WE CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW that the first three Spirit Scholars articles on Crowdsourcing are prompting many of us to begin exploring this enormously important movement that will reshape our spiritual communities, whether we like it or not.
Here are just a few of the comments that readers have Emailed back to us:
"I think you have just identified a cultural tsunami."
-- Zen Buddhist monk and author Geri Larkin
"The Crowdsourcing concept is fascinating. Thank you … for bringing a variety of seemingly disparate threads together, culminating in the present and projections for the future."
-- Shelley Bates, high school Humanities teacher
"As far as religion is concerned ... I wonder how this will affect those teaching and studying in seminaries. Does it suggest that seminary education needs a more external component, bringing the crowd into the seminary classroom? Is the crowd as important as analyzing the sacred texts and understanding church history?"
-- Dennis Archambault, writer, communications expert
NOW, we draw this four-part series to a close with the most troubling question of all about our cultural shift toward Crowdsourcing.
The question is: Whose Crowd?
And, just as we weren’t alone here at Spirit Scholars in posing the first three questions – about the origins of the term, about the prophetic voices already trying to shape the movement of the crowd and about the churches that already are stumbling toward crowdsourcing – we are not alone in raising this final, almost apocalyptic question.
The cultural markers are springing up everywhere that the real question about Crowdsourcing is how we define our Crowd.
This query yawns like an abyss before us at the end of this discussion, because, for more than a century now, the lifeblood of American culture has been a breathless pursuit of the ever-changing boundary between the “in crowd” and the “out.”
In this new millennium, it is almost impossible to square this American desire to see ourselves as part of a privileged set -- with Jesus’ preaching or similarly provocative preaching by the Prophet Muhammad or the Buddha. OR, how could we possibly square our ideas about privilege, ownership and an "in crowd" with those radically egalitarian ancient Jewish sages who came up with such mind-bogglingly utopian concepts as “Jubilee Year,” a 50-year cycle that ends with the cancelation of debts, the freeing of slaves and the redistribution of private property among the people.
All of these wise voices echo down through the centuries, crying out that a spiritually healthy crowd MUST include everyone, especially society’s outcasts.
In fact, within the Christian tradition, that's how Jesus announced his ministry to the followers of his cousin, John the Baptist, echoing the message of the ancient prophet Isaiah. If you don't recall the scene, check out the 7th Chapter of Luke.
It’s not a value unique to Christianity, though. It's impossible to imagine Buddhism without this core value. The Lalitavistara Sutra, a nearly 2,000-year-old compilation of Gautama Buddha's life, declares that, along with enlightenment, what shone most brightly from his life was "the blind regained their sight, the deaf once more could hear, the lame once again had perfect limbs, the poor found riches and prisoners were delivered from their bonds." If you're familiar with Luke 7 (or Isaiah for that matter), then these words sound remarkably familiar.
How stunning it is, then, to find many Western Christians performing theological gymnastics that seek to preserve our exclusive tightrope of privilege. Many of us like to call these privileges our “blessings.” And, if you haven't caught the drift of this article already, then simply buy a copy of Rob Bell’s Nooma, No. 13, “Rich,” for 11 unforgettable minutes in which Bell deconstructs the tragedy of such spiritual claims to wealth.
But, here’s the NEWS: The Spirit Scholars and the Rob Bells of this world are not alone, if we have eyes to see all of the prophets wandering among us – pointing us toward this question: Whose Crowd?
Want to see this question rattling through the American cultural architecture right this moment?
Go see Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu's deeply troubling new movie, "Babel," which tells stories of personal tragedy in three seemingly unconnected corners of the Earth: the remote mountains of Morocco, the busy streets of Japan and the impoverished villages of Mexico.
What is so fascinating about this film is that it is NOT a typical third-world diatribe against callous Americans. In fact, Americans wind up as compassionate victims for the most part. Instead, "Babel" is about the tragic disconnections that are endemic in all of our global cultures. In one third of the film, a deaf Japanese girl finds herself driven toward suicidal dispair as she tries to survive in Japan's high-powered audio culture. In another third of the film, a Moroccan peasant's inability to communicate with Moroccan police leads to catastrophe. And, in the other third, a traditional, middle-aged Mexican woman can't communicate with a rebellious Mexican youth who winds up driving her to the brink of tragedy.
At one point in the Japanese portion of the film, the deaf girl is humiliated by a group of young men in a club and she retreats to the shelter of several deaf friends, signing out her exasperation about the heartless guys. "They look at us like monsters!" she says to her friends.
But, hey, that's only a tip of the real Monster's toe.
Simply flip open the current issue of The New Yorker (the one with President Bush on the cover looking embarassed). Yes, we're not kidding. We're talking about prophetic voices in the New Yorker, that bastion of Upper-Crust Cool. Yes, we understand the irony: For generations now, intellectually aspiring readers could establish their social altitude by simply mentioning in casual conversation, “Did you read in this week’s 'Talk of the Town' …”
However, for quite some time now, the editors in Manhattan has been dropping disturbingly subversive hints that this definitely is NOT your Grandfather’s New Yorker. Their series of Letters from Baghdad, for instance, served for a couple of years as a terribly important window into the human chaos we were wreaking in Iraq.
