Systems

W

hen I was writing my previous book The Songs of Peter Grey, and really going through my church past even more than I ever had before, one thing that really made me think was to remember:

1. How constantly the men in our church spoke negatively about human religious systems[1]
2. How carefully they contrasted these systems (churches, charities and Christian communities) with “God's way,” which we were following at our church, of course

and

3. How absolutely everything they said, and everything I knew about human systems, religious or otherwise, was also very true of my own church.  Yet I'd been raised to never put it under that spotlight along with the rest. So I hadn't, really.  To suggest there was anything merely human about what went on at our church was definitely fighting words.

The thing about a system, is it is human made, rather than naturally occurring. Systems add structure by defining limits.  In our country, for instance, we have a legal system.  There are innumerable laws, and pretty much all of the laws take away, rather than grant, freedoms.  And we're fine with that, because we want the liberty of other, less trusted people, to be carefully limited.  We're fine enough with this, that we're willing to give up those same liberties ourselves, just to make sure “the wrong people” don't have them.

Every system, no matter what it claims, tends toward being anti-change.  We need some systems, but systems also have to be limited themselves, or they'll subject everyone to tyranny.  Tyranny is control taken so far as to be anti-life.

I'm a classroom teacher, and I have to keep kids in the room, in their seats, out of each other's stuff, attentive, quiet and off their phones.  Now, if the kids were actually dead, those things would all cease to be problems.  If we just executed all of them, and they were all propped up in their chairs, grey, stiff and cold, not one of those problems would trouble the room anymore.  All we'd have to sacrifice would be life itself[2].

Now, with all the Jordan Peterson videos I've been watching lately, I have become more acutely aware of the fact that the 20^th century was firstly a secularizing century, which intended to bring a new era of liberty from all the old traditions, customs and religious claptrap. 

What actually happened (obviously) is that the regimes most determined to rid their societies of traditions, aristocrats, religion and other forms of structure, all ended up under the thumbs of tyrants.  Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Kim Jong-Il and Mao Tse-tung spring to mind.  These men caused more death “in the name of freedom and prosperity and good,” supposedly for the future of their countries, than anyone else we can easily think of.  Control taken too far.

On a more individual level, some people have the tragic misfortune to live with (or work under or go to church with) someone who is clearly a tyrant, who seems to need to impose order, control and structure so desperately that s/he (boyfriend, girlfriend, sibling, parent, spouse, boss, elder or pastor) clearly puts the needs of the people under their influence far below the maintenance of the obsessive order to which they are so addicted.  All decisions are made with that ranking in place.

My problem with my upbringing was that, as to my father, and as to my church and as to some of my teachers, this was exactly what I lived under.  It was most extreme when seen in my father trying to gain/maintain the approval of the church as to how I was allowed to live.  Everything from what shirt I could wear, to my hairstyle, to my music, to my shoes, speech, friends and entertainment were carefully controlled.  I was trained to “just know” how the system worked so I could be socially (or sometimes academically, ecclesiastically or physically) punished without anyone needing to even tell me what I'd done wrong.  We all were.  We all had to just know.  And so we did. 

The success of this “just knowing” training encouraged the leaders among us to present the “just knowing” as very natural.  It wasn't.  It was hammered into us relentlessly and was nothing if not systematic.  No system is natural, though if they are sufficiently gentle and flexible, they can work very well with it.

Where I went with this idea was a bit like this:

If, as I have been taught, every person is flawed and imperfect, and in the course of a given day, caught at various moments during that day, is going to be doing something stupid, then a system run by a group of such individuals simply can’t be expected not to drop the ball repeatedly in the course of a given day.  It is our expectation of how they should work, spurred on by how most systems wish to claim they work, and the image they try to present, that makes us frustrated when we look too closely at any system, or worse yet, have personal dealings with, or within it.

I work in a high school, and so have a close-up view of how stupidly the education system tends to end up working.  Some work in a hospital or corporation or the military.  All say the same thing: if you have a close look at it, it’s far from optimum.

I would go further and suggest that there are always people who fall through the cracks, and people who get very badly served by any system.  In fact, most systems have what would have to be called victims, either of neglect, or worse.

