Teaching Technology

The following is an email I circulated around my Humanities class in the Graduate Diploma of Education (Secondary). It's been a very long time between blog posts and this course and a new baby is why. I wrote this email in response to a class in which the benefits of technology in education were massively overstated; QR codes for goodness sake, as if the insertion of a technological hurdle makes for investigative learning. 

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As humanities teachers we should be aware that technology has underpinned huge social changes - the telescope, the printing press etc. These changes have not just been in terms of what is produceable - ie. the printed book - but in how they are produced, in the structure of work. Technology - the tools we use to do our jobs - will always shape our jobs and shape the economy around our jobs. Technology shapes how teaching (and optimistically education) is produced by teachers.

Increasingly our schools in Australia are reliant on technological products which have only one producer and lock schools into propriety systems. This is called vendor lock-in. Unlike an I-pad, a pencil is made by a million different companies and is usable with paper made by a million other different companies. There is very little (intrinsic) vendor lock in with pencil and paper.

The high rate of vendor-lock in our schools and wider society by tech companies is a direct consequence of a deliberate business model in which consumers or end users are the ultimate product. We are encouraged to see ourselves as masters of our environment and "creatives" but our work is saved in a format we can't understand and only retrievable with our owners continued support. We are no longer sold to like some historical free agency walking past a hypothetical shop front. We are obtained. 

The impact this has on our teaching is profound and subtle. Once upon a time an art course required students to gain a deep knowledge of their tools - where was pigment both currently and historically obtained, how was paint mixed. We can still benefit from this kind of history (as this piece on chalk shows) But without it we are only questionably in any kind of control of our art - or other disciplines.

The tech company business model discourages a deep appreciation of their tools.They want us drunk on the manufactured fantasy that we are all maestros and geniuses the moment we open their program. 

(Note: This is a long video but well worth watching to understand how we have been conned.)

Somehow the universality of their product only enhances our uniqueness! How convenient? Surely a program exists that will make us amazing and unique and interesting teachers too. Let us shop for it. It's harder to sustain that giddy thinking looking at the innards of your devices with confusion so they tend to focus us on the screen and the pretty colours.

The fantasy is also ruptured by any awareness that these new tools are produced in ways that contradict their supposed purpose- they are produced in ways that look like an extreme version of the sort of teaching they are supposed to banish. Below is a benign (and possibly sanitised) demonstration of the process of making I-pads; I'm not trying to turn anyone's guts with images of terrible working conditions. This is approved imagery. Yet still what are the educational philosophies involved in these tasks? Constructivism? Humanism? 

If forcing a class of Australian high school students to watch this video for its full 7 mins would be terrible teaching, what kind of teaching relies on people of a similar age to make these products all day? Is that an unfair question? Does it matter that unlike pen and paper many of these ICT educational tools have no local or ethical producers? I don't think you can use products made by slaves to meaningfully teach about the ethics of slavery. This may not be anything as extreme as that example, but surely as humanities teachers we can't ignore our tools means of production; their history.

In the context of these questions why is the use of Information and Communication Technologies one of the key aspects not only of our national curriculum but of the rubrics for our own courses' assessments? How is it that other criteria like addressing diverse learning styles fails to make it onto rubrics? And why is ICT simply using (consuming) technological products - not necessarily understanding or critiquing them?

This kind of questioning is not a luddites position. It can't be dismissed as technophobia. Too many serious tech writers and thinkers raise the same doubts. (Douglas Rushkoff below is a personal favourite. )

The answer is not no tech. Slate and chalk is a form of technology. Shoes and books are too. We are tool using creatures. The point is to make technology transparent, to engage critically with it, conscious that we are the generation that was sold the fantasy of purchasable creativity boosters. We need to slap ourselves out of that. Then we can dig deeper, pull our technology apart, meet their makers (not just their marketers) to ultimately encourage a relationship with our tools that isn't wittingly naive.

Pinocchio's Easter

When I was created

By the swathe of a carving knife.
my creator loved me so much

that the blue fairy gave me life

But once I could walk
I kicked my creator in the knee
I ran away laughing
So he came looking for me

He took on the Leviathan to find me
So how could he fall ill?
A tower of a Father
Broken by a chill

My rebellion broke then too
How could it not, in his weakness
When he had loved me most of all
in my worst insolence

He is my Father now twice over

I owe him twice my life
No less because he can
no longer grip a carving knife

For he is more than what he can do

As we are more than just his toys
From learning this I have become
A real live boy.

