Quick: what do you think of when you hear the word “resources”?
I was at a “Stewardship and Spirituality” conference on Saturday, with my pastor and a few other lay people from my church. It was a conference on how we as a church should be better stewards of what God has entrusted us with - and how we can live an alternative lifestyle that is counter to our culture’s dominant materialism and consumerism. After starting the day with a couple of windy speeches against materialism and consumerism, and exhortations to embrace stewardship as a joyful practice instead of a dutiful obligation, we spread out into various workshops.
One of the workshops I attended was about a “holistic approach” to stewardship and spirituality - integrating spiritual practices with stewardship. During the session, the speaker wrote out a few definitions: quotations from various authors on what “spirituality” meant and what “stewardship” meant. She quoted one author (I cannot remember who) who defined spirituality as: “the increasing sway and vitality of God in my life.”
She then quoted Dallas Willard in defining “stewardship” as: “the getting, having, controlling, and using of resources.”
This is where my soul recoiled.
RESOURCES???
Now, to be fair, the speaker pointed out that this definition went well beyond most people’s common understanding of “stewardship” as “giving money.” The speaker asked us to reflect on how Dallas Willard has extended “stewardship” to include not only how we give money, but also how we GET that money in the first place - how might we earn our living more responsibly and ethically? - and how we nurture that resource.
She also asked us to reflect on how Dallas Willard has extended the definition of “stewardship” to include not just money, but any “resource.” So, she asked us to list various resources, and people started voicing: “time”, “talents”, “services”, etc.
I sat there stewing and brewing… RESOURCES??? Thinking of “stewardship” and “spirituality” in terms of “getting, having, controlling, and using resources” strikes me as being an inherently materialistic and consumeristic view of the spiritual life.
My problem with thinking of stewardship in terms of “resources” is that it totally dehumanizes people and relationships. How are we to be good stewards of our relationships? Given Willard’s definition, we would have to start thinking about that kind of stewardship as: “getting, having, controlling, and using” our friends and family.
How are we to challenge our culture to break free of materialism and consumerism if our primary language is in terms of the material consumption of resources? Might there be a different way to think of life than in terms of how we use resources?
I fear that we as a culture see EVERYTHING as resources - including other people. When I discussed this with my pastor, the incomparable Reverend Todd, over lunch at the conference, Todd put it really well thus - thinking in terms of resources “sees people as commodities and objectifies their use.”
Some people already live that way - have you ever felt used by another, only to be ignored when you become useless?
When linked with our culture’s dominant materialism and consumerism, “resourceful thinking” spawns a mindset of usage: how useful are you to me? If you are not a resource for me to use, then you are, by definition, useless to me. I could ignore you, but if I were feeling charitable perhaps then I should be useful TO you. Perhaps my role as a responsible steward of God’s Resources would be to rehabilitate you into being more useful to our society, maybe by giving you money to go learn a vocation and get a job.
Suddenly social activities start getting evaluated under the lens of “usefulness” and “relevance” - if the church is going to hold an event, how “useful” is that event going to be for the community around it? If it’s not “useful” then why do it?
This is such a dominant thinking pattern in our culture that it is hard to justify doing ANYTHING that is, by our definition, useless.
Which is why we see such a decline in the teaching of art and music in our schools. If you can’t make money from it, why take a risk on “art” that will be seen as “useless” or perhaps even “offensive”?
Which is why we see such a decline in the teaching of history and civics in our society. If history is a bunch of “useless” information about the past, why bother learning it? Unless you can recast “history” in terms that are useful to us for living today?
Which is why we see such a decline in meaningful news on our televisions - because news is produced by companies which are paid by other companies that want to tell you excitingly useful news about pills that cure your cat of erectile dysfunction.
This kind of thinking leads to us valuing useful people, productive people, over useless people. This kind of thinking leads to us judging everything and everyone by how valuable of a RESOURCE they are to us.
And this kind of thinking falsely gives US a flawed sense of our own importance and value - we feel GOOD when we are USEFUL to someone else. Our culture of materialism and consumerism REWARDS us when we are useful. In contrast we feel BAD about any interests we have that are USELESS.
Do you play a musical instrument? Why not? Because you don’t think you’re “that good” at it? How good do you have to be to play it? Do you have to be good enough at it to play “well”, play “live”, play with others, play for money? All those terms are ways of evaluating your skill, NOT your desire - if you have some way of deciding that your skill level in some artistic endeavor is “not good enough”, then you have decided that it is “useless” for you to pursue that endeavor. You have just killed your heart’s desire because your brain said it’s not good enough. Not good enough for WHAT?
Whatever happened to just “playing” music? You know, for the “fun” of it?
That’s useless.
Kids don’t just “play” anymore - they take part in organized sports activities, scheduled on weekends and evenings, with structured development managed by “coaches” who want to help them improve their skills.
Whatever happened to kids just throwing catch together in the streets or in backyards after school?
That’s useless. Kids need “constructive” developmental activities that teach them teamwork and cooperation in pursuit of defined goals and objectives.
Whatever happened to people hanging out at bars or in the town common?
That’s useless. People need “constructive” activities to participate in collectively for some defined purpose with set goals.
Whatever happened to people being people?
