Physical presence and social media

The article referred to underlying the title text is about why some scientists are postulating that smell may be implicated in autism. However, for me the new learning was that we do, in fact, subliminally process smells from each other that we can't consciously notice:

Although this sense [smell] is not our primary sense, as it is in many other mammals, we still subliminally read and react to certain odors. For example "smelling fear," even if we cannot consciously detect its odor, is something we may do without thinking... this is a form of social communication...

So, one of the things that this led me to was the thought that this may be a factor in why it is that we often think that church should involve face-to-face meeting: something about bonding and responding to each other in physical proximity is actually biologically important.

This is not to say no aspect of church and fellowship should be done any other way than by physical presence. After all, swathes of the New Testament are actually the remnants of first century social media -fellowship at a distance via letters and Roman roads. However, it should help us to value the dimension of physical presence.

What this article doesn't really go into is the effects of other kinds of subliminal smelling -assuming that there may be pheromones (I'm assuming that's what we're talking about here -but happy to be informed more fully) for enjoyment or other kinds of general affect. There is mention of hexadecanol in relation to calmness, so I guess there is something in this.

Of course, the other thing we need to notice is that this study is related to autism -and seems to suggest that those with ASDs may misinterpret these chemical signals. So that's a matter for us to consider in working out, as churches, how better to include them.

A further surprise was that

Research in recent years has turned up smell receptors like those in our nasal passages in all sorts of other places in our bodies -- from our brains to our uteri.

Intriguing eh?

Autism and the smell of fear: Odors that carry social cues seem to affect volunteers on the autism spectrum differently -- ScienceDaily

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Neighbour-love means pushing back against discrimination

Just to be clear that discrimination is a Christian issue -that is one which Christians should be concerned about and actively resisting. This research finding:

 "when an individual experiences discrimination, they report worse health and depression. ... -- this stress spills over and affects the health of their partner as well"

means that by the imperatives of loving neighbour, doing to others as we'd have them do to us, seeking the welfare of our society and even going second miles, we must actively work, speak and think against discrimination. We can't be loving our neighbour (etc) if we allow discrimination, fail to consider how we can push against it or how we can include and affirm others who are different. The research is showing clearly that discrimination causes actual harm to health. This isn't simply a matter of stiffupperlipping (a prescription usually applied to others, btw) but of serving others, seeking the good of others which is the least of what loving our neighbours means.

Just saying.

Discrimination harms your health, and your partner's, study shows -- ScienceDaily:

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Evolving Advent

Advent has had a varied history. Sometimes in some places it's been a 40 day preparation season a bit like Lent. Sometimes it's been about a week. At some point it started to be thought of as the Church's new year. At some point it gained in the West the form of a 4 Sundays before Christmas season of preparation -with the penitential feel that tended to go along with Lent. The idea was that Christmas began on the night before Christmas day. I won't go into the details, there's Wikipedia for that!
However, it seems to me that it is difficult for the season to be kept in that way in the contemporary west without is being seen as killjoys and legalists. This is because in the popular psyche, Christmas begins before 25 December -which is felt to be the culmination of the feast. As a child, I can remember thinking that the 12 days of Christmas were the previous 12 days not the following ones. That was logical: you'd end up on the most important day with the most gifts!

So, as I have written before, I think we should re-configure how we approach (metaphorically and chronologically) Christmas. Now might be a time to start sketching out ideas as we go through things this year with a view to beginning to change things next time around

Suggestion the first. Let's start the preparation sooner. I'd suggest after remembrance tide; so about two weeks into November -this would roughly coincide with a Celtic Advent which was 40 days prior to the Nativity. However, I'd suggest that the preparation season be staged and take account of the new Kingdom season -which is essentially November, ending with the final Sunday of November (Christ the King). I'd suggest that from mid November to mid December a time of relative fasting be considered -perhaps in the style of Muslim Ramadan where some feasting is woven in and then a couple of weeks before Christmas this would ease off.