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This poem has been my first post for a while. I am distracted by both a return to university to study to be a secondary school teacher and a return in another way. My partner and I are having our second child due this week. 

There are many post worthy topics in my head however. For example the recent Noah movie raised fascinating moral questions about humanities collective guilt towards the environment; Is collective guilt a useful notion? Is our human collective survival anything that might matter to you?

I also finally obtained and finished a William Stringfellow book "An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land" and it warrants a review. I'm going to try and finish Walter Winks "Unmasking the Powers: The invisible forces" next. Being a uni-student gives me access to all this.

Then there are some of the interesting issues raised in my course. Technology in education is a big one.

But don't expect much from me soon. With my first teaching rounds and my second baby I will be happily busy.  

Yes, this is the title: The Virtue in Stating the Obvious.

A writer doesn’t want to communicate the obvious. Readers experience such writing as a “point being laboured”, with all the painful and drawn out connotations of labouring and none of the positive associations from reclaimed feminist narratives of birth. Encountering the obvious in an essay is not sharing in the all-in-good-time emergence of an idea but rather having a band-aid being removed by nothing more than time. You just want to rip that sucker off.

This affects our discussion of a lot of problems in the world that might just have apparent causes. It encourages a style of analysis which is more sophisticated than necessary.  That style tends to muddy and confuse issues by attaching them to conflicts that are removed from what concerned us in the first place. I find that offensive because it takes something beautiful – a person’s concern about the world – and clouds its vision. It usually blunts the persons drive to act on their concern too.

This blog has previously championed naivety as a virtue of theology. Here I want to champion the same spirit as an intellectual virtue in the doing of history.  If you experience an outrage over something in the world then rather than substitute some larger concern for the immediate issue I propose staying with what initially bothered you. There will be allies and actions in that location that make more sense than in some broader dissociated cause.

Example 1. The Holocaust as political hand grenade.
We are disgusted by the Nazi Holocaust of WW2 in which approximately six million Jews were killed. Approximately five million non-Jewish victims were also targeted due to ethnicity, disability, sexuality or just refusal to publicly endorse the Nazi regime.

The T-4 program was actually a program of forced euthanasia
 for the mentally and physically disabled not cheaper health care.

Clearly nobody wants this tragedy to be the fruit of their philosophy and so it is often allocated to the other side in a range of debates. Creationists have described Nazism as an outworking of Darwinism. People against the state– in its control over guns or its perceived coziness with or opposition to religion or even bizarrely in its broadening of public health insurance – have linked these things to the Holocaust. 

Captain Obvious says however that the Holocaust is outrageous because it involved the unjustified mass murder of people for aspects like race, disability and sexuality or for dissenting from their government. These things can all be opposed far more directly than suggested by either Creationists or the Tea Party’s analysis.

You don’t have to support Biblicism. You don’t have to support the Republicans party. You don’t have to give a damn either way about God or guns or lower taxes. You can just get directly involved in anti-racist, disability rights, gay liberation and other civil rights movements. Heck why not just be involved in opposing genocide. Amnesty international will be happy to have you.

Example 2. The Abuse of Women
Sexism especially gets my goat as a father of a daughter and lover of a woman. That ranges from the belittling and objectifying of women found in “lingerie sports” all the way to the brutal murdering of women in supposed honour killings. It also includes the spiritual damage caused by teaching submission for women under men in many philosophies. It includes the narrowing of girl’s play by companies like Lego. I could go on.

The outrage I feel at this treatment of women is spontaneous rather than rational. Such treatment assaults what we know of women’s depth and worth either because we are women or we know them. That spontaneous insight and resultant fury is a huge temptation for other agendas to co-opt.

Atheist movements popularly attach our revulsion at sexism to their opposition to religion. They do this by focusing on those abuses of women that find some religious justification. To the sorrow of feminists in those religions they don’t have to look so hard.  Meanwhile some religious people identify the exploitation of women in the sex industry as a symptom of godlessness. Their work in rescuing people from sex-trafficking is inspiring but they ignore the sexism of their own spokespeople and in their own churches. They also make an unnecessary requirement of their own religion as part of the solution. 

