TCC #4: System's Child
What is the nebulous "System" that everyone talks so metaphorically about and blames for all of our woes? That one question is woven into the fabric of every major element in our lives.
We hear various excuses and blameful complaints hurled at something called “The System” almost every day. The System is almost always the bad guy in these statements.
“It's the System's fault.”
“I’ve been in and out of the System my whole life.”
“The System took my kids.”
“The System is rigged."
Just like that mystery man, Nobody, who always got the blame for childhood mistakes but none of us can describe, The System is often presented as an obscure boogeyman that causes all of society's Big Problems.
Who broke the cookie jar?
Nobody.
Who oppresses the masses?
The System.
In the newest vocabulary trend, the word “systemic” gets thrown around as a more sophisticated alternative. It's used as a derogatory adjective for describing widespread problematic issues, without much thought to it’s actual meaning.
Systemic poverty. Systemic racism. Systemic collapse. Systemic corruption. Systemic election fraud.
Before anyone gets upset, I’m not saying these things don't exist. But I take issue with how the terminology is being consistently used as a negative reference. These arguments rarely do more than vaguely blame The System in that same, child-like finger pointing manner.
I’ve never heard anyone say “The System saved me," as the result of a social worker’s, or police officer’s, or bank teller's positive functions in society. We typically credit the individuals alone when things go well for us, oblivious to the hundreds of other things that also have to go right within those systems for those individuals to succeed.
I’ve never seen these events labeled as “systemic policing”, “systemic finance” or as a “systemic success”, even though positives may be every bit as endemic in a system as it’s negatives.
From presidents to police or social workers, Individuals get to be heroes, but The System always gets the broader stroke of blame.
The very real danger in this generalized mentality is that it trains our minds to look to some Individual to play the hero and “save us” from The System. We convince ourselves we have no role as cogs in The System, because that would require understanding it.
It’s easier just to wait for our savior to arrive and usher in a New System.
Those that propose to “tear down the system1" will always gather a fervent following for exactly this reason.
We all use these systems references loosely in one way or another, but The System does exist. It's not just a metaphoric reference.
But before we can ask what The System is, we have to ask what systems themselves are.
Systems of Belief & Lifestyle
I couldn't tell you exactly the first time I recognized a certain sense of comfort that came from wrapping myself in the rules of a well ordered system. But in retrospect I can see it everywhere in my childhood memories.
The most impactful of these systems was our religious culture.
Both sides of my family come from a small, minimalist Protestant sect known as the Church of Christ. Their doctrine arose out of the 1840s Restoration Movement2 and in practice is very reminiscent of what you see on The Little House on the Prairie TV series, without the horses hitched up outside.
We had a simple doctrine: Christians are followers of Christ and the demonstration of the early church only.
If a religious rule or practice is not something we can see demonstrated in the books of the New Testament then it has no place in the modern church. Anything additive is unscriptural and thus un-Christian.
Therefore, there was no higher order structure in the church, the male elders of each congregation managed it's affairs without any central control or executive councils. No female roles within the church at all, no age or gender segregated services (no Sunday schools), no funding of social services or institutions, and most congregations had no employees, not even their ministers.
They reject the concept of denominations and external creeds within the Christian world.
There are no Baptists, Calvinists, or Methodists according to Church of Christ doctrine. The word Christian itself means “Christ-like”: how can you be Christian if you put Calvin or Luther first? You are either Christian or you are not.
Some congregations take this so far that the word church shouldn't even be capitalized because it looks too much like a denomination when treated as a pronoun.
We weren’t members of The Church of Christ, we just went to a church that belonged to Christ.
It was the ultimate in Christian identity politics. There was an inherent sense of superiority that came from growing up inside a tiny3 community that believed it understood the truest meaning of the word Christian by it's most literal definition.
Children were not automatically baptized into the church. Most of us would usually make the choice to be baptized in our early teen years. Culturally, baptism was our coming of age moment, but it was up to each of us to decide when or if we were ready to make this life-changing commitment.
Within this very patriarchal culture a baptized male began to be given adult roles within the function of the church, regardless of age: being an usher, offering a prayer, or assisting with Communion. In effect, he had become a member of the priesthood.
In my case, as the oldest son of a preacher there was the unspoken, but scriptural expectation that I too would eventually become a preacher or missionary.
