on Paul, Christianity, marketing and globalization

Rob Sica pointed out this somewhat rambley but interesting article in the April issue of The Atlantic. It's titled One World, One God (by Robert Wright) but it could also be called "Paul the apostle-marketer". Paul the apostle-marketer has a bit to teach us about how to thrive in an increasingly connected (globalized) world. Apparently the situation he (and others) faced is not so different from our own.

When people open a local franchise—a McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut—they do so because they expect to get something in return. What did people get in return for making their homes Christian franchises? In some cases, no doubt, it was mainly the benefit of the gospel; Lydia presumably found Paul’s initial teachings gratifying, and what additional benefits she got—social, economic, whatever—from hosting a church, we’ll never know. But as the franchising continued, and the church expanded to more and more cities, it offered new benefits to church leaders.

In particular: reliable lodging. Tents were adequate for overnight stays on the road, but when you reached the big city, nicer accommodations were desirable—especially if you planned to stay awhile and do business. Paul’s letters to Christian congregations often include requests that they extend hospitality to traveling church leaders. Such privileges, as the scholar E.A. Judge put it, were increasingly “extended to the whole household of faith, who [were] accepted on trust, though complete strangers.” This extension was a revolution of sorts, since “security and hospitality when traveling had traditionally been the privilege of the powerful.” The Roman Empire had made distant travel easier than at any time in history, and Christianity exploited this fact. The young church was, among other things, the Holiday Inn of its day.
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[H]istory expands the range of non-zero-sum relationships—relationships in which two parties can both win if they collaborate, or lose if they don’t. Technological evolution (wheels, roads, cuneiform, alphabets, trains, microchips) has placed more and more people in non-zero-sum relationship with more and more other people at greater and greater distances—and often across ethnic, national, and religious bounds.
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[E]ither people of different faiths, ethnicities, and nationalities get better at seeing the perspective of one another, and acknowledging the moral worth of one another, or chaos ensues

The main trick seems to be the extension of familial hospitality to any inside the church. I find the arbitrary trust in Christian communities both warm and unsettling. Warm because I like to give people (especially strangers) the benefit of the doubt. Unsettling when I see people manipulated by someone they trust because s/he claims to be Christian (they don't often become aware of the manipulation). For Paul that whole familial-trust thing was very useful. A distrust of people because they aren't exactly like us isn't warranted. Beyond that though, trust still needs to be earned.

maps of the "real" world

Here is a Telegraph picture gallery that shows what the map of the world would look like if we look at metrics other than land mass. This is what the world looks like based on war deaths from 1945-2002.



I got pointed to this from Andrew Sullivan's blog.

Update: here's the mondo version of this (worldmapper.org).

American anxiety

American anxiety springs from something much deeper, a sense that large and disruptive forces are coursing through the world. In almost every industry, in every aspect of life, it feels like the patterns of the past are being scrambled. "Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus," wrote Aristophanes 2,400 years ago. And—for the first time in living memory—the United States does not seem to be leading the charge. Americans see that a new world is coming into being, but fear it is one being shaped in distant lands and by foreign people.
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For the last 20 years, America's superpower status in every realm has been largely unchallenged—something that's never happened before in history, at least since the Roman Empire dominated the known world 2,000 years ago. During this Pax Americana, the global economy has accelerated dramatically. And that expansion is the driver behind the third great power shift of the modern age—the rise of the rest.

Newsweek Article "The Rise of the Rest"

This article challenges some of my pessimism about the loss of cultures and languages that inevitably comes with globalization. It says that as India has increased wealth, they've become more interested in their own billionaires than in America's billionaires and "that newfound interest in their own story is being replicated across much of the world." English has primarily been adopted as the global language but this shift to countries looking back at themselves seems like the road to keep cultural pluralism alive, at least among globalization's winners. It probably helps that the US is losing its "cool kid" status.

the revaluation of all values?

Recognizing that difficulty with Nietzsche I won't pretend to be addressing him directly here. Instead of the statement from the last post

"the idea of God is no longer capable of acting as a source of any moral code or teleology" (wikipedia)

I prefer

no idealistic philosophical system has ever been capable of acting as a source of moral code or teleology on its own

We just keep giving them more credit than they deserve. I probably believe this because I've been with and without the strong influence of the idea of God and I don't see it as having this sort of impact (it just rarely translates out to distinctive lived practices). I see people defined by their society and those who go against it for good or ill would do so I think with or without the idea of God, it's more to do with their personalities, their personal motivational bearing. An idealistic philosophical system can never be the main story of a person's life because existence is that main story. The struggle between "human will as a law unto itself" and an external story "idealistic philosophical system" is a perpetual struggle that always has been and always will continue to exist. That to me is the central insight of Dostoevsky. Do we have reason to diminish/de-humanize (re-humanize?) the past? Human nature, like The Dude, abides.

So given all this is there a need for the revaluation of all values? I think cultures and religions should be understood as containing truths of experience. When I read proverbs, Confucius or the codified law in the Old Testament I can read it as sharing truths of experience about how we should live. These truths are templates for how to live that I ignore at my own risk. I don't see how they would or could stand or fall on the basis of how I feel about the idea of God. They stand or fall upon how I feel about existence.

Although I don't place much faith in the progress/decline of human nature I do believe in the movement and rearrangement of cultures. My primary concern is that cultures are being destroyed day by day and the monoculture that's coming will be soooo lame (and scientific). This is where our fears should lie. Give up the perennial ideological debates and start looking towards the pluralistic future we're failing to build and the knowledge we're destroying on our way.

Note: If you want a more precise reading of Nietzsche, don't read what I'm writing consult one of the many others who are overly obsessed (and more qualified) to explicate his philosophy. (on the Re-evaluation of values) I shouldn't be jumping haphazardly into something with so much research involved in it but hey, what's blogging for if not the dissemination of half truths and straw men? Maybe (hopefully) someone will bother to correct me in the many ways I'm wrong. I'll be revisiting "Beyond Good and Evil" in subsequent posts.