Captain Obvious says you don’t have to either be an atheist or accept Jesus as the son of God to act on your initial insightful response to the abuse of women. You can simply engage with feminism, an entire movement which centres itself on the principle that women are of equal depth and worth to men. That was the principle that undergirded your outrage and its perfectly fine to stop your analysis there.

Just like with the simplistic assessment of the Holocaust this simplistic assessment of sexism doesn’t leave you with nothing to do. There’s a whole range of actions that can be taken directly on the abuse of women. Support the White Ribbon Campaign or a Reclaim the Night March. Challenge how power and authority is shared around you (and by you). Support women’s sport. Alliances around those actions might include people of religious faith and atheists but only those of both opposed to sexism.

On the other hand if you allow yourself to fall for a more sophisticated analysis – that the real problem is something larger than your initial concern – then you are likely to find yourself in alliances with at least some people who simply don’t care about sexism towards women.  Then your effort for your concern may be undone by those “allies”. Such betrayals are common; the prosecution of the Iraq War revealed that when gender issues are used disingenuously by others for their agendas then those issues will be the first to be traded away.

When our response to something like racism or sexism just stays with the topic of racism or sexism it can get denigrated as naive. Such denigration is often allowed to stand because there isn’t a lot to say against it. It’s hard to stand up for the apparent. This post has risked being boring in order to do so.  Sexism or genocide are not necessarily other than exactly that. Such crimes can be opposed directly.

If our analysis is too narrow we will discover that when opposing sexism and genocide we find a common foe for all; a common principle to injustice. This wont however need to be justified by sophisticated arguments. It will be apparent from experience. In fact the more arguments needed the less likely a common foe is real; the more likely it is an attempt to co-opt you.

Captain Obvious says our common foe will probably be something very unsophisticated; like the desire to hurt other people and the excuses to permit it. Let's hope we're naive enough not to try and make more of it. 

The story of our world.

In my last post I asked for submissions of origin stories. The goal is to publish ones which don't contradict our observations of the world and which respond to what we do see. A part of that is the values that matter to us. It's my contention that the Adam and Eve story doesn't meet these requirements - at least as well as it might. That leaves us with a challenge in cultures that have predominantly used that story to understand the meaning of their humanity.

Here is my draft. Enjoy.

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Rascetane vatre by Vangel Naumovski

The Zippidydooda was completely sovereign over everything in the greater world, from the slightest breeze across a planets plains to the movement of constellations. Everything in the greater world was a precise demonstration of the Zippidydooda’s wishes. 

Like a child artist the Zippidydooda made amazing creations. They worked on the grandest of scales and the tiniest. But the creatures they created were merely automatons – complex and marvelous but still machines.

Out of curiosity the Zippidydooda withdrew its control from one corner of this greater world. They sealed this corner off from the controlled universe and allowed a portion of the stuff of the greater world within it to do what it willed. Thus our world came into being. But our world did little but blob about.

The Zippidydooda then took a portion of its own mind, energy with will but without any consciousness, and added it to our world. Their playfulness was now reflected in our world. Subsequently a variety of energy emerged. And from that variety of energy matter emerged. And from that matter came different forms. And one of those forms was life.

But the Zippidydooda was concerned with what they had done. What had they lost of themselves and would it be returned the same? That concern entered our world which is why although we love change we fear we cannot bear it.

The life in our world was not as fantastic as what the Zippidydooda could create when it employed its will elsewhere. The life in our world was still small and simple and looked set to remain so. The Zippidydooda was tempted to intervene. And because they were still playful and young they did. The Zippidydooda caused sex.

Immediately afterwards they regretted their intervention for it was born of impatience. The Zippidydooda was coming to respect the freedom of this world but they were still eager for excitement. This is why in our world sex is so fraught with conflicting emotions even today. It speaks to our natures playfulness but carries the weight of changing others.

With sex in the world life exploded in variety. This included beings of diverse intelligences. That many of those beings loved others of those beings astounded the Zippidydooda. The Zippidydooda watched and learnt. The Zippidydood was humbled by what they saw. Until one day they realized something truly amazing; they had fallen in love with this world. That was our gift to our creator.

Their love was still young when the Zippidydooda intervened in our world again. The saw our own hearts break at death or the collapse of endeavors. Unable to merely watch when beings in this world suffered, the Zipidydooda gave us hope. This way no defeat could be total.