My role in life, very often, is listening to and believing without judging, those kinds of people. The people who feel they’ve gotten neglected, sidelined or actually badly mistreated by various human systems.  Often that’s okay.  Too often, though, systems try to shut people up and discredit them, or try to interfere with people like me listening or comforting.  Someone like me being around, with no clear loyalty to the system in question, perhaps watching as light is shone under certain rocks, means I am often perceived as a threat to it.  Certainly, if I talk or blog about some of what I learn, I am attacked for this.

What Good Are Systems?

We recognize what we think of as “chaos” whenever we encounter nature.  Stuff that’s not orderly enough for us.  We live in houses, most of us, because we don't want snakes and deer and wild dogs in our kitchens checking out what we're cooking for supper.  We don't want ants in our nostrils or bees in our armpits.  We want to keep life out, to some degree.  We want control over what sort of life is in and which sorts are out, of what. 

In the bible, much of the story starts in a garden, which is, of course, nature not simply being allowed to run riot, growing within a kind of structure or scheme.  Gardens have rows, beds, paths and walls.  Gardens showcase life and make it possible to walk around looking at it (I’m thinking of Winston Churchill’s huge and ornate gardens, tended long after he had died, which I walked through last summer).  Thickets keep you out.  Garden paths take you down them and show you the flowers.

And what is cancer, by contrast?  Life run riot, cells dividing out of control and not staying with the plan.  Individual cancer cells are life, but they can kill the organism they’re growing in.

A marriage, a family, a school, a church, a town; these are all systems that we are quite content to use, unless a tyrant takes them over and starts stamping out stuff that smacks of life.

The dichotomy I was raised with, of course, was “the Church/God's people” vs. This World.  This world had things like drugs, adultery, extortion, theft and rape.  You stayed in the Church, and limited your time and social circles to that tightly controlled little circle.  In turn, it would:

·         provide you with everything you needed which you might otherwise have had to get from This World

and

·         ensure that none of those above mentioned problems touched anyone within the Church.

It was supposed to work like that, anyway, this God-pleasing, necessary system within which we lived.  Of course we were encouraged never to view it as a system, and certainly not a man-made, merely human one.  Systems were only the natural, flawed efforts of well-intentioned, but fallen man.  We were plugged into God-stuff. 

There were five hour-long “meetings” each week.  The system included purging the “worldly” joy-giving entertainment stuff from your life and going to these extremely quiet, somber church services[3] and sitting at home silently reading the bible by yourself and praying, where you might otherwise pursue leisure activities.  Seemingly arbitrary[4] restrictions like not being allowed to run or swim or play games on Sundays were part of my childhood from birth.

And was my upbringing good? Well, I write to now as someone who learned to use a toilet, sink and shower properly, as someone who can read and write and almost do math.  I do not go around punching people, wrecking stuff or stealing things.  By that standard, my upbringing did its job.  Every child grows up within a system of order, a socializing pattern of some kind.

Now, for every child who isn’t absolutely neglected, socialization means that their comparatively infinite capacity to enjoy themselves and transgress all social boundaries needs to be something they learn to curtail.  Notably, children are taught to be able to turn their natural play impulse on and off the way they are taught to wait until they are on the toilet before they empty their bladders.  A child who can’t learn to not immediately act upon every single impulse s/he has, ends up not being included in any social interactions at all, really.

The thing is to give children what skills they need, in order to get by in social situations and systems that are going to be healthy for them.  It’s important that any system a parent insists a child live in not abuse them.  In North America, residential schools for aboriginal peoples crushed much that was natural out of native children for many decades.  Their names, their language, their stories, and even things like showing affection for or spending time with parents and siblings were simply removed from their childhoods almost entirely.

The system I grew up hardwired into wasn’t as severe, of course.  As a kid, I felt very keenly however that I was, to a lesser degree, being forced to live under a deeply unnatural, relentlessly joy-killing system, and that people were far from candid about exactly what the system was doing, or who was driving.  And I wanted answers. I wanted people to admit, to be clear out loud, in words, about what was being expected of us.  They didn’t like being asked for answers.  God was driving, of course, they claimed. 

It didn't appear that way to me.  Especially when, by the time I'd reached adult-hood, I knew first-hand that it hadn't “delivered” sufficiently, neither in providing me with what I needed, nor in ensuring that its own weren't touched by the aforementioned problems. 

