The Day of Rest - Biblical Teaching About Time (continued)

The Day of Rest
Biblical Teaching About Time
— An online book about rest and worship —

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Chapter 2

A World of Uncertainty

As I said before I was so abruptly interrupted by my personal technology, life is not like it was when I was a child. People of power have always run the world, but today there’s a different breed of power brokers. Today’s cultural elite includes information brokers. These upper class folks have access to information and the knowledge of how to apply it. Their control of information technology gives them power and money. The gap between this elite group and the little fish at the bottom of the food chain is growing.

A few years back the United Nations Development Program released some figures about how the rich in the United States are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. Back in the early twentieth century really rich families like the Rockefellers, Asters, Blairs, Carnegies, Goulds, Morgans and Fisks controlled about 20 percent of our country’s total assets. As we entered the 21st century that small group had nearly doubled the assets they control. Now the super rich, men like Warren Buffett, the wealthiest man in the world and  Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft , the third wealthiest man in the world, control nearly 40 percent of U.S. assets. By the way, Carlos Slim Helu of Mexico, is the second wealthiest man in the world with $60 billion in assets.

What does this mean? Among other things, it means that our technological changes have not solved the problem of poverty. Statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau tell us that during the past twenty-five years educated, information-savvy households became richer and richer while the poor and uneducated became poorer.  The income of information savvy technologists and managers rose dramatically while the poor consistently lost ground.

To make matters worse, more sudden changes hit us as the twentieth-first century began. Terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers and the stock market collapsed. That collapse hit the technology folks pretty hard—for a while. Many lost more than 30% of their invested assets. People went around moaning about that for six months. But things soon turned around for them and their wealth returned as the economy bounced back. With that return, their political power also returned.

That was all fine and good for the upper-class segment of our population, but people living below the poverty line were hurt. In the U.S, the numbers of the poor living below the poverty line increased to better than twenty percent of the population. What is this poverty line? Think food, shelter, clothing, health care, and transportation—the basic necessities of modern American living. Each year, the federal government calculates the minimum amount of money required by families to meet tbasic needs. The resulting calculation is commonly referred to as the poverty line.  In 2001, the year of the New York Twin Towers’ destruction, the government had set the poverty line for an average family of four at about $18,100.  Six years later that figure rose to $20, 650. The twenty percent folks who struggle to get along below this imaginary line poverty line are mostly members of black or Latino minorities. They are forced to exist on about one-fourth of our country’s average income. For them, ideas of rest and leisure are destroyed by the need to work long hours in order to fund basic needs. Technological changes have only aggravated their condition, not helped them.

This complicated picture will not easily change. Despite all our knowledge, no one has adequate answers to the persistent issue of poverty and the issues of immigration, health care and child abuse that accompany them.  Jesus said we would always have the poor with us. It remains so in our postmodern world. Technology has improved the lives of millions. The United States has the largest and the most robust economy in the world, but for the lower one fifth, things have become worse. Without information and the knowledge and skills to use it, the poor keep getting poorer even as the rich get richer.

Our consumer driven culture
Many other aspects of our culture shifted as we entered the 21st century. Along with the rise of technologies, the arts changed.  Pop art has largely replaced classical and folk art. Pop arts are arts-for-the-moment, constantly changing with the ever changing whims of people. Rock and roll, rap, hip-hop and country-western dominate both broadcast and Internet radio. Folk stations are still around, but most stations focus on pop music that by its very nature always changes. Rock songs from a decade ago are ‘golden oldies.’ Even last year’s hits are already on the way out.

The same thing holds for clothes and clothing styles. To be in style one does not wear two-year-old jeans or blouses. The current uniform for some teens may be low-rise blue jeans, baggy pants, huge belts, six inch soles and bright t-shirts, with rings on fingers and toes as well as in noses, ears, belly buttons and sometimes tongues— but this is all for the moment. Give us one more year and these styles will be out of date.

My real point is not that clothing or music tastes change. They always have. What must concern us is the worship of novelty. Whatever is not new, different, up-to-date, is considered worthless, insignificant, something to be scorned and despised.

