Keeping Score: Does It Damage the Precious Snowflakes?

We live in a society that increasingly exalts the individual as supreme in the political, social and religious realms. We exalt, what Bill Whittle calls the "precious snowflakes" to preeminence with the new iron doctrine that everyone is special and everyone must have certain things or be able to do certain things he or she wants to do regardless of their ability. This new system of belief that is being foisted upon us by politicians, educators and (sadly) religious leaders has sprung up in an age where, as C.S. Lewis put it, "There is a crowd of busybodies, self-appointed masters of ceremonies, whose lives are devoted to destroying solitude wherever solitude still exists.  They call it 'taking the young people out of themselves' or 'waking them up' or 'overcoming their apathy'."   

(c) by William Wetmore

We see this most clearly in the physical education classroom. Gym teachers, once the tough, no nonsense, hard-drivers of the education system have increasingly bought into the precious snowflake philosophy of teaching. Many have not only stopped keeping score, but have also stopped even teaching kids how to keep score on the grounds that scoring sends a negative message to children that some of them are better than their fellows and, as we all know, each of us is the same - individuals to be sure, just not too individual.  In this system there are limits to one's individuality.  We are all equal members of the team only in the sense that we are all the same, except, of course for our leaders.  On that issue Lewis further complained that, "If an Augustine, a Vaughan, a Traherne or a Wordsworth should be born in the modern world, the leaders of a youth organization would soon cure him."  The precious snowflake version of individualism is useful if you're planning to dump a lot of six-sidedly uniform individuals into a snowdrift or a socialist collective somewhere. Doing away with scoring of athletic competitions in the name of protecting the feelings of "individuals" is an essential precursor to creating a collectivist state.

There is a time to score and a time not to score according to Solomon.  What he actually said was, "To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven," but it means the same thing.  I worked with abused and emotionally disturbed kids for almost a decade as a therapeutic recreation director at a residential treatment center. I taught the kids to play games like baseball where there was plenty of scoring.  We even fielded a team in the local youth league. We kept score. The kids lost a lot. Some of my colleagues thought this was a bad thing for kids with already low self-esteem.

The kids thrived on it. While on the ball field the kids held themselves to a higher standard of language and behavior than any other team out there. They measured their performance by the scores, yes, but as they improved, they also knew they were making real progress because nobody was playing down for them.

The telling moment one day was when the scheduled team confused their schedule and only half of them showed up for the game. We had the field for a couple of hours, so those that showed up decided to play anyway.  We mixed up the teams and played a joyful game of softball for two hours. The good players were helping teach the poorer players (mostly those on my team) and we had such a blast that we totally forgot to keep score.

I started an equestrian program for emotionally disturbed children that everyone said was insane. They were certain the kids would run away on the horses or get themselves hurt or abuse the animals.  What people don't understand about horses is that they teach their riders as much as their riders teach them.  Horses score you on how well you ride and the consequences are immediate and more than a little disconcerting. 

So, if our best game was unscored and our most therapeutic activity didn't post numbers to a scoreboard, am I saying there is no value to games that have no score?  Not at all. The unscored pickup game I played with my treatment center ball team was probably the most therapeutic of the year, but it would not have been so without its having been set within the framework of the scored games. I'm saying there is no value to games that have no point.  The score of a game may well be whether or not you accomplish a task.  The score for the unscored game was mutual understanding and helping each other learn the game.  The score for horseback riding was a successful ride in which the horse went where you wanted it to.

I took a group of kids out once to the woods to build a trail.  We cut the trail, cleared the brush, lined the trail with logs and then wheeled in sawdust to fill in the trail between the logs.  It took weeks to cut a two mile trail. The "score" was riding down the trail on horseback and knowing we'd built that trail with our own hands. No one got paid. Everybody did what they could. The stronger guys pushed the wheelbarrows. The smaller kids spread the sawdust and pitched branches aside. Those of us who could use machete's and axes cut the branches and brush back.

My kids trying out the new trail.

That's actually a pretty good metaphor for how a team or organization of true individuals actually ought to work. Paul (the apostle, not the Beatle) compared it to the organs of the body.  The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you."  The eye also cannot claim to be the hand for it is not at all the same thing.  Each has his part to play. Each is an individual, distinct and whole, but without whom the rest of the organism would be unable to work.

In the opposite way, the athletics departments of our schools have gone too far by making the individual all important and reducing the lesser players to a supporting role. We elevate our stars to a lofty and privileged stature and in the process the stars forget that they are, or at least should be, part of a team. This also is an essential precursor to the formation of a collectivist state in that this teaches that some should be elevated in status over the mere rabble (Marx called them the proletariat) because of their special and genetically superior genes.  These elevated special people then become the privileged caste who are charged with managing the snowdrift.