Not long after my baptism, at eleven years old I was asked to prepare my first Sunday evening sermon on my own. It was a role I accepted as the natural order of things without giving it too much thought. I scripted it out and delivered it the same way I’d watched Dad prepare his sermons my whole life.
Even decades after leaving the church, I still notice a sermon-like style and format creep into my writing. My apologies, I don't mean to be “preachy” but at least now you know where it comes from!
The nuclear family was the central component of the church community. The divorce rate in the Church of Christ is well below the national average, even among other Christian groups, at just 6% in 2020. It was even lower in the 1970s.
When divorce did happen it was often considered scandalous and not to be discussed in open company (cover the children’s ears while we whisper the D word).
Marrying outside the faith came in at a close second on the list of forbidden familial sins, and was probably the main cause for the few divorces that did occur.
These were small, regionally affiliated congregations, most smaller than a dozen families each. This meant most congregations were related by marriage in some way. With three services a week, we never went more than a few days apart from each other. Our church friends and family were always much more a part of our lives than those from the “outside world.”
When it came to music and worship, we sang acapella 4-part gospel harmonies from a hymn book. These were occasionally assisted by a pitch pipe and a song leader to provide tempo, but there were no instruments or clapping or raising hands or dancing involved.
None of these things were documented in the austere 1st century church.
Looking at church as a social system, it was easy to comprehend and follow. It was a stable, well-ordered lifestyle.
As a belief system, it was dependent on having an accurate understanding of the period in which the New Testament was written. It was something my father, a young ordained Church of Christ minister and Greek scholar, excelled at.
Language as a System
Under Dad's guidance I learned from an early age about language and Biblical translation from Greek. He helped me understand Latin as the root language behind English and so many other languages.
He showed me that languages were well-ordered, connected systems, separated by time or location. He showed me that languages constantly evolve, as a living system.
His example also showed me that languages were not immune to chaos.
Many of the early church's books and documents relied on the wrong Greek dialect for translation. In some cases these translations reach conclusions that are the opposite from the writer's intent when translated from the correct dialect. We know a great deal more now about ancient Greek dialects and their roles than we did even a few hundred years ago.
My father made it his life's mission to study and identify the original intent of the entire New Testament, from it’s relevant Greek dialects. By also studying the cultures of the Roman Mediterranean for which it was originally written, he wanted to make it's meaning more accurate & relevant to modern people.
I grew up with fat Greek texts, concordances, maps, and Roman histories laying open around the house, along with Dad's notes, scrawled out in his left-handed, barely legible chicken scratch. He never seemed to mind me poking through them.
It was like living in a self-serve seminary.
He was showing me that finding context is probably the single most important aspect of study, whether that’s languages, cultures, or theologies4.
Lastly from the religious perspective, there was the book, chapter, & verse structure within the Bible itself. The basic numeral system made it possible for even a young child to follow along and study scripture on his own.
Again, here was another well-ordered system bringing me comfort and knowledge if I took the time to understand it.
Knowledge as a System
If Dad was my scholarly, theological influence, it was Mom’s curiously creative nature that steered my urge to explore every other topic I could imagine.
At her instruction, I became a master of the card catalog. She showed me the Dewey Decimal system was like a treasure map that could - in mere seconds - steer me to everything I could ever want to know. I just had to know how to ask.
There was one childhood event that really propelled this lust for libraries.
In the mid-1970s we moved from Texas, where Mom was from, to Oregon, where Dad had grown up. The landscapes I’d experienced to this point were mostly the flat cotton farms and canyon lands of west Texas.
I celebrated my 7th birthday on the road the day before we arrived at our new home. That night in the motel room I lay there excitedly thinking about this new land of volcanic mountains and hidden forests, alpine lakes and giant redwoods.
When we came over the Siskiyou Mountains the next day, the crossing from California into southern Oregon was as if an entirely new world had just opened up. Looking down into the Rogue Valley it was even more beautiful than I had imagined.
It was the best birthday gift ever! I became instantly fascinated with the Pacific Northwest's geography, history, and animals.
Google mastery may be the preferred digital skillset for today’s knowledge seekers, but in the analog world of my youth Dewey Decimal was the ultimate search engine.5
As a well-ordered system it just worked, no matter which library you were in or what books were contained in their collections.
I left the public library every Saturday morning with another armload of books about animals, forest rangers, native tribes, and explorers. Before long I’d read every book in the easy to access school & public libraries. I started asking Mom to drive me, or I riding my bike, to other library branches around the valley.
