Build Something

Follow the creative impulse.

The car ride to and from Big Bend National Park is long. The Lone Star State is a big place. We have two young children. Thankfully, we have a Nintendo Switch.

My kids played a lot of Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. during our ride a couple of weeks ago. They also played Minecraft. My son is a world builder and decided to create a world for Molly.

Like any good project manager, David asked a lot of questions. He wanted to create a world that was pleasing to his mom, something she’d be proud of and enjoy. Naturally, the first building he constructed was a chapel. Here’s the view from the outside:

There’s a reflecting pond next door. David then designed a place to eat after worship gatherings, conveniently located on the other side of the foot bridge. Here it is:

These are structures in an imaginary world. But this is where structures begin—in the imagination, in the mind. Every building we enter began somewhere as an idea, a concept, of a place. The initial design was meant to serve a purpose, to meet some human need. Then, once it is built, it is something we can frequent and enjoy and use.

You may inhabit a structure like this. You may have built it. Someone else may have built it, and you’re maintaining it. No matter who put in the initial work, the work now continues. What we build must to be maintained, renewed, and rejuvenated for a new generation of use.

It is the same with our institutions: government, colleges, family, churches, civic organizations. These institutions began as ideas. They were then built, established, and expanded or maintained. But they continue to need work. They need building. Unlike the virtual world, the things we build tend toward entropy and decay. Sabbaths are needed (and wise!), but the work is never done.

In A Time to Build, Yuval Levin observes that major institutions have been in a state of crisis, and have been for quite some time. Rather than seeing institutions as molds which shape us, they have instead been used as platforms for personal advancement. We use institutions, rather than allow ourselves to be used and formed by them. We take what they can give us when it is to our advantage. We withhold parts of ourselves from the institution, lest they constrain us. And we put personal interests before corporate interests. We look out for number one.

Levin argues that this kind of posture leads toward a culture of celebrity, rather than one of integrity and character. Why? Because everyone is clamoring for the spotlight. A few make it. Most don’t. Bitterness, resentment, and personal jealousies then dominate those who fail to seize collective attention. And because the attention economy is defined by scarcity, those on the bottom then dedicate their efforts to tearing down and destroying those who have been elevated to the top, clamoring to take their place. The result is chaos.

A Time to Build ends with an appeal to reject these negative impulses. Rather than tearing down our institutions in hopes of ascending, Levin writes, “We need to inhabit these institutions, love them, and reform them to help make them more lovely as well.” By offering ourselves in the building up of an institution—education, law, medicine, public service, sport, religious tradition, etc.—we not only better ourselves, but we enhance something that can then better serve everyone around us as we make the institutions themselves more trustworthy.

Levin writes:

If the problem we face, or a significant part of it, is that we have stopped thinking of ourselves as formed and molded by the institutions that surround us, then one key to improving things would be a change of mind-set and expectations. We don’t have to figure out how everyone might do this; we just have to do it ourselves. You and I. We can do it in small ways—in thinking about how to use our time and energy, how to pursue our goals, how to judge success and failure, how to identify ourselves when people ask us who we are, how to measure our responsibilities. Approaching the social crisis of our time through the lens of institutions gives us all something to do by giving us each something to do. It doesn’t require some universal social movement or a public policy agenda or a religious revival. These might all be long-term hopes. They are all needed. But the scope and scale they would require should not paralyze us, because there is something small we can do to start.

Would this lead to renewal? Is renewal possible? Levin thinks so. He says, “There is reason to think that renewal is possible, because the hunger for it is evident in the very symptoms of decline around us now.” Our dissatisfaction with the world around us tells us that we want things to be different. The question then becomes what we can do about it, and if we are willing to take those steps.

The pathways are many. But one, for people who follow Christ such as myself, is to seek to be all that our tradition claims we can be through the workings of God’s grace.

I am sure that we will continue to hear loudly from those calling to tear everything down. But I hope there are many more around us who will quietly give in to the creative impulse, who will dedicate themselves to building.

Book Notes

Prior to finishing Yuval Levin’s A Time to Build I motored through Jim Rasenberger’s Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six Shooter That Changed America, a fascinating profile of one of America’s most significant inventors. Colt is a complex character, and his success wasn’t only the product of genius, but a profound understanding of manufacturing, marketing, and politics. He had plenty of help in perfecting his design, setting up his operation, and funding his work. He was socially well connected on a monied, genteel class.

Early in life he had significant failures. His family life was a mess. He married late. His brother was the perpetrator of a horrific murder, in whose trial he became a player. His invention, the revolver, wasn’t immediately received as a helpful innovation. In fact, it was at first deemed inferior as a tool of warfare, unfit for the American style of combat. That all changed when the pistol came into the hands of Texans on the Western frontier.

I also read William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, a novel that had been on my stack for years. It’s a mystery of sorts.

The central character, Cayce Pollard, is a “cool hunter,” a person who identifies trends as they emerge and helps marketing firms and other commodifiers then capitalize on those trends. She is hired to track down the creator of footage that has emerged on the web which has acquired a cult following.

A wealthy financier, Hubertus Bigend, hires Pollard to track down the creator, believing that this footage is something new, something that could revolutionize the way images are created, captured, and rendered to influence the public, sell products, and shape the global market. This adventure pulls Pollard into an international intrigue.

Sights and Sounds

I really enjoyed the 1961 samurai film Yojimbo. A lone warrior strolls in to town, finds a community that is absolutely wrecked by two competing factions, and works to turn them against one another so that each is destroyed. While trying to appear calloused, cynical, and detached, he is a “good guy,” a fact that he cannot, in the end, hide.

The Maestro: The King of the Cowboy Artists is a documentary about Gerald Gaxiola, a former airplane mechanic, traveling salesman, and bodybuilder who decided to become an artist. And once he started creating, he dedicating himself fully to making art, not for profit, but for the art itself. “Art,” the Maestro says, “is a religion, not a business.” He positioned himself as an anti-Warhol.

Last Words

My goal is to post three new items a week, and there is new stuff on the blog. I shared some Jesus art, guidance on what to read, and the importance of a thick theological anthropology.

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Be well this week. Bless others.

Best,

BAS

P. S. - It’s Father’s Day weekend. Enjoy this dad joke.