In fact, it turned its back to you and systematically and facelessly punished you if you showed signs of needing more than the dry, dead, dust-caked fare it was dishing up, and it did the same thing is you got touched by any of those problems.  It had a world-class “blame the victim” approach, no matter if it was adultery, rape, extortion or whatever.

This left me feeling very much it had taken all of our life-sacrifices (all systems require some kind of sacrifice of a bit of your life, if you think about it), and had then not only not delivered what it promised, but also was silencing, disappearing, shaming, slandering and otherwise punishing people in a way that Joseph Stalin could have taken notes from.  To say that it was Orwellian is an understatement.

So why have structure at all?  You need it to have order, to get (somewhat) predictable and reliable results.  You need the “madness,” and you also need a method to your madness.  Jordan Peterson (again) explains that in order to play a game, you have to embrace so very many kinds of limits that the fun is in overcoming them.  You win by moving the only chess piece you can sensibly move, in the only way you’re allowed to move it, and only when it’s your turn, thereby vanquishing your opponent and impressing everyone looking on with your ability to work inside that system without breaking a single bit of the structure build into it. 

Art works like this also.  Jack Whyte in It Might Get Loud (2009) speaks eloquently about how much he uses limits, how much he needs to rail against petty technical problems and little obstacles in order to make music at all, let alone good music.  He keeps playing old, cheap guitars that need to be continually tuned and fixed.  In his band The White Stripes he was backed only by a single person playing simple drum parts.  He “fights” with his guitar and sometimes leaves blood on the strings.  This makes his performances what they are. 

Because good art is often doing what you can, somehow, despite there not being really many choices.  I think that’s the main reason why so much bad music is being made nowadays.   It’s too easy. It doesn’t cost much, it isn’t difficult and pretty much anyone can do it, anytime they want. 

I think this is why George Lucas wowed everyone with his first Star Wars movies, with his crazy battleship model parts glued to ping pong tables lined up in a row, with the cameraman driving by in a pickup truck, leaning out the side window with the camera as fireworks were set off.  The obvious question was “How on earth did he manage to do any of this? I mean, at all?” 

Decades later, with a virtually unlimited budget and array of technical doodads, the obvious question about anything he then went on to create was “You could have done absolutely anything you wanted. Why on earth would anyone choose to do that?!”

So limits of the right kind can be very good.  Limits of precisely the wrong kind, as we sometimes encounter when we run up against a system that wants to control us when we need a bit more liberty, are a serious problem.

When should you work within a system set up by other people, and when should you decide to go lone wolf?  When you slot yourself into a structure, the important question probably is “What do you want to do?”  The structure needs to not only allow, but help that.  Otherwise, it’s gotta go.  Especially if it’s not letting people grow.

My complaints as a teenager weren't that I really resented not being able to go get drunk, shoplift, vandalize or use drugs without being punished by that system.  I accepted all of that.  My complaints were that I was starving in there (and it wasn’t safe in there either).  I was punished if growth started to happen. So what was the point of it[5]? 

I wanted to learn to know God as a real Person, and not just be religious and hide from doubt and temptation, and above all, no longer wanted to live in constant fear of the system “getting the wrong idea” about me.  The system encouraged me to live for show, and to serve men rather than God.  It made me think of how decisions looked, rather than if they worked and were wise.  It made me be careful about everything, and live in fear and bondage to rules. 

So it had to go.  But I didn’t leave it.  It left me, like geese leave our province when winter comes.  My mind stopped being limited by those trained, but wholly removable limits.  I still attended church, but the internal cognitive and emotional limits were gone. 

The “power people” at the church didn’t want and of that spreading to other people.  They couldn’t have me walking around with my head all Christian-liberated in their space, and still maintain what they felt they needed to.  And I stood out for having liberty, for following grace rather than rules. 

So they kicked me out.  This fixed their problem.  Then they could say “See?  We were right. If you do what he’s advocating, you could end up right where he is!”

And this does raise a very difficult question: if you leave behind your Christian system, what are you, then?  Can you be a Christian? Can you still follow Christ, all by yourself?  Doesn’t this “going out unto him without the camp” constitute a clear disobedience of rules that are in the bible?  I mean, it’s got to, right?  We can’t just be free from the scrutiny of each other, of being accountable to the church of our choice, and limited by them?

I live like this.  It works.  I deal with God.  I don’t have to ask a pastor if it’s okay before I write things.  I have not signed a church membership agreement to abstain from alcohol and R-Rated films.  I serve God rather than any of the myriad church systems. 