Suggestion the second. Some marking and staging of the preparatory weeks: Lets have an Advent wreath of seven or eight candles, each to be lit on each Sunday progressively (there are those menorah-like candle-stands from Scandinavia, perhaps, to draft into service, eh?). And this might enable us to fix a current problem with the four/five Advent candles thing: the 'traditional' themes of the candles don't fit the lectionary readings for their respective Sundays. So we could do with a rethink of that, probably by tying in the candles to the respective Sunday themes -and writing prayers and little songs to fit that. For much of the Church of England this candle-lighting stuff is only about a generation old anyway: it hardly counts as hoary tradition, in reality and we have no canonical oughtage driving this: it's purely churches liking to 'beef up' the seasonality (perhaps responding to the Advent calendar's popularity). So let's take back control from unthinking antiquarianism and make the nice little liturgical additions serve well rather than pulling in another direction.

Suggestion the third. Liturgical colours. Let's face it, the use of red for Kingdomtide is more about differentiating from Advent which was using purple when in fact Kingdomtide's themes would more naturally lend themselves to purple (or black even). So how about, by recognising the increasingly 'feasty' nature of things as December progresses, we perhaps started to use red in Advent, or perhaps the last couple of weeks before Christmas day? That would free us up to use purple in November. Maybe we might even stage things like this: black for the first couple of weeks of November; purple next and finally in the last run up to Christmas, red. Perhaps we might fancy returning to using blue like used to happen before Roman canonical conformity interfered: Black>blue>purple (imperial colour for Christ the King?)>red. Maybe we could colour our candles accordingly?

Sleep Walking into a War

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” -This quote (By Garry Kasparov, originally) from an article by Tobias Stone – in Medium. It seemed to me that it's worth highlighting because it is insightful about what is happening now on the internet particularly social media.

I think it's interesting because it parallels a tactic that governments and corporations seem to operate in relation to pushing through measures that they sense will garner much opposition: they throw loads of information out, make a song and a dance about relatively minor things so that by the time a bigger issue is brought out, opposing voices are muted and energies are sapped. And of course this can work because populations have become passive, soporific and take democracy for granted, forgetting that its price is eternal vigilance. The problem being that eternal vigilance is costly in effort and attention, especially when life is hard, as it is increasingly for our populations.

And then, the other useful thing to note about this is that this is the new war. If war is politics by other means, then disinformation and distraction is politics by other means and that too is war. Actual bombs-and-deaths war is part of the picture but a relatively small part.

So, I'm left wondering what this means for war resistance. It goes way beyond refusing to fight, it goes beyond making the case for resolving conflicts through diplomacy, pressure and legalities. It goes beyond building the capacity of communities to use tactics and discipline to overcome oppression non-violently. No, we are going to have to learn to build capacity for 'eternal vigilance' and for myth busting and understanding what the real issues are to keep an eye on without being obfuscated into obscure and ultimately irrelevant matters.

And I'm already feeling tired just thinking about it. So, how to move forward?



Sleep Walking into a War – Tobias Stone – Medium:



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App map vs paper map

Now I quite like app maps for some things: they can map out a route more quickly and help you to follow it and they don't tend to blow away in the wind. I'm a bit of a technophile and generally defend e-versions of 'apps'. So I will tell others why I don't do paper diaries and why I prefer e-books on the whole (even while quite agreeing that new books often smell nice).



But I do have to say that I am more evenly balanced about the merits and demerits of app-maps and paper maps. For the reasons set out in this article (see end of post), I do tend still to use paper maps: I tend to like to have a better sense of orientation that the paper versions give -not least because I see more in peripheral vision. The other thing is that the battery life of the paper version is rarely in doubt!