From library volunteer to librarian for my Boy Scout troop, if it had to do with libraries I was in.
Again, this had a lot to do with my mom’s example and support. She volunteered at my school library. It was Mom that got more hands on with my Scouting adventures, volunteering, encouraging, and helping with merit badges. If Mom knew I had an interest in something, she was right there to foster it.
But, where do you go after you’ve run out of libraries? Have you worn out your welcome if the reference librarian rolls her eyes when she sees you walk in the door?
Unlike today when a hundred new online articles and videos about animals come out each day, in pre-Internet times I had to work hard for weeks sometimes to find new sources of information on a given topic.
From garage sales or used book and antique stores I would buy stacks of National Geographic, Boys Life, and Ranger Rick magazines for a nickel each. If I was in a doctor’s office, and they had an older magazine I was interested in, I was known to ask the receptionist if I could keep it. These, of course, were all added to my own growing library at home.
The local Safeway store featured a series of animal encyclopedia books, with a different book available each month. Mom got us the collection over the course of a year.
Then sometime in the late 70s she got us one of the coolest, most inspiring gifts ever: Safari Cards.
Once a month, we received a packet of 15-20 cards in the mail, each card with a new animal for the collection. I waited eagerly for their delivery, ready to discover new species, devour every fact, and spend hours looking at the pictures.
I would group them first by kingdom, such as mammals, reptiles or birds. Then as predator or prey, carnivore or herbivore. When I tired of that I could sort them by region and create my own expeditions to India, Asia, or the Antarctic. I used the pictures as a source to practice drawing animals.
Safari Cards gave me my first introduction to taxonomies - methods of categorizing, describing or, navigating a system. Low and behold, when I started reading about the Linnaean zoological taxonomy shown on the cards, there were my old friends Latin and Greek making regular reappearances.
Have you ever wondered why Latin is still so prominently used within most scientific disciplines? Science is saturated with it.
First, as a so-called ‘dead language’ you can do whatever you want with it without worrying about social concerns like linguistic or cultural appropriation.
Second, but most importantly, Latin is broken down so that word parts behave like Lego bricks.
You can chop them up, change them around, mix them into new combinations, and create new words that automatically have meaning to other people - without having to update the dictionary every year.
Building on what my dad had already taught me about Latin, within the zoological taxonomy I could literally see, read, and comprehend words that were completely new to me, ordered, and structured in the perfect manner for scientific discovery.
It was as if the library card catalog, an ancient language, and science itself had all merged to become a single thing. That thing’s purpose was to describe a very complex, inter-related system, broken down into infinitely smaller sub-systems.
That's the only way I can think to describe how my discovery of taxonomy felt. It was mind-blowing!
Even more so when I realized the scriptural numerical system of the Bible was just another kind of navigational taxonomy.
Systems within Systems
Safari Cards didn’t stop at zoology, though. Each card explained the geography and ecological roles the individual species fulfilled, and if they were endangered and why.
It didn’t take any great leap of imagination to begin to see that even nature itself is organized in a series of inter-connected systems. These extend well beyond what a single taxonomy or science can describe.
Suddenly I was seeing that everywhere around me were different kinds of taxonomies, each enabling a system to be navigated or described in their own way. The more I understood about how one taxonomy related to its subject, the easier it became to learn about other subjects that used similar taxonomies.
In terms of intellectual stimulation, I credit Safari Cards as the perfect format that just put all this raw information literally into a child’s hands, and organized in a way that then let their minds arrive at conclusions on their own.
Safari Cards were a magical, well-ordered system in their own right, where the card catalog itself was the library’s collection.
The Order in Systems Gives Us Comfort
There are other kinds of systems that shape our world, but I’ve emphasized well-ordered systems for a reason.
The presence, or absence, of these kinds of systems have an incredible effect on the human mind.
From structure we can consistently define and explain the world around us. These systems are stable ground on which we build our foundational concepts of reality. They're like a comforting mental blanket we can tuck ourselves in with at night.
If that's the case, then my early childhood was about as comfortably snug as it could get.
I had a loving, intellectually stimulating home and family life. A deeply involved religious culture with easy answers for vexing spiritual questions. As a male and the oldest son of a preacher I enjoyed the social privilege and pre-destiny that was inherent in those roles. I had a structured understanding of written & oral languages as well as their historic context.
Lastly, and probably most importantly, my mind had been opened up to intellectual discovery as an organic process I could pursue on my own, not the rigid, force-fed exercises taught in school.