Such attitudes spill over into popular thinking about people and institutions. Pop culture insists that it must be new to have value. Old ways are throwaways along with old clothes. What about throwaway people? It seems so. There is a strong tendency in our postmodern culture to leave behind the wisdom and the lessons older generations might teach us. The tendency is to ignore the guidance of those who have lived through at least some of that past. Supposedly, true wisdom lies in the future and the young who are daring enough to lead us into it. The past was full of failures. Only the future holds promise. Old people cling to old ways. Old thinking equals ignorance. Change, new ideas and new ways are what the future is about. Senior politicians, religious leaders, businessmen and teachers—the whole gang of old men and women—are not to be trusted.

The same is true for the disabled or uneducated. We assume they are useless people who have nothing to contribute. They too are throwaways. They are part of the past. We must move on to those who are new, fresh and truly useful. The past is past.

There was a time in the not too distant past when teachers, ministers, lawyers, political leaders and artists supported and promoted traditional standards by which we lived, norms based upon principles passed on from one generation to the next. No longer. We must now have new norms. Tomorrow we may have even newer ones.

Consider the issue of divorce. When I was young, people in our community frowned upon divorce. Divorce happened, of course, but not nearly as often as in this postmodern world. An injured party actually had to prove that one’s spouse was guilty of adultery or abuse in order to obtain a divorce. Now laws permit no fault divorce. All parties need do is work out the details.  Not often an easy task of course.

Where are the norms for making moral judgments in this postmodern world? Objective values are out of date. Traditional approaches to ethics are scorned. We live in a new time of enlightenment. Along the way family life suffers, but these are postmodern times.

More Cultural Changes
Sexual mores have also changed in this new world. An article in the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) reported on a 2001 New Jersey based Gallup poll. According to the report fifty years ago, two-thirds of American young adults believed premarital sex was immoral.  By the 1970s the number of young adults who still thought premarital sex was immoral had dropped to a little less than half, down twenty percentage points from the previous decade. By the middle of the 1980’s, over half said premarital sex was acceptable.  As we entered the 21st century the number accepting of premarital sex had climbed to over sixty percent. Today only thirty-eight percent of young adults say premarital sex is immoral. We have a whole new set of standards and norms, established and promoted by an ever-changing popular culture. Rules of conduct are no longer based upon established principles, but upon constantly changing whims. See also the NCR article on hookup sex.

Along with the new norms come new problems. News media report that researchers at the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that at least one in four teenage American girls has a sexually transmitted disease. Nearly half the black teens in one study had at least one sexually transmitted infection, versus twenty percent among whites and Mexican-American teens. The most common one is the virus that causes cervical cancer and the second most common can cause infertility.

The sad truth is that not only in America, but in western culture in general we have very few agreed upon objective norms for what is moral or immoral. We are adrift on a sea of confusion about moral and ethical questions. There are no universally agreed upon principles by which to judge our actions. Everything is relative. This is of the essence of postmodernism.

The hidden roots of relativity
How did all this happen within such a short period of time? Some want to blame scientists like Albert Einstein (1879–1955). Einstein published his great work, Relativity: the Special and General Theory, in 1920. His work introduced us to a whole universe of maybes. Einstein’s science taught us that time itself is relative. Matter and energy are also interchangeable. The speed of light remains the only constant in the entire universe. But now the constancy of the speed of light is also challenged. In the early moments after the Big Bang some suggest that light went faster than it does today. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to move beyond the speed of light. Science fiction has long ago predicted it.

Add to that confusion the introduction of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, to speak colloquially, describes light as a wave on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and as a particle or packet or something like that on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. On Sunday it may be both. This is, of course, a totally unscientific description. My point is that given one set of circumstances light acts one way and given another, it acts another. Can it be both? Who knows? Scientists continue to struggle to understand this strange, but natural phenomenon.

How does that affect our everyday world? The answer seems obvious. If science cannot tell us how the universe works, then maybe there are no answers to life in the universe, no real answers anyway. What works on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays won’t work on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. And who knows what works on Sundays? Everything is relative. Everything is in a constant state of change. Everything is evolving, just as it always has.

From evolutionary studies we are taught that billions of years ago our ancient ancestors were lizards and monkeys, but over the long, but steady progress of years various species evolved to new ones.

Today change continues. Everything inside us and around us is changing. Everything—everything—is  relative. What works for you won’t necessarily work for me. I come from a different family, a different culture. I see things in a different way than you do. So you decide what works for you, but do not judge me, especially since there are no commonly accepted standards, no big set of Ten Commandments. Everything is subjective. Everything is constantly changing. This is the postmodern mood.
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Next time: Chp. 2 continues with more information about uncertainty and doubt, leading to some now what questions.