Countering the Tyranny of Acceleration (Burnout, wk 5)

Subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | YouTube

The forces of acceleration behind our societal burnout are experienced as guilt by the middle class, and as injustice by the working class. Vince points us to the Bible's Zacchaeus to help us imagine how communities can counter this "tyranny of acceleration" by holding up alternative visions of fullness of life.

SPEAKER NOTES

Burnout, wk 5: Countering the Tyranny of Acceleration

Opening

I was going to start with a story this morning from my personal experience.

But with the violence continuing in Palestine, I decided instead I want to begin by commenting on how our discussion of accelerated Modern Life and societal burnout can offer some context to how we are processing all of the information we’re getting from the Gaza Strip.

This situation sadly is just so entrenched and overrun with justifications for violence and bad faith actors in authority positions.

And, thus, as you may have followed this week, one of the difficult things has been figuring out what information is true and what is misinformation.

And this is largely happening on social media, which algorithmically and psychologically rewards outrage and down-votes nuance.

There is so much going on in all this that is way above my pay grade to speak to, but one thing I do think I can comment on is that:

Modern Life’s prizing of speed and acceleration as our highest moral goods are exacerbating the misinformation.

There is so much pressure and demand on journalists to be fast and first to the news, that one bad faith actor can set off a domino effect where, suddenly, the most credible news sources in the world are aggregating unverified claims.

And, in the context of war, misinformation can have very real, very violent consequences.

Where I want to go in today’s message is to make clear that the forces of acceleration behind our societal burnout are moral matters. And they are not isolated in their effect only to workplaces being dehumanizing or Modern city-dwellers feeling the fatigue of making meaning and purpose and a good life for themselves by themselves, these forces of acceleration are also connected to the larger systemic injustices and corruptions that plague our world.

And, as we’ll see, that makes the phenomenon of societal burnout a tool in the hand of bad faith actors in power to keep the status quo the status quo.

The God Jesus shows humanity is calling to all to join in God’s deep solidarity with our world. I hope today can help us, as Brown Line Church, hear that call.

Context

Well, so far this fall, during our series addressing societal burnout

• We’ve talked about how burnout is not a problem with fringe individuals, it’s a societal problem, a central feature of the way Modern Life works unfortunately
• We’ve visited some historical inflection points in the ::500 year story:: of time speeding up to track how we got to where we are today, with our conception of a good, full life in modern cities is a busy life
  • Which exhausts us, but also kind of excites us
  • because busyness makes us feel like we’re in demand or have good stories to tell
  • We have a love-hate relationship with busyness, which is what makes it so hard to not conceive of fullness as busyness
  • Our image from the kitchen in FX’s The Bear with the big clock and the "every second counts" sign illustrates this so well if you know the show -- it represents purpose for the characters AND we're forced to ask the question "is this killing their souls?” at the same time
• Each week, we’ve pulled in captivating invitations from Jesus to conceive of fullness of life differently… I’ll offer another before we’re done today.
• But before I do, I want to add yet more texture to this picture of Accelerated Modern Life and the 500 year story that we’ve been gradually unpacking, with help from our scholar sources for this series
• This texture focuses mostly on socioeconomic observations, but I think we can also make related sociopolitical observations to connect this to the violence in Israel-Palestine (and I’ll try to do that) ::500 year story off::

The Tyranny of acceleration

Hartmut Rosa — one of our sources — observes how the challenges of acceleration are experienced differently across socioeconomic classes in Modern Capitalist Democracies like America.

