balance of power is actually quite simple: generosity.

I think that God has set the world up to work in a certain way, and that things will always work out better when they match God’s design.  (Although even if you don’t believe in God, I can think of several non-religious arguments for the same premise — just sayin’.)  And God’s design seems to be that power and authority are only possessed in order to be given away.

Consider, for example, the Biblical creation story.  God spends six days making everything that exists.  He is in absolute control over everything.  And when he creates humankind, the very first thing he does is share his authority.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.  God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.  Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”  Genesis 1.27-28

God, with all of His power over the world He has just created, gives that power into someone else’s hands.  There are responsibilities and expectations to go along with it, and the sharing of His authority doesn’t diminish His own ability to intervene in the workings of the world (as we see not long afterward), but it is nonetheless true that God entrusts humanity with the ability and responsibility for taking care of things.

Similarly, when Paul is describing God’s long-term plan in the book of Ephesians, he points out that all along God has intended for authority and power to be given away:

“And he made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment — to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ….  [God’s] power is like the working of his mighty strength, which He exerted in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated him at His right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.  And God placed all things under His feet and appointed Him to be head over everything for the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way.”  Ephesians 1.9-10, 19b-23

God the Father shared His authority with Christ.  And in turn, Christ has shared His authority with the church that is His body.  Jesus has entrusted the church with a tremendous amount of responsibility, but He has also empowered it, through the Holy Spirit, to accomplish the daunting task of representing Him on the earth and fulfilling His wishes (which seemed to be generally summed up in the command, “Love.”).

Moreover, Paul says that sharing, not selfishness, should be the root motivation of our own acquisition of resources:

“He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need.”  Ephesians 5.28

Even in our dealings with each other, then, we shouldn’t be looking to advance our own interests.  If we work, it is not merely to fill our own stomachs, but so that we can have something to share with others.  Generosity is such a pivotal part of God’s design for the world that giving ranks equal to eating.

When I think through pretty much every story that the Bible records about God’s dealings with humanity, it seems like He is always saying, “I’m the one in control, but I’m willing to share it with you.”  He is continually allowing people to make their own decisions, even when they choose poorly.  Even though He has absolute authority over all of existence, God sees fit to share that power with all of humanity.

God’s generosity with His power and resources, sharing them with others so that they can choose their own actions and values, sets a pattern that it seems like the world would benefit from emulating.  As things work in our current culture, though, large-scale power centers strive to accumulate power for themselves so that they can wield it over others.

For example, the American government seems intent on keeping as much authority as possible in the highest bureaucratic levels.  And even though I think they have the best of intentions in doing so, and I believe that the government is sincerely (if often ineffectively) seeking the best interests of the nation, it seems like sharing out that power to local groups looks a lot more like God’s design than the self-serving and self-promoting accumulation of power that we’re used to.

Similarly, corporations are always jockeying to position themselves to have the greatest amount of influence over their particular sphere.  The cell phone industry right now is a great example — Verizon wants to best AT&T, Google wants to best Apple, and so on.  But rather than setting up their rules and fees and policies in such a way that is only self-serving, it seems like a more generous approach would, in the long run, be of maximum benefit to all the involved parties.  If the resources that these companies acquired were not simply kept at the corporate levels but shared out to local entities, I think we would see a wildly different (and, in my opinion, wildly more Just and Good) cultural environment than the self-absorbed egocentrism and greed that the current capitalistic model tends to engender.

God set the world up so that generosity is a critical component.  I wonder how different the world would look if we began to gather power and resources so that we could give them away, not hoard them and exploit them for our own agendas.

A Neutral Internet?

So, there’s a lot of stuff floating around the internet about Net Neutrality today, mostly due to the announcement that Verizon and Google have been having discussions about some form of Net Neutrality legislation.  No one knows the details of their talks, much less their conclusions, but everyone is very up-in-arms about the possible “end of the internet as we know it.”

The fear is that Google will pay off Verizon to make its websites and services load faster and run better than its competitors for Verizon customers — so, for example, YouTube would get priveleged access over other streaming video sites.  Or Google’s Blogger platform would work faster than, say, WordPress.  In essence, large companies would be able to purchase the right for their sites and applications to work better than their competition.  That means that small businesses and internet start-ups would be severely disadvantaged, essentially ending the innovation and independence that has made the internet what it is.  Net Neutrality is the idea that all content should be delivered without interference or special privelege, so that the “little guy” has the same opportunity for success as the large corporations.  It’s a reasonable fear, and a reasonable thing to protect the opportunities of the individual and start-up group.

I have two problems, though, with the people who are responding militantly against Verizon and Google.  (And sure, I recognize that I’m heavily invested in both companies — but honestly, that’s not the point for me right now. :D )    First, no one knows what Verizon and Google have decided, and what kind of legislation they are recommending to the FCC.  There are strongly conflicting reports; the NY Times accuses them of back-door dealing with one another, but Verizon and Google both say that the documents they’re drafting are intended to protect Net Neutrality, not end it.

Secondly… the internet is not neutral.  It never has been, and never will be.  No form of media is.  People who have more money have better access, by virtue of being able to afford better equipment, higher bandwidth, fewer advertisements, and so on.  The internet is following exactly the same path as, say, the telegraph or radio — it began in the hands of individuals, but as its utility and accessibility increase, the content and control became focused in the hands of those companies and groups who could afford it.  That doesn’t mean it was necessarily the end of innovation or independent content creation.  In fact, the resources expended by those larger groups was in large part responsible for the success and expansion that those technologies enjoyed.

I’m not saying that I want the corporations to have control over internet content.  I think that’s a horrible idea, and something that we should try to prevent — both legally and technologically.  I am saying, though, that Net Neutrality as it’s been presented by its more militant advocates is a naive, and even potentially harmful, understanding of the way media works.  There are a lot of good things that could come from Verizon and Google’s talks, especially when the FCC is pansying out of their responsibilities.  Until we know more about it, I just wish people would chill out.

And, lest you think that this is totally random and irrelevant to the rest of my blog posts… to me, this is another manifestation of the small-scale versus large-scale concentration of power.  That theme has been all over my life, it seems.  And I think the resolution I want to see is not the elimination of large-scale power (as some Net Neutrality advocates argue) but the responsible use of their resources to empower and protect small-scale endeavours.  That has always been the goal of pro-neutrality corporations like Google, and I want to give them the chance to uphold their past promises before I accuse them of being evil.