All this came as the result of being embedded in a world of interconnected, well-ordered systems. You could say in this sense I was a “Child of The System." A composite of all the most relevant systems in my life at that time.
But the real world is chaotic and full of things that are beyond our ability to define, much less control. No system lives in a vacuum, or remains static and stable forever. What we may perceive as order is often just a comforting and temporary facade created by the limitations of our perspective.
Human systems almost always legitimize one form of bias or another.
My religious culture was literally defined by freezing time in the Roman world in the year 33 AD and assuming that human cultures should never, ever be anything different. My comprehension of that culture at an intellectual level required me to study multiple dialects of ancient Greek, a dead language which didn’t seem relevant at all to daily life.
The more I learned about language systems and the history of Biblical translation, the more I studied the scriptures themselves, the more I realized that the New Testament wasn’t God's literally documented word 6.
In order for this not to create a crisis of faith, I had to start thinking of ideas like “Truth" as metaphoric concepts rather than definitive historical or spiritual facts.
Even my appreciation of Latin as a Lego-language was tempered by the fact it was thousands of years old and completely obscure in most contexts. By the early 1980s I had more meaningful cultural opportunities to explore Klingon7 than I did Latin.
Yet, here I was, very clearly a product of all these ancient systems and social orders. The more systemic order I discovered, the more it awakened my awareness of these systems’ fragility and dependence on a static, unchanging universe.
Something was missing for it all to make sense and stay in balance.
What happens to the comfort and confidence these kinds of well-ordered systems lend us when Chaos and Change leave them damaged or irrelevant?
I see I’m approaching my length limit, so this makes a good stopping point. We’ll continue this idea from comfortable order into the stormy nature of chaos and change in TCC #5.
Before I let you go, though, I’d ask you to play a mental game about your perceptions of “The System".
Think about your childhood.
What were the well-ordered systems that gave you your first comfortable perch in the world?
What events and influences helped first open your eyes to the wonder of discovery?
Who were the people or institutions that helped you navigate the early childhood world of systems within systems?
Can you visualize how these all connect in your mind's eye like a diagram or map? Give it a try!
I hope this leaves you curious about the many systems that shape our reality.
In future issues we're going to start exploring some surprising and powerful ways to peel back the “secrets” hidden within everyday systems, both natural & man-made. Things like what your car can teach you about fixing a computer problem, or how the systemic relationship between a slug & a duck can help you get promoted at work.
(Now tell me that last paragraph didn't sound like the promise of a future sermon or two! 😉)
Until next time,
A.W.
Curiosity Should be Viral
The world needs more legitimately involved curiosity. We need to involve each other more in our ideas and interests. Hell, we just need each other, now more than ever.
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That makes 100 free subscribers an important goal for me to reach to start exploring that potential. I’m not looking to get rich, but I wouldn’t turn my nose down at earning a few bucks in return for all the clickity-clicks at the keyboard... :)
I got a nice initial bump from friends and family, but it seems my social influence reached its rather limit peak at around a third of the way to that starting goal.
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“Drain the swamp”, “Break the billionaires”, Left or Right, take your pick - these mantras are about using personality politics to create the narrative of The Savior vs. The System. David vs. Goliath. Neo vs. The Matrix.
Restoration Movement history and theology overview on Wikipedia.
I had no idea exactly how small the Church of Christ was until doing supporting research for this essay. From my perspective as a child I thought we represented a large percentage of the Protestant world, and that most other people who were Christians believed as I did. Yet fewer than 0.8% of adult Americans identify with this branch, which is also approximately 91% white by racial breakdown. Like all religious groups, the Church of Christ has sub-divisions. From my research there are fewer than 500 congregations in just 13 U.S. states who adhere to the specific beliefs I grew up with. A tiny sample of American faiths.
If you are a language, writing, and word geek, I maintain a regularly updated collection of related articles called Words Matter worth exploring.
I’m not trying to piddle on anyone else’s beliefs here, just to share where and how I came to some conclusions that were relevant to me. Your spiritual truths are your own.
If you’ve been living in the jungles of Borneo for the last 50 years you might not know the Klingons are a widely popular race of warrior-aliens from the Star Trek science fiction franchise. Their fictional language has garnered such a cult following that some people regularly use it to communicate with fellow Trekkies or to create new works of fan fiction on dedicated Klingon-language keyboards.