A digest of three things to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.
The Religion of Workism
Derek Thompson
Over at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson explores the new religion of "workism" so prevalent among millennials (who are rapidly burning out, as we saw a few issues ago). Why has work taken on the trappings of religion? Thompson notes the way in which "the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings—from necessity to status to meaning."
Today, one's work can become one's soulmate, invested with nearly religious meaning. However, as Thompson notes, one benefit of traditional religions is that "God-fearing worshippers put their faith in an intangible and unfalsifiable force of goodness. But work is tangible, and success is often falsified. To make either the centerpiece of one’s life is to place one’s esteem in the mercurial hands of the market. To be a workist is to worship a god with firing power."
Read "Workism Is Making Americans Miserable" at The Atlantic. For a deeply Christian treatment of faith, work, and vocation, check out Tim Keller's Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work.
Surveillance Capitalism's Threat to Democracy
An interview with Shoshana Zuboff
Did you know that 2016's Pokémon Go phenomenon was a Google-incubated experiment in herding, tuning, and steering populations toward guaranteed commercial outcomes? If not, buckle in.
This is no conspiracy theory; it's what Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, "an unprecedented approach to making money ... [that] unilaterally claims private human experience" – camera and location data, in the case of Pokémon Go – "as its own commodity that can be translated into behavioral data which can be then sold and purchased in a new kind of marketplace that trades exclusively in predictions of our future behavior, what we will do now, soon and later."
It's the business model of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and countless smaller companies whose overarching goal is not to provide customers with goods and services but to gather useful data for behavior modification. This invisible process is currently aimed at commercial outcomes, but at the moment "anybody with enough money, any ambitious plutocrat, can buy the skills and the data to use these same methodologies to influence political outcomes." Hence, surveillance capitalism is uniquely poised to undermine democracy.
To learn more, listen to this lucid and accessible interview with Shoshana Zuboff at Tech Tonic or read Noah Kulwin's interview at The Intelligencer.
For the brave among us, check out Zuboff's new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (or this review by Nicholas Carr).
The Soul of Shame
Curt Thompson
Guilt and shame are not the same. As Lewis Smedes once put it, "We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are. A person feels guilt because he did something wrong. A person feels shame because he is something wrong."
True. However, Christian psychiatrist and neuroscientist Curt Thompson goes even further in suggesting that shame is used against us to "corrupt our relationships with God and each other, and [to] disintegrate any and all gifts of vocational vision and creativity" in our lives.
The more we keep shame inside, the more it is reinforced in our brains. But Thompson offers hope: We escape from shame by being known – by God and by other people.
To learn more about the reality of shame and its relational healing, watch this energetic and humorous talk by Curt Thompson. For more, pick up Thompson's remarkable book The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Tell About Ourselves.
Weekly Miscellany
A few extras we couldn't fit in elsewhere
Andy read a good commentary on Genesis by Jack Collins in preparation for an upcoming lecture on Genesis imagery in the Psalms. Check out the English L'Abri podcast for that and other lectures such as one on the Enneagram, one on seeing Jesus in every part of the Bible, or one on T. S. Eliot's masterpiece, The Four Quartets.
Phillip recently did some teaching on commitment phobia with the help of the philosopher D.C. Schindler whose book Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty is simultaneously blowing his mind and tearing it to shreds. He's also enjoying the BBC's new production of Les Misérables and thrilled to bits by the lack of singing. Keep those songs on the stage, please.