We’ll call this the Tyranny of acceleration

• ::middle & upper-middle class — internalized guilt::
• ::working class and poor — externally imposed::

For the middle class, like me:

• The tyranny of acceleration is internalized — they experience it inside as guilt
• Time is moving so fast I always feel guilty I’m not using my time well enough
  • to be more productive,
  • to be a better person,
  • to improve my marriage,
  • to be a better parent,
  • to make more money,
  • to read more important books,
  • to get in better physical shape,
  • to stay up to date on the news, or to be able to spot the misinformation from the information
• Guilty, guilty, guilty all the time for all those ways I’m wasting time —
• Guilt is such a familiar symptom of burnout, right?
• Because we’ve internalized the tyranny of acceleration.
  • “The call is coming from inside the house!”
• In ages past, people felt guilty before a holy God; in the modern world, we feel guilty before ourselves — we are our own judge, jury, and executioner
• In our secular age, in which we’ve become used to everything being explainable and often forget to attend to the mysterious or spiritual, we largely conceive of our lives without an involved God,
• BUT that hasn’t freed us from guilt as some 19th century Atheists thought it would, guilt has just moved offices! — from bad religion up in the sky to the overburdened, private, modern mind
  • (guilt is working from home now too, I guess)
• The tyranny of acceleration is internalized for the middle class

BUT, Rosa says, for the working class and poor:

• The tyranny of acceleration is externally imposed on them — they experience it as outside pressure, as injustice
• The time clock, the boss, the systemic structures that have no mercy, and are often racist and patriarchal
• The impenetrable bureaucracies that are so complex and full of jargon when they send you an unexpected bill, that it can only be fought or explained if you are familiar with white hierarchical organization structures and a native english speaker
• Societal burnout for the working class isn’t inner guilt; it’s an externally imposed despair, hopelessness — leading to a feeling that the world is against you — what can you do against such odds?
• And of course that’s not only a material despair. Howard Thurman, the African American mystic and teacher of Dr King, called the existential mental threats to the disinherited of society “the hounds of hell” - the temptations to live in constant fear, to deceive in order to survive, and to hate in order to validate oneself
• This is the hell that the tyranny of acceleration imposes on the working class, the disinherited, the marginalized ::tyranny off::

Those who keep time keep morality

Underneath all this is another key detail of our 500 year story of time speeding up.

• Time always has a timekeeper ::timekeepers::
• In the Pre-Modern World — the Medieval World and the Ancient world — Religion was the timekeeper
  • For Christians, churches literally kept time for their communities by ringing bells on the hour
  • They determined the rhythm and pace of people’s lives
• But as Modernity’s story of time speeding up begins 500 years ago…
  • Religion was eventually deemed too slow,
  • And the Nation-State and Industry took over the role as timekeeper
  • With calls to patriotism and duty to one’s people, and the formalizing of timezones around trains and railroads
• Today, it’s no longer church bells, or patriotism, or train schedules,
  • but smart phones that keep time
  • the products and services of the likes of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc. determine the rhythm and pace of people’s lives today
  • Silicon Valley and multi-national tech companies are now the time keepers of Modern Life

This is a truth here that I don’t want us to miss: those who keep time keep morality