Immediately afterwards they doubted their decision for they saw that it could lead us into danger again and again. This is why we will always believe in a better future. This is also why we are able to see that sometimes our hope is our folly.

Finally the time came for the Zippidydooda to renew themselves. This would enable their existence to continue but meant that all they had created would be wiped clean. The Zippidydooda had done this before countless times. This time however was different. This time the Zippidydooda was in love.

A choice had to be made; to renew and start creating again in its eternal cycle, or not to renew and to allow our world to continue for a long time but not ever. The Zippidydooda knew it could make a copy of our world but such a copy would never be free from design. Or they could hope our world re-emerged by chance. But the Zippidydooda did not just love the idea of our world. It loved it in particularity.

Thus the Zippidydooda did not renew itself and passed into its own great silence. Our world will know its own decay as all worlds must but its end will be millennia later than it could have been. This was our creators final gift to us.

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In summary;

We (this universe) are special because we are free.
We are playful to our core.
We are conflicted over change, sex and hope.
We have taught love to our creator and been loved by them in return.
We owe our existence to that love.

Is it time to rewrite Genesis?

What sort of writing is Genesis?

The first three chapters of the book of Genesis – the Judeo-Christian* creation myth commonly called the story of Adam and Eve – is associated today with a disregard for facts. That disregard for facts may take a heavy form in which the overwhelming evidence of modern biology and geology is denied in order to maintain a literal reading of these chapters (hereafter just referred to Genesis). Alternatively it may take a lighter form in which the facts are deemed less important than the moral truths of Genesis as if higher truth and mundane fact could be held as mutually exclusive fields.

I don’t think either the heavy or light kind of disregard for the facts honours the original authors because I think Genesis was an attempt to observe the facts of its own time. Then Genesis aims to do something quite excellent with these observations. Genesis tries to organize them in a way that gives meaning to its reader's present life. The greatness of that task is not recognized today if we simply say that Genesis can contradict the facts and stand.

This post was inspired by reading a defense of Genesis based on the argument that literalism wasn't a necessary position. That's correct; a totally literal reading of Genesis with days pre-existing the sky is just silly. It is a minority position in Judaism and Christianity. But neither does Genesis belong to an entirely different dimension of truth. Even a metaphor needs to be translatable – days can mean epochs for example, taking a fruit from a tree could even mean gaining religion. The Roman Catholic position is that we don't need to accept Genesis as science but we should accept it as history nonetheless - just in poetic language. If that was a solution with the Genesis account we could stop there, but its problems with modern observable reality are more qualitative.

So why bother replacing Genesis? Some people may with a shrug suggest we simply move on to the scientific account as if the age of creation stories can be considered behind us. But a purely scientific account would include all the data in the universe. For all the time it would take to tell it, such a perfectly scientific account would fail to address the key question of any creation story – who we are and what that means. Its story would be bereft of beginning, end and any plot.

The scientific account as it stands therefore needs to be woven into a narrative. Its facts need organization around us – the audience of its tale. For that to happen “us” needs to be defined. That’s what would turn it into a history.

Finally there are the moral truths of Genesis – the values which are implied from the story. Again these values rest on facts and can't be explained in the same way when the facts aren't there. However a purely factual account is not going to deliver these values – or any values – without a lot of narrative work (distancing it from a purely factual work).

Genesis is a story. It's a story about observable facts – which makes it more than those facts but also reliant on them.


How is Genesis broken?

By facts I mean observable reality that you and I can show each other. That “showing” may not be easy – it might require a demonstration of erosion or evolution on a smaller scale to prove a larger case but it can be done. It might also involve seeing ourselves or other animals in a certain light. Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall have shown us a side to the great apes that obliges us to recognise our similarities (while not ignoring real differences). Nuclear bombs and global warming show us our world is finite and fragile. Whatever the reasons (and science should not take all the credit for changes in ideas like animal rights or gender equality) we do not see exactly what the authors of Genesis see.

Firstly lets consider, what “facts” Genesis attempts to deal with;

• Humans are different to other animals but also the same in many ways. We uniquely have religion and language (we name animals) – allowing us to create the eternal spaces of ritual. Our minds definitely feel eternal. Yet we die like other animals – no matter what rituals we perform.
  
