The ear of God

There is another dimension.

It is not the third dimension. It is not the fourth, or the fifth dimension. It does violence to this dimension, in a sense, to give it a number. This is the dimension where number is nonexistent.

In the first two or three dimensions, number is required and defining. Length, width, depth, or height — these are measurements, and the first dimensions are measureable. We should know. The society is obsessed with measurement. In fact – and even 30 years ago one might have considered this absurdly impossible – a significant portion of the society considers immeasurable things insignificant.

The great enforcer of measurability is the computer. But money also helps.

Trillions of dollars (literally) are currently being invested to force the nation’s public school system into a computer-based model, in which a few large software and hardware companies require use of their products and control what short answers children are taught – and in which all teaching and learning is reduced to things that can be answered on a computer-based test.

The power of the economic profitability of this is enormous. Major foundations are pushing it, and hedge funds exploiting it. It has taken over the current U.S. Department of Education and the public schools of several states. Its profiteers are contributing mightily in elections.

In the doublespeak which has been perfected by a market-driven, concentrated-power society, the centrally controlled computer-based Common Core curriculum is said to introduce “critical thinking” into education where it was missing before. It does exactly the opposite. Test-writers write trick questions and call that critical thinking. In order to deflect the short-answer syndrome of all computer-based testing, extensive attempts are being made to get computers to “read” students’ essays.

Needless to say, few who have a choice will choose computerized classrooms, where experienced teachers are replaced with lower-paid classroom monitors, driven constantly by high stakes standardized testing. Most of us would prefer to have our own children educated in small classes in imaginative and encouraging private classrooms.

Kindergarteners’ play and creative work is being replaced by short-answer computer-based tests, frequently given, so that they can “get ahead” as quickly as possible. Their life of play and community is devalued, debased.

The drive for measurability is in no way confined to education, of course. Time and money, measured by whatever results can be measured or quantified, are the dominant shapers of medical care and non-profit funding as well. The logic of this is inescapable, but nurture is immeasurable. What is measured comes to dominate all activity. Poorer societies often do better at the immeasurable.

The U. S. Department of education and many education “reformers” whose investments are driving them are insisting that teachers be evaluated on the standardized test scores of their children, thereby removing any incentive to teach anything but the test, eliminating dissenters, and compelling survivors to gravitate toward students who will get good test scores.

Silence. Meaning. Depth. The immeasurable realities of life receive little attention and, even more distressing, little time. Time is money, whether it is in education, or in community work, or in medical care. Television and computers skate across the surface, demanding more and more of our attention and alluding to the meaning of life only by title. They occupy us.

There is no time for meaning. No encouragement of discussion. No truth of depth. Nothing unseen, unspoken, unheard is acknowledged. Things are not thought or connected. We feel the truth, but we are not led into its pathways. The paths become overgrown, and the way is even blocked on purpose.

There is no time for something immeasurable – a song or a symphony, a question or an alternative thesis. How would one determine what was substantial, or important – what had weight? Does one thing matter more than another? Is there something open-ended? Would there be wonder, or appreciation, or discussion, or reconciliation, or fellowship? No time for the smokiness of spirituality, no sense of the intersection of time and the timeless moment.

What gets revenue is what is produced and marketed. What is taught is what is tested. There is no place for learning about the world, for the advance of humankind, for the building of community, the holding of hands, the things that really and truly endure.

The depth of things is the beginning of each day and the foundation of our journey. But our financial-profit-driven materialism conspires to keep us on the surface at all costs. Even our electronic gadgets are our captors: the average smartphone is occupied two hours and 53 minutes every day. Dare not to envision the deep!

Meanwhile, there are press reports that more people are turning to spirituality. We are starved for meaning, desperate for depth, longing for silence. It is what a friend of mine calls “the ear of God.” Perhaps if we cry out he can hear us in immeasurable being.

The Rev. Benjamin P. Campbell, Senior Pastor