• We are rightly repelled by historical examples of preachers voicing “repent or die”, AND YET we nod along in agreement when tech execs today tell us “innovate or die”!
  • We must see this!
• We miss that those who keep time today exercise the same moral power as religion did when it was timekeeper;
  • As I heard one theologian put it: if you think toxic religious messages like Total Depravity or “Left Behind” Rapture theology are toxic for your kids or nieces or nephews, just remember it ain’t much better when toxic TikTok videos is the primary former of their identities!
• Silicon Valley and the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos can assert that they don't recommend any moral value, that they are just about "innovation”, BUT that is very much a moral value!
  • “innovation as the highest good” is a big reason the poor and working class experience so much injustice
    • Hartmut Rosa calls this desynchronization — our economy and democracy are out of sync with the speed of innovation,
      • because a just economy has to have checks and stops in places to stem inequality,
      • and democracy by definition has to move slow so it can consider voices,
    • but innovation doesn’t want to allow such stops and slow downs, so we have massive wealth inequality and a broken democracy
  • “innovation as the highest good” is a big reason the middle class feel so consumed with guilt that they’re failing to keep up
  • “innovation as the highest good” is a big reason for the peddling of misinformation about what’s happening in Israel-Palestine
• If we are going to make any headway in countering the tyranny of acceleration, and its effects of societal burnout, we HAVE to be willing to humbly admit that we are at the moral beck and call of Silicon Valley — today’s timekeepers —
• They set the moral agenda... they are not neutral…
  • and if we’re just flying on autopilot,
  • The working class and poor will continue to be run over
  • And the middle class, like me, will just roll with it, because the guilt we internalize about falling behind in the rat race to catch up with the rich and cool obscures us from seeing our relative privilege compared to the poor
  • Day in day out, we don’t feel privileged, we feel burnt out and guilty.
  • Do you see how insidious that is?!
  • Middle class burnout and guilt benefit bad faith actors with power.
  • They become tools in their hands.
  • To choke the middle class into apathy and nihilism, so they can exploit the working class without resistance
    • Whether we’re talking about unchecked free market capitalism in America
    • Or a war zone in Israel-Palestine
    • It’s always the working class and poor who experience the worst of society’s consequences
  • The status quo is kept the status quo by continually drawing Middle class eyes (like mine!) toward the 1%’ers the middle class feels driven to catch up with and have the same stuff as, and away from the rest of the 99% who have to work for a living (with whom they actually have far more in common)
• That is NOT freedom, just like bad controlling religious systems and authoritarian nation states are not freedom!
• British rockers The Who sang on Won’t get fooled again: “meet the new boss; same as the old boss.” ::timekeepers off::

(PAUSE)

Zacchaeus

There’s this story from the life of Jesus, in the Gospel according to Luke, that I want to read in response to the Tyranny of acceleration. ::scripture::

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. 2 A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. 3 He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.

5 When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” 6 So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.

7 All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”

8 But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

9 Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house…”

I think Middle class people today are Zacchaeus — ::scripture off::

• We read the word translated to “wealthy” in English, and imagine him a 1%’er, but what would be a better parallel to today is a middle class person: Zacchaeus, a Jew by birth, is caught between the Roman elites he is serving as a tax collector (they’re the better parallel for the 1%) and the Jewish masses of working people, with whom he shares heritage but is seen as a traitor complicit with the enemy.
• Zacchaeus presents a question for today’s Middle Class — will we continue to hitch our wagon to the wealthy 1%? or will we choose solidarity with the rest of the 99% who have to work for a living? — the poor and working class?
• Just like the pressure was on Zacchaeus in his society to compare himself with the Roman Empire elites leaving him always wanting more, the pressure is on Middle class folks today in Accelerated Modernity to compare ourselves with our 1% elites leaving us always wanting more
• BUT Zacchaeus, compelled by Jesus, decides to choose solidarity from that point on — and profoundly! — he gives half of his possessions to the poor, and pays back those he cheated four times over

I remember

• During the Pandemic, when people were receiving stimulus checks…
• Dear friends from this church gave away nearly all of the money from their checks to help pay the rent for some of their friends, who were all reliant on the gig-economy for work
• Thousands of dollars.
• These were Middle-class folks — by no means wealthy,
• But also by no means working poor, and they paid attention to that, not to the fact that they weren't wealthy
• That’s a Zacchaeus moment

What compels people to do such a thing?! That is hard! That is countercultural!