• Life is basically good (generally preferable to the alternative) – but also full of sorrow and death. The greatest sufferings are caused by inter-human strife. We also carry the burden of shame about our bodies unlike any other animal.
  
  
• All humans despite differences seem to be related – we are one species. Women are different to “us men” (Genesis was probably written by and largely for men) but still the same animal. We share the same flesh so to speak. No other creature can be company to “us” like a woman.
  

To an extent we don’t continue to observe these truths today. At the very least we observe them differently;

• Increasingly it’s harder to argue that humans are especially different to other animals. We are at least not the only personalities on the planet. Elephants mourn, monkeys use tools, mice sing and so on. We may even be only presuming that other animals have no “religion”. It therefore seems purely self-referential to put our species into a unique position.
  
  
• A part of the above is the recognition that “we” in reference to our species has not always been our species. If there are two categories – human and animal – then we were animal once. And we might evolve differently in the future. This undermines our special status as a species which is deeply assumed in Genesis. In Christian theology it is called the special creation of humans.
  
  
• Goodness and evil aren’t possible to separate in the natural world. What Genesis treats as something outside perfection – death in particular – has never been absent from life. Instead death and violence is observably part of the state of things, in the fossil record, well before any proto-human comes on the scene. This is where the scientific account differs from Genesis' with the greatest impact for Christian theology. In many forms of Christianity this idea that humans ruined creation through the introduction of sin is profoundly fundamental to their understanding of salvation (and justification for hell). However it no longer matches our observations.
  
  
• Genesis' treatment of gender has been used to claim patriarchy as part of a natural design – Adam is made first and Eve as his “help-mate.” Yet few people now doubt that any “first human” had both a mother and father. There was no boy's world first. We also now understand patriarchy to be a typical but not universal development in human societies and not grounded in the nature of men and women.
  

This last point is possibly the most contentious. Some people still hold that women belong in a position of submission to men’s leadership. Sometimes this belonging is described in a way that has no correspondence to any observable information – such as whether anyone is happier with that type of organization. For such people the rightness of patriarchy is just a condition of life we should accept on faith with no assessment of the outcomes. That’s a statement made entirely on faith and it’s on faith that I reject it entirely.

Note: I think there’s plenty of evidence that patriarchy doesn’t work well. The outcomes of organizations with the highest degrees of patriarchy are usually the worst for children, women and even men. I just have to resort to faith to reject a “spiritual” patriarchy which doesn’t need any evidence to argue its case precisely because evidence is irrelevant to its merit.

Other people reject that Genesis supports patriarchy. In fact they locate patriarchy in the consequences of our expulsion from paradise (although even there it can be used to oblige us to accept it). For them patriarchy is not a part of ideal life in Genesis but in fact repudiated by it. I think they should accept that Genesis contains an unnecessary potential to say that men are the image of God while women are the image of men. That’s a reading which has plagued society with the oppression of women and the unhelpful elevation of men. While it might be a misreading, its not an insane misreading. Genesis could easily be written better to preclude this conclusion.

Genesis also doesn't need to have it be a woman to be the one who tempts Adam to eat the fruit after having a chat with a deceiving serpent. No less a church father than the Apostle Paul used this special guilt to justify women being subservient to men;

1 Timothy 2: 11-15 A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

To be fair to Paul it's not an idiotic conclusion to draw if you hold that Genesis is true. The chain of fault behind the eating of the fruit reads like it should have meaning but it hasn't added anything but woe to gender relations.



While we're at it: A wish list for any creation story.

Entrenched patriarchy isn't the only problem to come from Genesis. “Green” readings of Genesis are entirely possible but have to do some complicated gymnastics around certain passages;

Genesis 1:28 God blessed them and said to them,“Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Genesis was written too early for people to appreciate that the globe has limits. “Fill the earth” was also never imagined as a network of superhighways and boxstores with no room for subsistence farming. Something which acknowledged our earth's finitude in the face of human exploitation would be ideal in any new creation myth.

That's possibly going to be an even greater challenge for a story reflecting the scientific account. In a long world history in which countless species have become extinct how do we value the preservation of biodiversity today? How do we describe the loss of the White Rhino without reference to it's special creation? Should our current ecosystem be especially valued if such an ecosystem is not what any God intended but merely one iteration of the environment? Tough questions.