That’s useless.
May 1st, 2008 at 3:07 pm
It makes sense to recoil at the term “resources,” but let’s look at it another way and see how it makes sense. I think that we could consider spiritual gifts to be resources — if we’ve got ‘em, use ‘em! And look at how Henri Nouwen finished his life, and what he thought was a blessed use of his amazing talents — caring for an invalid. Look at how we use our gifts in a family — we listen to and care for each other without being trained counselors, we cook for each other without being five star chefs, we run errands without a chauffeur’s license. Supposes we interpret “resources” to mean “entire life,” and we manage and control our “entire life.” Does that make more sense?
May 3rd, 2008 at 8:55 am
Hi Ed!! Good to hear from you!
Thanks for posting - yes, I do see all those positive ways of seeing “resources”, and, indeed, if all people did was to recognize their talents and use them for the glory of God, this world would be a much better place indeed!
Admittedly, what I’m trying to get at here is slightly out of left field, and is a combination of two criticisms: (1) a criticism of our constant evaluation of what is useful and what is not; and (2) a criticism of the pressure to “manage and control”.
The first criticism comes from a reaction against “functionalism” - the idea that everything has to have some kind of function. This kind of thinking has no place for things that do not have any function - unless some way can be found to assign some function to them. So, for example, “painting” would be considered to have no function, unless someone was able to convincingly state the value of art and why painting has a positive function in society, perhaps by highlighting its therapeutic function, or its cathartic function, or its expressive function, and maybe eventually its monetary function.
The second criticism comes from a reaction against “consumerism” in general and “mechanization” as a dependent thought process stemming from consumerist tendencies. In a society that increasingly values consuming goods as a central activity, human interaction becomes more impersonal and more centered around exchange of goods or services based on monetized value. Supply and demand of goods and services drive everything about societal and social life, to the extent that even care for the invalid or the elderly has become a monetized service sector industry today.
What started out as a barter mechanism for the exchange of material goods has become a barter mechanism for the exchange of our very souls.
When everyone is so entrenched in the dominant thinking patterns of consumerism, there is a subconscious tendency to micromanage all our activities and evaluate them in the light of how efficient we are in consuming our goods: what is the cheapest price we can pay for some service? What is the shortest track we can take to get to a particular destination (or to achieve a particular career objective)?
On the tails of consumerism come two particularly insidious beasts: “mechanization” and “positivism”. The quicker and cheaper we can produce, the better and faster we can consume, so we become a society focused on mechanizing every aspect of our lives. We either develop technology to do things for us - which we then out-source to be made by some other country, mechanizing THEIR society as a result - or we mechanize our own daily lives to be “more productive.” We willingly subject ourselves to the tyranny of “Personal Digital Assistants” who do more disruption than assistance. Dinnertimes become fragmented by the frequent incursion of work, entertainment, and scheduled activities, to the extent that we simply nod along when KFC airs a commercial exhorting us to “get out of the kitchen and stop by a KFC for a wholesome home-style meal on the go!”
Of course, in a society where we have become consumers, where our very identity is caught up in consumerism (when all the news articles refer to us as “consumers” and when our spending is tracked on the “consumer spending index” and when presidential candidates are referred to as “consumer advocates” and the most valuable resource is “Consumer Reports”), then we look at everything as something to be consumed: our friends, our relatives, our neighbors, our coworkers, all become part of a system where each person is trying to function as the most productive consumer they can be.
Which leads to a necessary development of “positivism” - a way to measure everything scientifically and provide objective metrics by which different things can be evaluated critically. We measure everything, because, as consumers, we demand the right to have the choice of deciding for ourselves which product is best for us, and for us to make that choice we demand objective metrics that evaluate our products for us. Everything has a measurable index associated with it these days: everyone asks you to fill out a survey after you have consumed their product, from KFC to the hospital, and everything has a user-review index system of one to five stars.
If it is not measurable then it is not worth measuring.
All of this colors how we see our very lives: when everything around us is constantly being measured and evaluated and judged based on how productive it is in a system of consumption, we ourselves develop an inner system of calibrating our selves constantly to how well we conform to our surroundings. We then feel guilty if we are not productive enough, if we are being outspent by someone else with more money, if we cannot do something as efficiently as the young whippersnapper in the next cubicle who has a crack-berry and has MATLAB on his cellphone.
Because measurements and evaluations are all ways that we use to manage our consumption and production efficiently. We want to make sure that we are investing our time and efforts wisely, efficiently, for the best use for the greatest benefit. We develop elaborate systems of justifying or quantifying benefits - some of which are cultural while some are counter-cultural. Even the ones that run counter to consumerism, such as willingly caring for an invalid, we feel the need to justify somehow in terms of the matrix of consumption of resources.
This leads to a rampant culture of management in our society - everyone becomes a manager, and everyone is constantly being managed by someone else, according to some arbitrary system of management paradigms and objectives. Corporations become “organizations” with “core values” and “quarterly objectives” that all management layers “synchronize” with and integrate their workforces accordingly. Even toddlers have figured out how to manage their parents. And parents are managed by coaches’ schedules.
If something does not align with our core values, or our yearly objectives, then it does not fit on our schedules.
And that’s what I am criticizing