Ch. 2: Service
Theme Song: If I Had a Hammer – Peter, Paul & Mary
“On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
~ Martin Luther King Jr., "A Time to Break Silence"
This is the chapter that stalled this book prior to my GOD-to-GOOD-centric transformation: Do I really have something of value to say about the exterior spiritual discipline of service? I could take the easy way out and just write the obvious pap: be nice to people, pay it forward, give to charity, perform random acts of kindness, and engage in community service. Of course, I do recommend each of those personal manifestations of service; but, like Martin Luther King, Jr., I am concerned with systemic change that restructures our world to one that is based on love, goodness, and fairness; not one in which love, goodness, and fairness must be add-ons by individuals.
If I had continued to feel charged with redesigning the world command and control style from the top down, then I would have gone to my grave without writing this book. Fortunately, I bought a "Great Course" on Understanding Complexity in which Professor Scott Page introduced me to bottom-up emergent phenomena with no central planner. Phew, I wouldn't have to restructure the whole system since we now live in a complex world that is interdependent, diverse, and adaptive. According to Dr. Page: "An actor in a complex system controls almost nothing but influences almost everything." GOD-centrics and GOOD-centrics cannot impose a restructured world in which love, goodness, and fairness thrive; however, we can influence the world by making these changes locally. These localized zones of influence plus some positive feedback may produce tipping points for our movement of love in the world akin to Robert Kennedy's ripples of hope:
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope… and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. (“Speech at the University of Capetown”)
The GOD-centric and GOOD-centric mantra is “How would my action affect the movement of love in the world?” When it comes to the exterior spiritual discipline of service, both GOD-centric and GOOD-centric might ask: "How might we set up our world so love, goodness, and fairness thrive?" Service may be defined as "the organized system for supplying some accommodation required by the public." Our exterior spiritual discipline of service will focus on bringing our GOOD-centric focus on love, goodness, and fairness to the organized public systems of education and economics.
GOD-centric Christians may find motivation in these biblical calls for service:
One who oppresses the poor to increase his wealth and one who gives gifts to the rich—both come to poverty. (Proverbs 22:16)
Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. (Isaiah 10:1-2)
GOOD-centrics may find motivation to service in R. Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path:
It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a ‘higher standard of living than any have ever known.’ It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival.
GOD or GOOD-centric, the exterior spiritual discipline of service calls us to influence the world so that its educational and economic infrastructures are ones in which love, goodness, and fairness thrive. Don't think it can be done? Just remember how far and rapidly LGBTQ rights changed in the past couple of years. We now live in a complex, interdependent, diverse, and adaptive world; not in the simple silos of uniformity and conformity of old. As an influencer but not a controller, I will provide in this chapter GOOD-centric service guideposts in the domains of education and economics. I hope these ideas will germinate in individuals and local groups then emerge in broader infrastructural change.