• I don’t think it’s individual heroics or nobility.
• I know these friends would cringe at being called such, which is why they don’t have names in this story.
• I think what inspires that sort of behavior is the consistent holding up of alternative visions of a good, full life by communities that form us
  • (visions that aren’t “busyness” or “innovate or die!” or “keep up with the rich and cool!”)
• Rather visions of a good, full life marked by
  • Radical generosity
  • Vulnerability and relationships
  • Bearing suffering with others
  • Hearing the voice of God call us beyond ourselves and into the stories of others
• When people do these sorts of things within the context of genuine community, it’s not because they feel burdened to. It’s because they feel compelled to. Called to. Drawn to. It’s an experience of God.
  • (Of course, sometimes these sorts of things happen in the context of dysfunctional family relations, which is different)
• But in the context of community,
  • This is about people responding to a vision of a good, full life that, unlike “speed” and “busyness”, actually holds up and delivers on the promise of a feeling of fullness
  • Because, yes, we can talk about how it’s hard and countercultural, but you know what else we can talk about?
  • How incredibly beautiful and connecting it is to live such a way.

Communities are the best ways to consistently hold up alternative visions of a good, full life.

• Communities, like ours, do the job of Jesus in the Zacchaeus story
• Painting a picture of fullness of life for people
• Walking around, inviting people into that, even if they’re hiding in trees
• So that any of us here who are working class
  • are met in solidarity as you struggle against the tyranny of acceleration —
  • you are not alone!
• So that any of us here who are middle class
  • are pulled out of the never ending guilt spiral to experience the beauty and joy of living beyond oneself
• So that when there is conflict or war
  • We don’t exacerbate injustice with unconsidered values (like, for us today, speed and innovation)
  • We operate with wisdom and humanity
• All of this, according to Jesus, is what "salvation coming to one’s house” is.

Sacred Time

So how can we, as a community, do that holding up of such visions of fullness?

• We return once again to our phrase of the fall: ::Sacred time::
• When we keep sacred time together as a community, we cast a vision for each other, and all those around us, of what a good, full life looks like
• Sacred time, again, is a time we keep that is counter to the time keeping of modern life
  • Silicon Valley’s time is emptied of substance and values so it can be light enough to move fast and keep innovating,
    • but this leaves us feeling heavy burdened by the demand to keep up
    • and injustice thrives
  • Sacred time is weighed down with intention, purpose, humanity, the stories of others, shared values…
    • this kind of heaviness is good because keeps us in the present, rather than demanding we rush to keep up --
    • our time is heavier, but our burdens are lighter, because it doesn’t come down to us alone to solve our problems or achieve a good life
    • this kind of time nurtures us because it’s not hollowed out to move fast; it’s substantive, shot through with connection and God’s presence
    • Justice, not injustice, is what thrives in sacred time

• We cast a vision for a good, full life when we

  • sing songs together about a God of love, about forgiveness defeating shame, and about justice and peace defeating violence and scapegoating

  • serve the forgotten, the unhoused, the elderly together, as we did two weeks ago writing letters to folks in danger of isolation

    • The last of 185 letters were sent yesterday, well done all!

    • one person in our community wrote to us after that experience:

      Having recently experienced isolation, this activity really resonated with me. At the beginning of my cancer journey I was basically home bound for almost a year. As I wrote to these people I remembered how much I appreciated each person who reached out to me during that difficult time.

  • stop and slow down to remember the lives of loved ones lost, as we will next week in our remembrance service

  • carry and celebrate children, as we’ll do in two Sundays with our fall baby dedications
  • engage in prayer and ritual to hear God remind us: you are not an island, you are not a line item on a transaction sheet, you are a human being, and what you long for is genuine connection — with others, with yourself, with God
  • And the same is true for your neighbor, and for your enemy
• Keeping sacred time won’t immediately, magically change us so we no longer feel burnt out
• But, each time we participate in this, it refocuses us a little bit on goals and visions that are light burden, heavy time
• And over time, we discover that, indirectly, we feel less burnt out because our conception of fullness is something so much more than “speed” and “busyness”
• And, then, when we are moved with deep sorrow or compassion in the wake of tragedy or terror,
  • we feel not a burden to respond, but a call to respond,
  • a lure, a magnetic pull — those calls, to me, are the voice of God.
  • If you’re curious whether or not you have enough sacred time in your life, consider whether you feel a burden to respond, or a call to respond.

Let me pray for us…