I definitely want to include something that checks our human destructive potential. We have the ability to be like terrible Gods and we need something that gives our finger pause over that button. In Genesis we are humbled beneath our creator. Gratitude is supposed to balance entitlement. That's something for other stories to consider how to include; gratitude and balance with or without a divine Creator.

Lastly we should recognise that the notion that we all bear the image of God has been used historically to defend human rights for all. Characters like Bishop Desmond Tutu have used this idea to challenge racism and homophobia. Although our Catholic Prime Minister fails to see it, this language argues for an equality between any asylum seeker and Gina Rhineheart. Without a special status for the human species will we undermine arguments for human equality and dignity? What can we write that matches the facts to make a case for human rights?

We shouldn't underestimate the task of replacing Genesis. In fact engaging in the task gives me fresh respect for the story. It does some hard philosophical work.

Also just superficially, that seven days thing, from a writers perspective, is gold. It has marvelous rhythm. Its not easy to write a creation story that has adequate gravitas without sounding overblown. My partner is currently sitting on her own opening paragraph in case I steal it.

More seriously mirroring the daily life of the community – the seven day week – in the form of creation allows audiences to ritually re-experience their origins in ordinary life. That's magnificent writing and I challenge anyone today to achieve something even remotely similar.

That wasn't rhetorical. I'm actually inviting submissions. Send me links to stories of our creation which you feel are up to scratch or if you don't know any then write your own. I'll publish them here or link to them if I feel they can do the job.

In a little while I'll even publish my own.



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*Rabbinical Judaism divides the Torah into weekly readings. The first reading called Bereshit covers the first verse to halfway through chaper six of Genesis. I've chosen the first three chapters of Genesis to focus on due to my perception of their emphasis in Christianity and subsequently Western culture.

Christian readings of this story are also informed by first century theology in ways that aren't obviously in Genesis and not shared by Judaism. The Apostle Paul teaches the idea of Jesus as a second Adam correcting the error of the first which makes an actual Adam and Eve more crucial.  

Sermons I would like to hear: The Disappointment of Christmas

This is part of a series on this blog where I allow myself a little more freedom with religious language than a strict reflection of my beliefs might allow. I like to imagine slinking into a church and hearing this sort of thing from the pulpit.

Originally when I shared the sentiments of this particular post in conversation I said that if I was a preacher at Christmas time then I would preach this. I guess I sort of am, on this blog. So here it is.

Note: Usually I leave old writing intact but  I've given this a little edit for 2015. I hope it reads more clearly.

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This Christmas in some churches when they talk about the nativity they will call it a signpost. They will argue it points to the fulfillment of “a promise”. The fulfillment of that promise is not there yet in the birth of Jesus, nor is it even there in the crucifixion. Nor is it even there in the resurrection.

They will preach that the nativity is a signpost pointing to a promise fulfilled in Judgement Day – the second coming of Jesus. This is when the Messiah will reappear in full wrath and might; Jesus will impose their holy will on the earth as God's anointed King. This is supposedly a good thing – there will be no more victims of sin like little children abused. However by some reckonings all the little children who don’t believe in God are going to be thrown into hell so it may be more of a frying pan to fire outcome for some of them.

This shift of focus from the baby in the manger to Jesus with a flaming sword can be blindingly fast and in that lack of pause I hear shame. I hear shame and disappointment that when a peoples' awaited Messiah came they were a vulnerable and needy newborn. Vulnerable and needy are not words that many can comfortably attach to their God. Not when our Gods still function competitively in our psyche and our divine (or secular) powers ultimately prove themselves by their sovereignty over human affairs. 

Quickly Jesus must be aged, his human limitations removed and his divinity weaponised. This way, instead of reflecting on how Jesus might have needed their ass wiped, we can jump to a future vision of ass-whupping by a righteous king. A king is always meant to be unchallenged. The centre of the universe can’t be a baby.

But I don't hear anything in the nativity story that gives this permission to look away from the crib – to hurry time till Jesus grows up, dies, rises, comes again and makes everything alright by being the sort of Messiah they should have been in the first place. No, this is supposed to be “it” ; the long-awaited God dealing with humanity. This infant is Gods' cards thrown down on the table in a hand of two high.

