catapult magazine

Does Shane Claiborne use Google?

by John Scherer

One of the “Ten things Google knows to be true” is that, “You can make money without doing evil.”  A little lower on their list, we also discover that Google believes “you can be serious without a suit,” and that “the need for information crosses all borders.”  Under that last point, Google claims half of their business happens outside the U.S. and that they offer their one-of-a-kind search interface in more than 110 languages. 

Google is huge.  In 2008, the Google roster included about 20,000 employees.  This impressive number, among other reasons, has led Jeff Jarvis to call the constantly broadening company the “U.S. Steel of our age.”  He’s certainly not alone in recognizing the tectonic effect Google has had on the way business is done in the 21^st century.  While there are others like Jarvis, there are also those wary of the Google creep.  Adam Raff, in a piece written recently for the New York Times claims cautiously that

Because of its domination of the global search market and ability to penalize competitors while placing its own services at the top of its search results, Google has a virtually unassailable competitive advantage. And Google can deploy this advantage well beyond the confines of search to any service it chooses. Wherever it does so, incumbents are toppled, new entrants are suppressed and innovation is imperiled.

As with most things, different perspectives elicit different narratives.  Later in his piece, Raff reveals his frustration further by claiming the detrimental effect Google had on his own company called Foundum, and one begins to get a sense that the op-ed is more of a swansong of a Google-causality and less a prescriptive for change.  But Google moves at the speed of business.  And it ain’t no stock car race.   

For a really long time — arguably since Christ threw us the curveball of the incarnation — Christians have devoted a good part of their lives to divining over the role of “business” in a sanctified world.  What makes this task harder still is Christ’s wish that we take it all seriously.  And so, for the most part, and since we’re only human after all, we try to make do.  We attempt to live in the world like we care and get excited when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation off-loads $100 million to small-farm productivity projects in Africa.  We do the best we can to measure out our Christian duty appropriately and find the GAP’s Red Campaign or Sprint’s Reclaim — a corn-based, eco-friendly cell phone — tidy solutions to big problems.  But big business always remains and so do the poor; and for many a socially conscious Christian, so do the anxieties.

As a result, it’s not uncommon for some of us to foster a more radicalized approach.  In recent years, Christian sub-cultures have been vehicles to the flowering of “intentional communities,” chastened consumerism, social justice and the bolstering of local economies.  Patron saints of this approach have emerged (Shane Claiborne, Wendell Berry, Cornel West), as well as hordes of generally motivated young people thrilled at the prospect of joining the cadre of justice-fighters worldwide.  The modus operandi of these re-imagined communities is a renewed attention to exploitation, human and otherwise, environmental sustainability and the exercising of a prophetic faith.  Whether or not all of this is resulting in the sort of justice being sought is something different altogether.  The important thing to notice is that intentional living arguably found in Scripture is really happening; a reality that may not have been conceivable twenty years ago.  

There is a cohort of Christians seeking a mean, as well, normally self-identified as “socially progressive.”  I confess that this is where I find myself.  Always with an eye to justice, I also admit to the usefulness and elegance of a company like Google.  I own a Mac.  In college, I bought a used Volvo as a way to round out the image I thought was important (the car now belongs to my sister).  I can’t in good faith make many claims to purity.  I even have a Kohl’s charge card used expressly for socks and underwear (as I prefer to buy such things in bulk). 

It’s this pining for purity, though, that gets us in to trouble.  This is why it is apropos to this conversation to look at our hermeneutic duties as infinite tasks.  That is, to reduce the world to a way things “have” to be belies our Christian affirmations of God as surprising and perhaps, most importantly, indeterminable.  The moment we think we have God’s possibility for surprise surmised is also normally the moment our categories begin to crumble.  Merold Westphal reminds us that “interpretation is always approximation.”  This is true.  And such an idea ought to be carried over to our Christian understandings of Big Business.  All human institutions are admixtures of the sacred and the profane.  To affirm a complete knowledge of the real estate of the divine holds out little hope for the work of the Holy Spirit and trades one fundamentalism for another.   