I have Christians friends and we hold each other accountable.  We have a community.  We have each other, though we live in different cities.  And I can tell you that there are limits.  I am very aware that I am freed by the work of Christ, and I am equally aware that I am very much in the hands of a God who can be angry at times.  But I deal directly with Him.

And I feel that, though my “job” is different, as well as my origins, that I should actually try to live in this world like I think Jesus Christ would want me to, and even, would himself live, if he for some reason had my life to live.  I’ve been told outright, by Christians, that my “job” isn’t to imitate Christ, but to follow the leading of a godly pastor at a nice church.  I disagree.  I’ve never dealt with a system that does anything but punish and resent me if I get Christ-like in any way that surprises them or does anything but praise and maintain their church system.

The thing is, you can set your own limits and follow Jesus, based on reading the bible, praying and paying a certain amount of attention to your own life and what tends to happen in it.  And you can follow Christ without needing to be guided by someone with a title like “reverend” or “pastor.”  You really can follow Christ yourself.  You may find you have to “leave father and mother” to do it, but you might, as I found, actually really need to do that.

Making Order

You can make and maintain quite a bit of order, this classroom teacher can tell you, without needing a whole lot of systematic, heavy-handed limiting of rights.  And it can be flexible and friendly, especially once people believe that they will actually benefit from the minimal amount of structure you decide is necessary.  No one needs to die or be vapourised or anything.

In fact any good parent or person who tastefully, almost invisibly, adds some order to any kind of people-chaos can tell you that what you want is a lively dance between impulsivity and plan, whim and policy, energy and restraint.  One of the things that marks a professional is the ability to make snap decisions that “roll with the punches,” that make sense, given unexpected turns of events.

I have found that to a large degree, once you remove yourself from the watchful eye of your parents and/or church, you are being your own parent, your own pastor.  And you should be a good one.  You need to provide the life, the inspiration, the engagement as well as the plans, limits and policies.  If you loathe yourself and feeling nothing but disrespect and disdain (an attitude quite at odds with the one God has toward you, and commands everyone to have towards you as well) you can become your own tyrant. 

People who think the bible is only intended to inspire caution, order, ethics, rules and structure, are missing the other side of things.  I know it's the bible and everything, but sometimes even people in the bible have to say “You know what?  Why not?” 

And they do say this.  Because this is part of what living people do.  They get ideas.  They get inspired.  Sometimes by the Holy Spirit/God Himself.  It's not always deeply underlined that sometimes God is telling them all the specifics and looking for obedience, and other times decisions are being left to their own discretion. 

Adam: You know what?  I think I'm going to name THAT animal a jujube.  No wait.  I'll call it a zebra.  Yes.  A zebra.  To rhyme with Debra in Britain and de-bra in America. Yup.

God: Amen[6].

And quite often, God honours that.  Kinda follows them.  Like a parent letting a child choose which kind of ice cream the family will be having after supper.  He doesn’t make all of our life decisions for us.  Refuses to do that.  You will have to decide various things in your life.  God will make you, and He won’t simply tell you what to do every time.

And as Jordan Peterson points out, sometimes you get it wrong.  And that is often okay. You can just go ask God “Why didn't You like that?  Why didn't that work out?” 

Or you can notice that things are working out well for the next guy over, and you can go figure out what he's doing right.  Or you can get a rock and go murder your brother for being different from you.  Because you don't want there to be two sides to the thing, and you feel the need to control the situation and exert your own influence.

One interesting thing is that when we are juxtaposing order and chaos, it is chaos that has more to do with life and possibility.  Now, religions other than Judaism (and its sequels) tend to envision the cosmos being made of chaos.  What we would think of as empty space they would think of as a chaotic mess of stuff.  Crazy, unbridled, unformed energy and possibility. 

In their stories, it is then taken and formed into something more stable, so that life can last and thrive in constant forms on it.  To this way of thinking, chaos is a breeding ground for life.  The creation myths of ancient cultures are about there already being lots and lots of “stuff” there, and order being imposed upon it.  Dragons and mothers or fathers war and have sex, are killed and dismembered, and their dismembered members become continents or mountains or whatever.