Why I always travel with a paper map in hand : TreeHugger:



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Big church, little church and cultural fit

Recently I happened to be talking with one of my bishops and we  both noted how smaller churches tend to show up in studies as being better at making disciples than big churches. This Psephizo post, by implication, tells us why, and re-tells us the advantages of large churches. Interestingly, of course, the downsides of big churches are to be addressed in the post by also giving them a small church dimension. This is the top-down version of things. Of course, it might be worth noting that the NT seems if anything to have a bottom-up version where lots of small churches are locally linked. That may be simply expediency; what number can you get in someone's front room. Big church only becomes possible when Christians are able to have big public buildings without attracting adverse attention. 

What we don't get in scripture is any instructions about sizes of gatherings or congregations. I find this interesting -some other religions do tend to have regs about such things. Jewish minyan, for example and Islam has instructions for people to shove up into proper neat rows to fill from the front at prayers. But Christianity has very little that isn't just general and arguably about local custom and making-do. So if you don't buy the Catholic Tradition thing, there is plenty of scope for adaptation and that includes church size.

I don't have any 'primary' theological objections to large churches (but I do have 'secondary problematisations'). But I do question them. As mentioned above, they would seem to be less good, proportionally, at making disciples. This is probably because they can carry way more 'passengers' -and this means that in effect they may be more likely to evade the priesthood of all believers and have a 'priesthood' of the specially talented (I could say more about that because 'talent' is more circumstantial than sometimes implied). As the blogpost says, "It always seems odd to me that the excellence of a cathedral choir is lauded as enabling encounter with the transcendence of God, but an excellent band set-up with professional lighting and sound is sniffed at" -that is a well-made point with which I agree: I can't really see anything but taste differentiating the two kinds of worship referenced. However, that may miss the point: it's still a small group of 'stars' and the question may be as to how far we want to ape or promote a kind of celebrity culture with its attendant disabling of more 'ordinary' ministry. 

The obverse of that is also the promotion of certain kinds of ministry to a status that can also restrict the imagination and valuation of 'ordinary' Christians with regard to their own gifts and callings. A salutary lesson in this being the change at the Reformation from having 'a pope in Rome to a pope in the pulpit' -the result being that we still had a passive followership. Today perhaps it has become a 'magisterium on the stage' -as if musical talent or a good voice gave moral authority? (And that goes for both scenarios).

What really got me writing this post was the following in the Psephizo post:

It is easy, then, to miss the virtues of scale that large churches represent. It is much easier for one person to invest the time, energy and resources to offer a really engaging sermon that digs deep into the Scriptures and draws out, with relevant application, the lessons for living in contemporary for 400 people, than for eight preachers to do this for people meeting in groups of 50. In a church will feels pressed for resources, the efficiency of large churches is not to be sniffed at.  

And I agree at one level but want to dig behind this more. I want to ask whether it might not be even better that there might be 8 preachers learning their craft and offering a more realistic role model? Might it not be better for several groups of 50 to have more opportunity between them to craft responses that work in their local contexts than 400 de-contextualised and un-neighbourly largely avoiding that or doing hit-and-run projects?

Now I realise that I'm playing with ideal-types and stereotypes here, but if we are going to think about such things, can we recognise that there is nuance? And could we not bow to the god of 'efficiency' quite so promptly? -We might want to think of efficiency less in industrial terms and more in terms of individual people growing in capacity to grow the kingdom -and smaller churches probably do have the edge in that. 

When it comes to big churches needing to cultivate a small church dimension, I recognise this is vital as a corrective to the big church disbenefits. However, we might want to note that it is a top-down sort of thing. That has a further downside: it tends to squeeze out the smaller experiments that don't fit the ethos or apparent 'values' of the big entity and yet which might be vital engagements in mission. 

That said, I think I'd end up arguing for a mixed economy. Perhaps the term 'resourcing church' has it right. By all means leverage some of the advantages of 'economies of scale' but make sure they are geared as an engine to a wholistic growth of the church in a region -and I mean growth in grace, ministry and discipleship as much (if not more) than numbers. I believe in obliquity: if we seek first the right things, disciples will be made. If we seek converts, we will end up with religious consumers and a religious veneer on wider culture.

