The Slow Speed of Comfort?

Photo by Ryan Johnston on Unsplash

My good and wise friend, Peter Block, has observed that two seductions of our contemporary monetized society are “speed” (go faster) and “scale” (go bigger). I have had this observation in purview as I read The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (2010). Carr observes that a turn from print to electronic communication inescapably delivers some trade-offs, some of which are laudable. As his argument unfolds, however, it becomes clear that he is especially alert to the losses that are mandated in such a trade-off. He observes that electronic communication is faster and can cover much more ground, thus putting much more data at our fingertips. The title of his book, The Shallows, however, indicates what losses are entailed in the trade-off. While the internet lets us go wide, it requires us to go “shallow,” not ever going deeply into what we know. The result is a rather cursory reading of a great deal of material, but not ever pondering any of it very much. I can readily confirm that myself, as I read the daily newspaper online very differently from the way I read it when I hold it in my hand.

Finally Carr identifies two specific losses that should concern us “deeply.” First, Carr observes our loss of capacity for memorization. He quotes a technology writer:

With a click on Google, memorizing long passages or historical facts is obsolete. Memorization is a waste of time (181).

Carr adds:

Not only has memory lost its divinity; it’s well on its way to losing its humanness. Mnemosyne has become a machine (181-182).

He arrives at this verdict:

But there’s a problem with our new, post-Internet conception of human memory. It’s wrong…One of the greatest dangers we face as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is the one that informs the fears of both scientist Joseph Weizenbaum and the artist Richard Foreman: a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity (182, 220).

This is of course what Peter Block has understood so well. “Scale” and “speed” are inimical to our humanness.

From this Carr’s second major loss in the exchange toward electronic communication is even more critical, namely, the loss of our capacity for empathy and compassion:

The more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctive human forms of empathy, compassion, and other emotions….It would be rash to jump to the conclusion that the Internet is undermining our moral sense. It would not be rash to suggest that as the Net reroutes our vital paths and diminishes our capacity for contemplation, it is altering the depth of our emotions as well as our thoughts (221).

Carr quotes Antonio Damasio, the director of the USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute in his conclusion:

The higher emotions emerge from neural processes that are inherently slow (222).

My reading in Carr got me to thinking about a society that has given up its capacity for empathy and compassion because it has opted for scale and speed. Thus is occurred to me that ancient Israel, in its painful destructive displacement in the sixth century BCE exile found itself in just such a world, one devoid of empathy and compassion. That world did not have the Internet, but it had its own practices of speed and scale that served a like purpose. Thus I was led inescapably to the Book of Lamentations wherein Israel finds itself bereft of comfort, desperately seeking a comforter. Thus the poet reiterates the absence of a comforter and the consequent unprocessed grief:

She weeps bitterly in the night,

with tears on her cheeks;

among all her lovers

she has no one to comfort her;

all her friends have dealt treacherously with her,

they have become her enemies (Lamentations 1:2).

Her downfall was appalling,

with none comfort her,
“O Lord, look at my affliction,

for the enemy has triumphed!” (1:9).

For these things I weep;

My eyes flow with tears;

for a comforter is far from me,

one to revive my courage (1:16).

Zion stretches out her hands,

but there is no one to comfort her;

the Lord has commanded against Jacob

that his neighbors should become his foes (1:17).

They have heard how I was groaning 

with no one to comfort me.

All my enemies heard of my trouble;

they are glad that you have done it (1:21).

The most discerning, poignant reading this grief comes in the elegant words of Kathleen O’Conner, Lamentations & the Tears of the World (2002). She attends fully to the lack of a comforter for Israel, a lack surely reflective of the scale and speed of that ancient context where one could not linger over loss. O’Connor recognizes that what bereft Israel most wants and needs is a witness, one who can see and acknowledge (and perhaps bring to speech) the pain and loss of Israel:

In Lamentations the afflicted need a comforting witness, neither the evangelist who announces messages from outside suffering, nor the legal witness in a court of law who “objectively” states the facts, but something at once simpler and more difficult. The witness sees suffering for what it is, without denying it, twisting it into a story of endurance, or giving it a happy ending. The witness has a profound and rare human capacity to give reverent attention to sufferers and reflect their truth back to them. And in the encounter, with those who suffer, the witness undergoes conversion from numbed or removed observer to passionate advocate (100).

At the outset it is the poet-narrator of the Book of Lamentations who is the witness. It is the poet who sees and suffers with and brings to speech. While God will elsewhere and afterward become a witness to Israel’s suffering and respond to it, that does not happen yet in the Book of Lamentations. For this anguished offer of poetic notice, it is only the poet who becomes witness to the suffering of Israel. But that is enough. It is enough for the moment, until other and better witnesses can be evoked. Thus O’Connor shows us the thin thread of poetic utterance that will “see” Israel through until the tradition can break open with divine assertion in II Isaiah. O’Connor’s compelling exposition then goes on to identify in our contemporary world a roll call of witnesses who have seen and brought to speech the suffering of the world in all its specificity. And of course, it follows that when the suffering is seen and brought to speech, there can be no backsliding to silence or denial. Thus the role of the witness to the suffering of the world is pivotal for any possible renewal for a world that is set deeply in its suffering, misery, and abandonment.

