You Can Put a Man on the Moon but...
I am a few episodes into the podcast Obama and Springsteen have put together, “Renegades.” Much of what they talk about so far is reckoning with the problem of racism in America through the lens of their life experiences. The show at times varies between awkward moments where Obama or Springsteen are trying to walk a line of how you are supposed to talk about this subject in public and moments of real insight and weight. The audio is filled with long pauses and restarts and Springsteen just admits at one point that talking about this stuff with honesty and vulnerability is hard.
There is a moment where Springsteen asks Obama, 'How do you hold the same country that sent man to the moon with being the same country of Jim Crow?' It’s interesting that Springsteen wonders why we can have such advancement with technology but not virtue. To state the obvious, technological advancements aren’t the same as virtue formation. But our culture has been more concerned with how to have a good life (through new technologies) than being good people.
I wrote somewhere on a friend who said to me, I’m just waiting for Elon Musk to figure out some technology that’s gonna either delay or reverse global warming. I responded,
….that our global crisis isn’t from a lack of technology or a good idea that hasn’t been formed yet. Wendell Berry describes the problem as human beings having infinite desires in a world with limited resources. Our problem isn’t a technological problem, but a desire problem. We’ve technologically advanced thinking only about our desires without thinking about the harm. . . Looking to the “Elon Musk option” to fix our deepest problems might not be what we really want.
Somehow our culture has learned to depend on technology advancements to solve deeper issues of our heart. We don’t know how to invest our resources into anything else.
Obama at one point reflects on a moment when as a child a friend called him a racial slur and said that instances like this come from someone feeling,
‘I may be poor, I may be ignorant, I may be mean, I may be ugly, I may not like myself, I may be unhappy—but you know what I’m not? I’m not you.’ And that basic psychology then gets institutionalized, is used to justify dehumanizing somebody, taking advantage of them, cheating them, stealing from them, killing them, raping them, whatever it is. At the end of the day, it really comes down to that… And in some cases, it’s as simple as, ‘I’m scared I’m insignificant and not important, and this thing is the thing that's gonna give me some importance.’”
Here we come to the substance of the matter. The implication that Obama is pointing to is that if we cannot deal with our own sense of shame, self-hatred, and insecurities, we will never cease to victimize and hurt others. Jim Crow was an institutionalized form of self-hatred. Racism is a fruit of deep insecurities and frailty. Technological advancements will not heal those wounds.
There is an ordinary human response that when we feel vulnerable or our self-esteem is threatened, we will try to think of our accomplishments (what we do rather than who we are since we are often uncomfortable with who we are) and if our accomplishments are lacking we will tear others down, so as to say, “at least I’m not you.”
Christians, on the other hand, are called to not only attempt to live into their imago dei, which sustains an equality of worth and significance among all people, but also their identity in Christ, which transcends their accomplishments, failures, histories, gifts, talents, networks, and family inheritances. These truths dignify each one of us, slowly transforming us from self-hatred and shame, to a sense of belonging and being loved. We say in our church community that our union and identity with Christ means, what belongs to Christ belongs to me; what is true of Christ is true of me. That means my dignity and worth is found deeply in an infinite Christ and so I don’t have to steal the dignity from others.
My family and I spent the last few weeks in Arizona and I got to shoot a couple rolls of film while down there. The first photo of our 11 year old (Noelle) was on my father in-law’s Beautyflex TLR camera from 1951 (I think), which is 120 film. The rest were just shot on an old Canon 35mm camera.