"There lies the maddening ambiguity of our faith as it must appear to outsiders," says Lewis.  "It sets its face relentlessly against our natural individualism; on the other hand, it gives back to those who abandon individualism, an eternal possession of their own personal being, even of their bodies."   When at last we renounce both the collectivist's "precious snowflake" notion of "individualism" and the equally destructive notion that some of us are superior by birthright, we may then move on to achieve a state of true selfhood.  When we submit our will to God, we get it back from Him, scrubbed clean of all the old grime and with all the psychological entanglements we've accumulated over a lifetime pruned away. Everything that has all along prevented us from achieving our true individuality is removed and we may, by our own unencumbered free will choose to fit ourselves snugly into the very place in the universe for which we were all along intended.





(c) 2013 by Tom King

Christ and the Collective

by Tom King

One may become a member of the Body of Christ with almost embarrassing ease.  It requires but one act and one small symbolic ritual.  The act required is repentance.  Repentance is not in any sense some sort of self-flagellation. It is not a trip to spiritual boot camp nor even 40 days in the wilderness, although that may be part of your spiritual journey at some point.  We need to be careful not to postpone taking up membership in Christ’s church in order to perform some great work of contrition or some great ritual of joining.  Joining the Body of Christ differs fundamentally from joining the Masonic lodge or the Communist party.  The Body of Christ is not in any sense a collective.

In the Body, we are members, not subjects.  We are, if you accept the idea that we are all created beings, already children of God and called according to His purpose.  We are organs of the Body of Christ, not all copies of one thing.  We are not called to sign up to join as soldiers. We are not called to be trained to sublimate ourselves to some collective state and be turned into another  identical egg in a stack of boxes of eggs all destined to be scrambled in service to the aims of the chef. We simply assume the place in the body that we were created to occupy.  It is not so much a process of molding so much as it is a process of restoration.

 C.S. Lewis* argued that “true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective”.  He compares membership in the Body of Christ to the structure of a family.  A family is made up of unique individuals.  They are not units of “homogeneous classes”.  You cannot interchange one for another.  If grandpa were to die, you couldn’t replace him with a Labrador retriever.  Grandpa has one role in the family. The family dog has another.  Brothers can’t be swapped for sisters as though they were all just “children” with identical functions.  You can’t even swap one brother for another.  All members of the family are unique; almost a species unto themselves.

We instinctively recognize the family structure as the “way things ought to be” – the ideal way to organize human beings.  Look at the myths and stories we tell ourselves.  The best ones are always about groups in which each individual is a separate, unique, but essential part of the whole.  The Wind in the Willows unites a Badger, a Mole and a Water Rat.  Star Wars unites a princess, a Jedi-in-training, a pirate, a stuffy robot, his comical sidekick, a teacher and a “walking carpet” that communicates by howling.  Every member of the Dirty Dozen has his own unique function.  Even Christ chose as his disciples, not identical acolytes, but an incredibly diverse band of fishermen, fanatics, theologians, tax collectors and accountants.  In none of the stories, that so appeal to us, does any member sublimate him or herself to the collective.  They simply work together in service to a common goal.  Each has his own part to play. Not one could be easily replaced.  None are members of a class. If you remove one member, as Lewis puts it, “You have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure.”

The Body of Christ is a unity of individuals.  This idea of the unique individual as part of a motley crew of rugged individualists is enshrined in the US Constitution and in Scripture as the model for all human endeavours.  We are not designed to be trained to robotic sameness, pumped full of ideology all spouting the same talking points and shoved into whatever box the collective deems appropriate for us. We are not part of a class that can be treated as though it were a chunk of cheese or a block of wood.  We are not blacks, Hispanics, conservatives, “the” poor, “the” rich or the ruling class. The central planners would put an end to individualism for individualism is seen as a threat to progress.  Individuals make for too many pieces on the chess board to push around.

By progress, the great leaders of our day mean the evolution of the people of this world into a vast homogeneous soup. The collective is a soup in which every man, woman and child is a bit of the broth which can be seasoned, stirred and heated into whatever flavor the planners happen to favor this week.  Individualism is anathema to the collectivist.  

The very existence of the solitary, independent-thinking individual is a threat to the collectivist ambition.  That is why membership in collectives requires extensive prerequisites.  There must be relentless training to subdue any tendency to think independently. Art, music and writing are encouraged, but only such art, music and writings which reflect the talking points of the collective.  To remain a member of the collective, one must perform frequent ritual obeisance to the collective throughout his life. The almost comic displays of “patriotism” and devotion to the great leader that one sees in places like North Korea are not an aberration, but are rather the logical conclusion of the collectivist vision.  

Where Christian faith is all about faith and trust and being secure as to one’s place in the universe, one is never really secure as a member of a collective. Someone is always looking over your shoulder, searching for telltale signs of individualism that must be rooted out.  The threat of being cast out or punished by the collective for unorthodoxy is always there hanging over your head.