Thus I read from Carr and the loss of a capacity empathy and compassion to O’Conner and the crisis of ancient Israel, a crisis that has becomes paradigmatic for faith. And from Carr and O’Connor I am led to think of our present world, caught up in scale and speed as we are, at the edge of forgetting compassion and empathy. The inventory of such suffering in our contemporary world is familiar to us:

• The force of poverty in a world of affluence;

• The acute risk of immigrants seeking to escape violence, some of whom survive to reach a safe border;

• The threat under which we live from toxic chemicals, (and alongside us fish and many other forms of creaturely life);

• The slow work of global warming that draws our world ever closer to being unlivable.

• The failure of health care delivery to so many who desperately require it.

• The aura of violence that surrounds even our safest places.

This inventory causes us to wonder how many persons there are who will today echo the poet:

Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?

Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow,

which has brought upon me,

which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger (Lamentations 1:12).

And in response, how many of us tacitly answer, “No it is nothing to me in my scale and speed.” Thus there is a profound mismatch between the need for comfort and our loss of a capacity to respond as comforter.

The summons of this mismatch must be, in some complex way, a summons away from scale and speed in order to recover our capacity for compassion and empathy, our capacity to pause amid our rush to mastery, and to respond with serious attentiveness that takes time. The crisis is fully voiced in the too-well known parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-35). A man left half dead! A priest in a hurry to get to a synodical meeting. A Levite fully preoccupied with a big question of Torah interpretation. Too busy. Too rushed. Too preoccupied, perhaps too numbed to be patient with a suffering “nobody.” And then, the champion of the narrative, an outsider Samaritan who took time to notice the half dead man:

But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity (esplagcnisthe). He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, “Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend (Luke 10:33-35).

He took time; he had compassion. He stood in solidarity with the suffering one. He put his resources to work. He turned out to be, we are told, a neighbor. His neighborliness is in sharp contrast to the anti-neighborly conduct of the two “pillars of society.”  The clue to this stark contrast is speed and scale…or….slow and specific.

Carr has seen that speed and scale lead to a loss of empathy and compassion, exactly the proper, primary work of the church. It follows that slow is the speed of neighborly church, slow enough to notice, slow enough to identify with, slow enough to interrupt our agenda for a neighbor in need. O’Connor, moreover, suggests that such notice and embrace of such pain in the other requires that we have to some extent come to terms with our own pain. For that to happen in the context of faith, the church, in its slowness, must be a place of honesty that goes unflinchingly beyond denial. My own sense is that the church’s incessant preoccupation with guilt is a form of denial of the pain that commonly besets us. Thus the church will do better, I suspect, if it slows to the pain that is everywhere among us, because pain acknowledged by a witness may turn to generative, restorative power.

This is a good point at which to call attention to an important study of “slow.” Carl Honore, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (2004), has explored the costs of speed in many areas of our common life. He reflects on how slowness may pertain to each of these areas. His general thesis concerns the cost of speed and the benefit and availability of slowness:

Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity. It is about making real and meaningful connections—with people, culture, work, food, everything (14-15).

Among the spheres of life, he considers are the following:

1. Food:

Many of us have swallowed the idea that when it comes to food, faster is better. We are in a hurry, and we want meals to match. But many people are waking up to the drawbacks of the gobble-gulp-and -go ethos. On the farm, in the kitchen, and at the table, they are slowing down. Leading the charge is an international movement with a name that says it all: Slow Food…On the economic side, Slow Food seeks out artisanal foods that are on the way to extinction and helps them gain a foothold in the global market. It puts small producers in touch with one another, shows them how to slice through the red tape and promote their wares to chefs, shops, and gourmets around the world. In Italy, over 130 dying delicacies have been saved, including lentils from Abruzzi, Ligurian potatoes, the black cherry of Trevi, the Vesuvian apricot and purple asparagus from Albenga. Not long ago, Slow Food rescued a breed of Sienese wild boar once prized in the courts of medieval Tuscany (58, 60-61).