One rationalisation of the Christmas disappointment is that God wanted us to have at least two thousand extra years for us to learn what right and wrong is. Jesus Mark I, the infant and the crucified, was the teacher and example. Jesus Mark II, the warrior, will set the final exam. It seems downright churlish to question this sort of reprieve. To accept it also potentially points history towards us as the real generation of Gods' will fulfillment, a reasonable feed of our ego.

But that’s bullshit. People were being raped two thousand years ago and I’m willing to wager they and their rapist knew what was happening to them was wrong well enough. If ever Gods' people needed a saving and avenging God it was the first century. They cried out for it from beneath Roman boot heels. The moment was ripe.

To spend Christmas talking about an avenging Messiah who is to come seems to me to be a denial of Christianity itself, a refusal to engage with the most basic mystery of the Messiah we got. Instead the nativity calls us to sit with a reality that includes the collective disappointment of God's conquered people. We should be able to hear their grief  still relevant to victims today;  “This, this is what we got God? A baby? Thanks heaps.”

No sword. No power. Another mouth to feed basically. A God who didn't come to kick our enemies arses at all. Instead they came to teach us to love our enemies and did so from the only position we would be willing to hear that from; one of us from the word go.

Why we need a shining Star.

My local community run cinema, The Star, has been publicizing a need to raise $65,000 dollars in order to convert their technology to show digital format films. The fear is that without this conversion the Star won’t be able to continue as a functional cinema in the Australian environment.

In addition to being one of a dwindling number of community run cinemas in Australia the Star is the only “art house” cinema in Bendigo, a regional Australian town of approximately one hundred thousand people. I’m not a huge fan of the term art house but there is no denying that the films shown at the Star, compared to Bendigo’s other more mainstream cinema are generally from smaller film studios, and include more characters that don’t conform to being white, wealthy, heterosexual and other stereotypes of “normal.”

My immediate thoughts on this matter in order were;

1. No! The Star must go on. What can I do?

2. $65,000 is an awful lot of money to be raising. How on earth is that going to happen?

3. Can I justify promoting this cause instead of promoting other, more bread-and-butter fundraising campaigns?

I’m not going to discuss thought number two in this blog post. Bendigo Council and Empowering Eaglehawk (the local traders association) are making contributions. For all I know $65,000 is quite achievable, if we all chip in. Also this is primarily a philosophy blog so I’ll skip to the philosophical concerns.

My primary philosophical concern is my vacillation between thoughts one and three. As I contemplate asking friends and family to join me in donating to the Star and as I contemplate how much to donate myself an embarrassing question occurs to me. Is fundraising for my local cinema just a feathering of my own privileged nest (or cosy two person couch, as that’s what the Star uses for seating)?  Shouldn’t my money and my friends’ money and attention go towards other more prosaic concerns like clean water in the majority world?

To answer these questions I want to illuminate what the Star really contributes to Bendigo. To do that we first need to consider what a cinema is. A cinema is a place where stories are told in moving image and sound, sure, but there are many places where such stories are told. In fact thanks to cyberspace, “films” to use their anachronistic title are shared anywhere we have a connection to the internet. And that’s possibly everywhere you go in a day if you’re reading this blog. The short film format in particular has never been so popular with facebook or twitter regularly guiding us to you-tube or vimeo. Perhaps we can declare that cinema is dead, but long live video.

This would be a loss however. What distinguishes a cinema from anywhere else is not what it does for us in telling stories but how we listen to those stories in a cinema. We listen without distraction and with devotion. If the moving image has become as ubiquitous as God is purported to be by believers – then the cinema is like a church, a place set apart specifically and reverentially for the object of its fascination.

Be honest– when was the last time you paid continuous attention for longer than an hour to any story told in moving image and sound? For me it was in a cinema. At home my best chance of achieving this is if my partner and I are both watching a dvd. Even then we’ll probably be stopping the film to put the chickens away, or make a cuppa or some custard.  Heaven help us if the film is boring at any point. Some movies don’t get finished.

On the internet there is simply no hope of my attention lasting that long. With a world of other information and entertainment only a click away then anything longer than ten minutes will almost definitely be interrupted. I recently made it thirty four minutes into an absolutely fascinating lecture by Douglas Rushkoff but I was watching it while making both apricot jam and fudge.

I’m not alone. According to a few internet articles which I skimmed and some videos I barely watched while opening another tab in my browser to check facebook, polls and experts recommend online videos be between two and half to four minutes long  or between ninety seconds and two minutes or  not much longer than fifteen seconds. 