To the Judeo-Christian mind[7], the cosmos was nothing. Emptiness.  In a time before time existed, all that there was was nothing that was.  And all of the energy, inspiration and possibilities were in God’s Head (were a gleam in His Eye, so to speak), waiting to be spoken into reality, perhaps with a big “bang” sound.  (that’s Judeo-Christian thinking.  To a more scientific heart, one might say “the mathematics were waiting to happen, the equations, formulas and numbers gazing eagerly upon the opportunity to have molecules to apply to.)

In the story I’m used to, God “adds” thing after thing to all the nothingness, until the Earth and the universe are teeming with things He thought of and spoke into ordered forms.  Just as in the very latest scientific creation myths, He brings all the life from what is already on the Earth.  He brings it forth from the sea, from the primordial mud/ooze.

I Am Afraid of Nothing

I think the worst thing that ever happened to me growing up was all the nothing.  I tell my students that with where we live, in all likelihood, nothing’s going to happen to them.  Really nothing. Nothing bad, if the lives of people in the whole world are used to put things into perspective, and if they’re not very, very smart, nothing good will happen to them either.

A lot of people leave where they grew up and go to another place, hoping that something will have happened to them.  Apart from perhaps an interesting meal or view or two, often all that happens is they find they are somewhere else for a time, and nothing much besides going there happens, really.

So I don’t fear chaos so much as I fear nothing.  I need God to show up and do thing to, around, with and through me.  I need to be inspired.  I need to do things.

And systems are often built by and for people who are terrified by the very idea that something or someone somewhere is going to possibly go out of control and do things.  This happens so rarely in our culture that it makes big news stories every time. 

I think it is a far more likely fate that nothing much will happen to me.  And systems I have been adjunct to[8] seldom provide much besides a celebration of being part of them, and of perhaps feeling that things are well ordered, that committees have been tasked, issues tabled and items spoken to.  In my experience, most systems are uncomfortable with much of anything much happening.  They get very uppity if any lone person starts succeeding at doing something that they’ve already appointed a taskforce to look into the feasibility of raising awareness regarding doing. 

They seem to me to be primarily about making sure all manner of things probably won’t ever happen, and then talking endlessly about things happening that do not impose much upon our lives beyond the talking and maybe a zippy acronym and colourful bracelet or t-shirt.  Oh, and an awful lot of congratulating people if they’ve so much as brought doughnuts.

I guess what I’m saying, in my snarky, rhetorical way, is where is the life, the inspiration, the action, the involvement, the actuality?  I see order and structure, but no life.  I guess this is why, when I get an idea to do something, I don’t check first to see if there’s an official church or government body already appointed, who only get to do that good.  I just do things myself.

At the school where I worked, when I was going to make a class webpage, the school board sent around someone to show us how they were planning on hosting and facilitating teachers with having webpages.  Their concept was too limited, limiting and controlled for what I wanted, so I paid (and pay every year) for my own hosting and domain name, and have a teacher website of my own.  One of the first things that happened once I set it up was the school board unknowingly blocked it.  I had to email them to get it unblocked, which they did.

   We live in societies and move in communities which really, really want to spend all of their time creating one size fits all fixes and structures.  If, like me, you find, through no fault of your own, that you aren’t typical, and therefore the typical fixes and structures do not serve you, but serve more to point up the narrowness of vision and planning seen in the systems themselves, you might just have to try a new approach: one size fits me.  And I know what size that is, thank you very much.

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[1]              A few older guys actually just called all Christianity outside our church “System.”  And they had not one good or even neutral comment to make about “those ensnared by System.”

[2]              Unfortunately, you need life if you want growth, and learning and education are supposedly serving growth.  Much of what goes on in schools isn't serving growth at all, but is necessary (or is thought necessary) in order to serve the interests of control.

[3]I do not remember there being any facial expressions at any of these.

[4] They weren't really random of course.  The system was challenged by joy and enthusiasm and was purging those from among us.  That much is clear to me now.

[5] I didn’t see the point of the cliques at school, either, so wore and said and didn’t do and didn’t like whatever I felt like.  There is a price to be paid for that kind of behaviour of course, but it can also be its own reward.

[6] Amen: means “so be it.”

[7] And to the modern scientific mind as well, really.

[8] I haven’t actually been “part of” very many systems at all.  And I think it’s safe to say I’ve pretty much never had a “positive” or helpful group experience of any kind.  Everything good that I ever saw involved at most three people.