Google might actually be a new sort of business, though it will be difficult to determine this for a few years as the next 12-24 months promise to be exciting and formative times for the company.  It is true, though: Google is different.  It’s also true that I could have chosen a considerably more ghastly example of Big-Business-gone-too-far to help make a different kind of point.  One of my reasons for not doing this is to open up space for optimism about our world and our economies.  Until very recently I tended to subsist on a diet of apocalyptic perspectives about the very possibility for justice in a Post-Christian world.  Most of these castles of thought were curiously motivated by a desire to “get reality right” and my “beliefs in order.”  But I have cordoned off despair more effectively lately by interrogating my reductionisms and reminding myself of the sovereignty of the God I actually claim to love, which I find surmised elegantly by Tennyson:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower-but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

your comments

grant
Jan 09 2010
11:23 AM

Thanks for the positive spin on the way business is done in the 21st Century. I am also inspired by this generation of hopeful do-gooders. I agree that we are turning a corner in terms of recognizing the potential goodness of big business. Though I am not by any means a skeptic when it comes to big businesses, I am still suspicious of Google. I think their goal of archiving and organizing all the world’s information has the built-in danger of turning “the world” into mere information. I’m not convinced Google is aware of the limits of information, which is why they continue to be such creative innovators. But there is a built-in danger with this kind of blindness as well. I also am concerned with recent reports that Google’s new facilities built to increase their networking capabilities have a big carbon footprint. But then I think: with all that information flying around at super-human speeds, someone will figure out how to eliminate such pollution and create absolutely efficient energy production etc. So, yes, with all the technological advancements we’ve seen and the potential of the internet as Google sees it, there is reason to be hopeful that information will save us from future dangers.

SamVanEman
Jan 09 2010
03:59 PM

I enjoyed this, John, especially the second to last paragraph.

ByronBorger
Jan 09 2010
08:39 PM

Wow, thanks for this beautifully written and very thoughtful piece. Very well done.

Over at the God’s Politics blog (Sojourners) just this week there was a very civil discussion about the impact of social networking sites, prompted by a (several year old, we now find out) video of N.T. Wright warning about the dangers. Julie Clawson (the sort of evangelical justice seeker you describe) took him to task, dismissing such concerns.

I suppose it isn’t exactly the same as what you’ve written, but interested folks might want to follow that thread. *cino should have gotten a mention as an example of good conversations online, building community, and instigating good stuff.

Thanks again.

johnrscherer
Jan 10 2010
10:34 AM

Many thanks for the replies above, all.

A few comments:

Grant,

Your point concerning the potential for world to be construed as “mere information” is right on. Seems like a Heideggerian investigation could be useful here…hint, hint :-)

Sam,

Thanks for the kind words. I hope I can get some more writing up as the year progresses.

Byron,

Thanks for the tip. I wasn’t aware of the discussion you mention and look forward to an engagement when I can find time!

John

mrrrty
Jan 13 2010
10:49 AM

John —

Beautifully, beautifully written. Again I say, please move north.

Personal insides aside, I share your somewhat conflicted point of view. You once asked Rob, Kirstin, and I whether we thought that “justive-driven” people (whatever that means) are more prone to cynicism, the implication being that they will continue to see the injustice in the world in spite of (perhaps) their own work. In light of your article, though, and your brief mention of the motives behind your thoughts on the possibility of justice, I think it bears mentioning that the same thoughts hold true for interpersonal conceptions of justice: i.e., there has to be a certain letting go of the end-all pursuit of justice within one’s own self, this attempt to “get reality right” and get your “beliefs in order”. This particular obsession seems to run counter to Christ as Savior—the one whose death and resurrection sanctifies you over the rest of your life. Justice, in other words, has been served; it is now being meted out. As with all sanctifying work, from ecology to literature to (yikes) evangelism, we can and must participate, but the work will be accomplished by strength far greater than our own. I think there’s a freedom in that to silence the roars of the cynicism that tells you that justice (of any sort) is impossible.