Given that a cinema provides a rare space for reverent attention towards the moving image it’s fair to say that the loss of cinema from our culture would be a real loss to how video story telling is received. I believe this is important because there is something uniquely important about movies. Although this would take numerous essays to do justice I’m going to attempt to explain this unique value here in just a small part of this post.

I’ll begin by suggesting that wisdom only develops when we encounter the world rather than studying it from a distance. We need to meet, with all the unforeseen circumstances such meeting might bring, other “worlds” (from cliffs to factory farms to outer space) to incorporate them into our reality. Otherwise we only know about them. We will have only stayed in our world in which those “things” are mentioned. If this seems remarkable to you then consider how you learnt about members of the opposite sex, or your own body, or spaghetti or the flu.

Video stories when completed with editing, sound and soundtracks and particularly when attended to in a darkened cinema are a way to simulate the encounter of other worlds. They are our best approximation of dreaming. I have respect for the lucid dreaming communities but I think movies done right exceed their efforts.

Before any bibliophile stabs me with their library card I’ll acknowledge that books provide encounters with other worlds – sometimes better than movies do. But ask yourself this – would you finish a book you pretty much disagreed with? If so you’re exceptional. I for one will probably never make it from the cover to cover of some new age mash up of self-help and quantum physics. But I watched “What the Bleep do you know?”  and I watched it at the cinemas believe it or not. (Cinema Kino in Melbourne I should add so as not to tar the Star.)

Likewise if I wanted a friend to open themselves to the idea that the Jesus archetype is relevant to today’s world and not just as a long past historical event then I could probably find many books for them to read. None of them would have much chance of being opened. I would be the most dreaded Chris Kringle . On the other hand I could introduce them to the film, Jesus of Montreal and they would probably watch it to the end. Even if they loathed the movie they would get a sense of what appealed in it to me while only losing a couple of hours of their time. 

Neither of these worlds of string-theory inspired positive thinking or Jesus Christ vs the Catholic Church are going to get an airing at Bendigo’s other cinema, Bendigo Cinemas. That cinema is committed to carrying the movies that generally cater to the mass consumer market and which come with the guarantee of entertainment rather than disturbance. This doesn’t mean “bad” movies at all  - I loved both the Avengers and the My Little Pony movie. They even include the occasional grungy and atypical story. I saw Animal Kingdom there, albeit on their smallest screen.  Still the only times Bendigo Cinemas will feature a film with a non-white main character, it will probably be an animated pony or car.

This is why the STAR in particular matters. We need to go beyond the mainstream to gain the wisdom to address exactly the sort of issues that might legitimately call us away from the STARs funding concerns – issues like Australia’s treatment of refugees for example. The same is true if we just want to see more nuanced conversations about relationships and growing up than the Disney model would give us. Those conversations might include unwanted pregnancies or same-sex attraction. These elements of reality do get a decent showing in movies at the STAR.

You could argue encountering these marginilised worlds in a movie is unnecessary. Those worlds are all around us and even in our own lifes. Very few of us actually live out Hollywood norms. However until we see our atypical lives depicted on the big screen and given such respect I think we can censor even ourselves from ourselves. We tend to view our own difference as deviance – not a definining aspect of reality but an error in the code. The Star showed a documentary a while back about Australian roller-derby contestants - This is Roller Derby. While the film probably gave local roller –derby players very little new factual information it gave narrative worth to the Australian history of a sport sometimes just seen as a U.S. import. It changed what was included in “the real” story of roller-derby.

So there we have it. The train of my logic (or at least rhetoric) has brought us here. Cinemas are crucial spaces for us to pay attention to movies and movies are realistic ways (more realistic than books frankly) for people to encounter worlds beyond their own or even their own previously self-censored world. Those encounters produce wisdom. Lastly the STAR cinema is going to show the worlds that are far more rarely shown – worlds that can offer us the wisdom we need to tackle those competing bread and butter issues.

I’m not sure I’ve entirely convinced myself that supporting the STAR should hold a similar priority to addressing more mundane needs (giving money to Refugee Resource Centres for example). I just hope I have articulated how the two are connected. Losing the STAR will make affecting change in regard to a whole lot of issues harder. Currently I consider the STAR to have a profound and positive effect on my local culture. That’s something worth fighting for.

So donate.