Surge pricing goes universal: some effects

Here's something I learnt today in an article which definitely deserves pondering by those concerned with culture, social justice and keeping an eye on corporate tactics.

In 1861 a shopkeeper in Philadelphia revolutionised the retail industry. John Wanamaker, who opened his department store in a Quaker district of the city, introduced price tags for his goods, along with the high-minded slogan: “If everyone was equal before God, then everyone would be equal before price.” The practice caught on. Up until then high-street retailers had generally operated a market-stall system of haggling on most products. Their best prices might be reserved for their best customers. Or they would weigh up each shopper and make a guess at what they could afford to pay and eventually come to an agreement.

Now, I never knew that history, though I suppose any of us would have guessed that perhaps there had to be a first place to move from haggling (and the personalised pricing that must have meant) to fixed ticket pricing. I am intrigued and delighted by the insight into how a simple change alters a whole culture for a couple of centuries across the globe. I note how it plays well with massification and the then-developing ideology of free trade.

Downsides not mentioned: this would blow a hole in rpi calculations and render difficult or impossible inflation calculations and thus problematise things like index-linked pensions or other payments relying on rpi systems (note the comment in the article "Increasingly, there is no such thing as a fixed price from which sale items deviate"). There's an interesting feed-back loop potential in that. And then there is the hint in the article that poorer people might not come out well, that they would be given higher quotes on the basis that they are less likely to buy lots.
It might also become difficult to argue for the price-lowering effects of the Market (capitalisation intended) if in fact such selective pricing is taking place. Interestingly this exposes, possibly, the reliance that market economics may have on fixed pricing as its ideological support. Now I understand that 'surge pricing' or whatever does rely on free-market justification but I suggest that offering a price based purely on demand at a particular point is not the same as offering personalised prices based on what the algorithm suggests that you are willing or able to pay. If the algorithms are using the same or similar digital shadows for you or me, they will all tend to offer similar 'deals' to us. Thus the possibility of shopping around with the consumer power that commands is nullified: this could become a sort of cartel/oligarchy arrangement powered by algorithms. This would create its own algorithmic feedback loop having the effect of ratchetting up prices over time. And I say that in contradiction to the article's assessment towards the end:
This looks a lot like the beginning of the end of John Wanamaker’s mission to establish “new, fair and most agreeable relations between the buyer and the seller” and to establish something closer to a comparison site that works both ways – we will be looking for the low-selling retailer, while the retailer will equally be scanning for the high-value customer.
I'm not sure that the algorithm's will be sufficiently differentiated. If you want a sense of how this might work, spend half an hour looking at the prices of rarer second-hand books on a variety of sites, asking yourself the question about who would buy at that price -yet probably the prices have been set by an algorithm: the idea that second hand means cheaper in most cases has been blown. Unless of course someone creates price-busting algorithms that have the consumer's better price interests at heart. Algorithm price-wars, anyone?

My own response is surprisingly visceral at a personal level. I feel that somehow this seems like a violation of natural justice -I resonate with Wanamaker's slogan about equal before God and price. And yet I find myself questioning how far that gut feeling is actually an artefact of a lifetime's exposure to fixed pricing and the way that it has become part of the way that I calculate swathes of everyday life.
Perhaps this kind of response is why "Horgan suggests that British retailers are still a bit terrified that customers will be put off by changing prices ".

I'm also thinking that it is likely to bring to the fore questions of profit; charging what the market /consumer will bear may increase an awareness of how questions of relative power are framed. Is the retailer really adding "that much" value to the product? Is the price of status projection really that high? Most of us don't quibble about the idea of a reasonable mark up for costs and a living wage, but some 'surge pricing' seems to be sheer profiteering and this would be a mechanism for that. 

So, I'm wondering whether we need to have a set of standards for algorithms which give a quality assurance which guarantees the protection of consumer interests?