2. Thought processes:

Experts think the brain has two modes of thought…Guy Claxton, a British psychologist, calls them Fast Thinking and Slow Thinking. Fast Thinking is rational, analytical, linear, logical. It is what we do under pressure, when the clock is ticking; it is the way computers think, and the way the modern workplace operates; it delivers clear solutions to well-defined problems. Slow thinking is intuitive, woolly, creative. It is what we do when the pressure is off, and we have the time to let ideas simmer at their own pace on the back burner. It yields rich and subtle insights. Scans show the two modes of thought produce different  waves in the brain—slower alpha and theta waves during Slow Thinking, faster beta ones during Fast Thinking…Research has shown that people think more creatively when they are calm, unhurried, and free from stress, and that time pressure leads to tunnel vision (120-121).

3. Medicine:

The backlash against Fast medicine is gaining momentum. Doctors everywhere are pushing for more time with their patients. Medical schools are putting a greater emphasis on talking and listening as tools of diagnosis. A mounting body of research shows that patience is often the best policy…Mainstream medicine is making room for Slowness in many ways. One is in the growing willingness to use relaxation in healing. To help patients unwind, more and more hospitals steer them towards soothing activities such as gardening, painting, making music, knitting and spending time with pets. Another trend is to recognize the healing effect of Mother Nature (149, 153).

4. Sex:

The modern world has little patience for anyone who is slow to keep up with the sexual pace. Many women—40%, according to some surveys—suffer from lack of sexual desire or pleasure. True to our quick-fix culture, the pharmaceutical industry insists that a Viagra-style pill can put things right. But genital blood flow may be a red herring. Maybe the real problem is speed. A woman needs more time to warm up, taking on average twenty minutes to reach full sexual arousal, compared with ten minutes or under for a man (169).

5. Work:

For the Slow movement, the workplace is a key battle-front. When the job gobbles up so many hours, the time left over for everything else gets squeezed. Even the simple things—taking the kids to school, eating supper, chatting to friends—become a race against the clock…Further north, the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has won plaudits for recognizing that its employees have lives outside the office. On any given day, up to 40% of RBC staff will be using a work-life program—job-sharing, flex-time, reduced hours…
For RBC, that calmness pays off in higher productivity—and more Slow Thinking…The work plays in the back of your mind, and often because of that you make better, more thoughtful decisions when you come into the office. You’re not just always reacting to things on the spot…Of course speed has a role in the workplace. A deadline can focus the mind and spur us on to perform remarkable feats. The trouble is that many of us are permanently stuck in deadline mode, leaving little time to ease off and recharge. Things that need slowness--strategic planning, creative thought, building relationships—get lost in the mad dash to keep up, or even just to look busy (191-192,  202-203, 209-210).

Honore offers many practical suggestions for ways in which slowness might be practiced. He is, to be sure, no fanatic as he recognizes the importance of speed in some aspects of each of these topics. And he does not take himself with excessive seriousness: in the blob identifying him as author it is reported, “He received a speeding ticket while researching this book.” Nonetheless his book is a helpful reflection on the dehumanizing force of speed. To my knowledge he does not refer to the practice of Sabbath, but it might readily integrate into his advocacy for slowness that permits the mobilization of our full humanness.

So imagine a resolve among us to break with the rush of the world. There can be no sustainable neighborliness in the zone of speed or the urge to scale. I am mindful of the old hymn:

Take time to be holy, speak oft with thy Lord;

Abide in him always, and feed on His word.

Make friends of God’s children, help those who are weak,

Forgetting in nothing His blessing to seek.

Take time to be holy, the world rushes on;

Spend much time in secret, with Jesus alone.

By looking to Jesus, like Him thou shalt be;

Thy friends in thy conduct his likeness shall see.

Take time to be holy, let Him be thy Guide;

And run not before Him, whatever betide.

In joy or in sorrow, still follow the Lord,

And, looking to Jesus, still trust in His Word.

Take time to be holy, be calm in thy soul,

Each thought and each motive beneath His control.

Thus led by his Spirit to fountains of love,

Thou soon shalt be fitted for service above.

Or consider these alternative verses that we sang recently in our church:

Take time to be human;

Come, all who are stressed;

Seek joys that are simple;

play, wonder, and rest. 

Let go of false measures; 

Serve God and not wealth;

Find life’s truest treasures:

peace, wholeness and health.

Take time to be human,

Take time to take care;

our bodies are temples,

God’s image we bear.

Heart, mind, skin, and sinew,

each wound and each scar, 

God’s light shines within you,

loved just as you are.

Take time to be human—

what more could we be?

Take time to remember,

God has set us free:
free from Pharaoh’s labors, 

free from chains that bind,

free: heart, soul, and mind.

Take time to be human;

Christ comes as our guide,

Shows strength by his weakness,

Shuns privilege and pride.

Uplifting the lowly—

God’s love on display—

Christ, human and holy,

Still shows us the way.

Take time to be holy! Take time to be human! It is not an either/or; it is a both/and. Take time! Resist the way of the world in the daily frantic expenditure of time, energy, and attention. There will be little serious missional energy in the church unless and until we find practical ways to live apart from the societal requirements of scale and speed.

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