The only ritual required to join the Body of Christ is baptism.  It is a once for all ceremony. It is a public declaration that I am unclean and would be washed and made new by Christ. It is submission, not to a denomination, a particular church group or even to a set of doctrines, but to Almighty God Himself and no other.  Anyone who says differently is organizing a collective with himself and not God as its head.

Christ did not die for a society, a political party or for a nation-state, nor even for a church.  He died for each individual soul, whether that soul chooses to accept the gift or not. To the secular-collectivists, communists, progressives, socialists and statists, Christianity would have to seem like an almost militant assertion of individuality.  To defeat this pernicious movement toward uncontrollable individual liberty, the collectivists must accuse the Body of Christ of their own sin, that of suppressing individuality.

In this the collectivists are having some success, because without experiencing it for oneself, it is easy to misunderstand what it means to be a “servant” of God.  Christianity must seem “maddeningly ambiguous” C.S. Lewis pointed out.*  Christian faith seems to come out against our own natural individualism in that the practice of that faith requires that we abandon our own “natural” will to God. The Apostle Paul described the natural will as doing what you do not want to do because you are compelled to do it by your old nature.  

What the secular-collectivists do not and cannot comprehend unless they experience a relationship with God themselves, is that, in exchange for our giving of our old “self” to Him, God cleans the old self, repairs the damage, polishes it up and gives it back to us.  We then are true individuals as we were meant to be; free from all the old urges, compulsions, terrors and cravings that living in a corrupt world had placed upon us and once used to control us. We become, in Christ, new people who can freely choose to do what is right because they want to and because they are no longer bound by fear, no longer deluded by old programming and no longer weak and able to be manipulated.  

To the leaders of the collective, the existence of such people must be terrifying indeed. 

© 2013 Tom King – Puyallup, WA

*From “Weight of Glory” by CS Lewis.

Division of Labor

And the eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you"; or again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you."  

- I Corinthians 12:21 NASB

My Sweet Baboo gave me a job yesterday.  She's decided to take up clipping coupons and wants some labels for the book and since I "know so much about computers", she assumed I would be just the bloke for the job.

She is, of course, absolutely right.

In a trice I whipped up a mail-merged page of labels for the old photo album that she is recycling for the purpose. I used Microsoft Word and created a PDF file with it which I printed, not only for her, but also posted for the use of my readers on my Howdy Ya Dewit website.  She has an old dayplanner she'd rather use, but I'll need to buy some plastic pocket pages for it.  Once I do get the new pages, I'll get out my Adobe Pagemaker and jazz up the labels even more with border and pictures and make it all cute.  She'll just have to remind me to buy the pages about 65 times. I think a grocery coupon book is a wonderful idea.

BUT DON'T ASK ME TO KEEP UP WITH THE THING!

I've learned that each of us has things we are good at and things which we are not good at.  If you keep asking someone to do something they just aren't good at, you are setting yourself up for lots of disappointment and frustration.  I, unfortunately, have the attention span of a jackrabbit on a date.  I could never keep up with clipping coupons, although once I spent an hour doing it and saved us something like $40 at the grocery store.

Not likely to ever happen again, though. Move on, folks.  Nothing else to see here.

That's why I have a garage full of projects I haven't got started on yet.  One day, I'll get a bug to do one and the time (which I don't have much of these days) and I'll get out there and build the six inch telescope, the box dulcimer, the canoe rack and cookie tin banjo I've been collecting parts for.  My how-to weblog is a monument to my trips to the shade tree to try and figure out how to make something myself or repair something on the cheap because I can't afford to buy it at the store.

Actually, I enjoy making things and my ambition is to build myself a greenhouse and a big workshop out back for the purpose. My wife's ambition is for me to get all my crap out of the garage.

We each have our purpose.  If I can help you in 5 minutes or so, I'm your guy.  If you want me to remember to do something later, drop me 3 or 4 e-mails and whack me upside the head about an hour before I'm supposed to have it done.

Or you can tell Sheila and she'll worry about it every day until she makes me get it done.

We each have our functions and as the Apostle Paul said, "The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I don't need you.'"  Well, the eye actually can say that and probably will before it's over, but that don't make it so.

I'm great if an airplane drops on your house or your septic tank explodes or you need to wrestle a water buffalo out of your pantry.  Sheila can not only show you how to cook, bake or clean anything you can imagine, but will have it pretty well cooked, baked or cleaned by the time she gets through explaining it to you. I play the guitar so most people can tolerate it (except my immediate family members who think its funny to moan and hold their ears every time I pick the thing up).  Sheila doesn't play. She rehearses over and over until its perfect.  She's the one you invite to perform special music at the church. I'm the one you stick with song service every week and a backup band of 5 or 10 kids who may or may not actually play the instruments they are holding at the time.  Beautiful music or joyful noise - pick your body part!

I'm just tellin' ya' what I think.

Tom