Now, in the current issue, among the very New Yorker-ish essays on cosmetic surgery, Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard, a hot new Icelandic sculptor and Nicole Kidman’s “take” on Diane Arbus – all of them mainstays of New Yorker culture – there is One Enormous Double-Page Full-Color Photograph of a Slum.
Therein lies the real Monster: the real Crowd.
Writer George Packer provides virtually a primer on the growth of global Mega-Cities. One of the best books he recommends in his story is Mike Davis' "Planet of Slums" (see the mini-review in the upper-right corner of this page). In his book, Davis charts what may be the most important social development of the past 50 years: the evolution of cities around the world with more than 10 million people, most of which are intertwined with vast slums and offer almost no hope of permanence. No permanent land. No permanent role in a society. No permanent identity.
Davis writes: "The squatter is still the major human symbol, whether as victim or hero, of the Third World city." Davis uses the word "still," because for years many American activists liked to celebrate squatters as brave, urban pioneers.
HERE's the shocking news that Davis brings in his book: It's Davis' conclusion that even the identity of "the squatter" is endangered! Unused stretches of urban landscape are vanishing around the world and squatters' slums are vanishing beneath the relentless blades of developers' bulldozers.
Do you see the distressing implication emerging? If more than 1 billion of our spiritual brothers and sisters are sinking, nameless and faceless, in these bottomless slums, then how can we as Americans make any claim to compassionate connections with the Crowd?
The New Yorker zeroes in on this very point. Armed with data from Davis and other scholars, Packer heads into the smokey, steaming slums that are home to 15 million souls in Lagos, Nigeria. If you care about these issues, you need to read Packer's amazing story -- and see the full scope of the photography by Samantha Appleton. (To whet your appetite to go read the original, we have included only a few small details from Appleton's canvas-sized photos with this article.)
IN THE END, Packer takes us to the heart of the apocalyptic abyss: One of the world's largest garbage dumps, situated in the heart of Lagos with the overwhelming stench of burning filth and maze-like walls of refuse that stand as tall as five-story buildings. Within this most precarious of all neighborhoods, thousands of trash pickers have settled themselves, exporting hand-picked bags of raw materials to support their meager, tragically fleeting lives.
Foreigners? Outcasts? People beyond our help? People so desperate that we need not think about their part of the Crowd?
No, Packer writes in aching eloquence: Souls.
Toward the end of Packer's long article, we discover that, in the very heart of this abominable landscape, the pickers "have built a mosque and a church and at Christmas they celebrate by decorating their shacks."
Did a shiver just run up your spine as you read that line? I certainly felt a shiver as I came to that moment in Packer's story. They've built a little church in the toxic wasteland? And CHRISTMAS decorations in homes where people are dying of poverty? That's got to strike at our deepest cultural nerves in America.
We ask again: Whose crowd? And answer: It's our crowd! All of us are souls within it!
Packer is a realist. He doesn't think there's much hope that we'll ever see these folks as part of our spiritual body, our crowd. His final lines are: "The really disturbing thing about Lagos' pickers and venders is that their lives have essentially nothing to do with ours. They scavenge an existence beyond the margins of macro-economics. They are, in the harsh terms of globalization, superfluous."
Are they? That's the question Brad Pitt wrestles with in "Babel" and that we need to wrestle with as people of faith.
The second chapter of the Letter of James puts it this way (and you can find similarly head-snapping indictments in other ancient scriptures): "My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, 'Have a seat here, please,' while to the one who is poor you say, 'Stand there,' or, 'Sit at my feet,' have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. … You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors."
OUCH! From "blessed" to "convicted" in the turning of a few pages of Holy Writ.
Or, to summarize the epistle of James (and Jesus' teachings for that matter): We're all one crowd -- and OUR lives depend upon accepting that responsibility.
Now, you can call us hopelessly idealistic here at Spirit Scholars. And, we all can make fun of the rich celebrities who are trying their best to act like modern-day prophets among us. It's so easy to do.
Just flip to the front of that same, current New Yorker magazine and you'll find a full-page advertisement for the celebrity-studded nonprofit movement, Keep a Child Alive. It's an arresting photo of the rock star Sting, declaring simply: "I Am an African."
Funny, huh? A rock star as a spiritual sage?
But, therein may lie the one prophetic hope of Crowdsourcing, it seems to us: Seeing finally that each of us is responsible for this vast, global family -- this crowd -- that our spiritual roots have thrust upon us.
But, as always, tell us what you think. Post a Comment or send us an Email. The truth is that this discussion is only beginning.
Poised precariously at the dawn of a new millennium, this may be the discussion that defines our future as a human family.
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