James 3:13-4:3,7-8a
We live in an “information society.” Since the 1970s at least, our society has experienced an explosion of information and an expansion of access to information that has been positively mind-boggling. We live in an information society. I carry around on my hip more computer memory than existed in the entire mainframe computer of the old Computation Center at UNC-Chapel Hill where I worked as a work-study student in the mid-1970s. I’ve got more memory on my hip than that giant thing had in the whole room, and I have access at my fingertips to information that only a few decades ago was available only in libraries and corporate offices and private collections. But here it all is in my hand: 24/7/365(or 6) access to information and misinformation galore. We live in an information society.
With the rise of an information society, we have entered into what is called a “knowledge economy.” Depending on your definition of the knowledge economy, it either means that knowledge is the preeminent output of our economy now, or it means that knowledge is the indispensable tool and the economic driver of economies the world over. Both are correct. Not just in major academic centers or in large corporate offices but in cities and towns and rural areas all over the country and all over the world, knowledge is a power that has gone out from a relatively few select centers to places and people far-flung. “Know-how” is no longer the private property of a select few. We live in an information society, and we work in a knowledge economy.
But this morning, I’d like to suggest that “Professor James,” as I’ve been calling him for the last several weeks, presents to us in today’s Epistle Lesson in the Revised Common Lectionary a “third order.” In addition to the information society and the knowledge economy in which we live and work, James calls our attention to the necessity of a wisdom community. A wisdom community.
You see, the information society is amazing. But one of its shortcomings is that in and of itself, the information society does not provide us with any criteria on the basis of which to decide which information of all the information that is out there we should use to shape our lives and form our souls and inform our perspective on the world. The information available to us is so expansive that it cannot be calculated, but there are no criteria provided by the information society to guide us in discerning which information should shape us and form us and feed us. That requires a wisdom community. In the knowledge economy, the know-how available to us, the know-how that we have—or that we have available to us through the capability of others—is astonishing and astounding. We have no shortage of know-how, but we stumble again and again over know-why. We have plenty of know-how, but we trip and fall down over know-when and know-when-not. Know-how comes with the knowledge economy. But know-why and know-when and know-when-not can only be cultivated in a wisdom community.
“Professor James” lived on the cusp of a revolution in information and knowledge. Shortly after his lifetime there was a revolution in the dissemination of information and the expansion of knowledge. This far removed from it, we don’t even think about it. We’re accustomed to saying “the book” of James without realizing that by speaking of “the book,” we’re revealing that we’re on the other side of the information and knowledge revolution on the cusp of which James lived. We don’t say “the scroll” of James, do we? We say “the book” of James. That shift from scroll-making and scroll-reading to book-making and book-reading was a revolution in human civilization. Instead of producing enormously expensive and tediously prepared material to write on made from goatskin or sheepskin tanned and cut and sewn together at the edges so that you would “scroll” your way into the text and scroll your way back out, it was becoming possible to produce books sewn on one edge with writing on both sides of the page. One of the many advantages of this new information technology was the ability to open it and scan through it. You could leaf through it, and you could find what you wanted and needed far more quickly and easily than in a scroll. Why, it was positively Google-ish, this new information technology called “books.” “Professor James” lived on the cusp of a revolution in civilization and information and knowledge, but he understood very well that no matter how good your information is and no matter how extensive your knowledge is, without wisdom you have no criteria, no principles, no grounding for negotiating your way through the information you have access to and the knowledge you acquire.
A wisdom community is what James points us to at the end of chapter three and the beginning of chapter four. James acknowledges in 3:15 that there is a kind of wisdom that is all about our own ambition, our own self-absorption, our own self-interest and capacity to acquire and gain for ourselves at the expense of others. He says that that kind of wisdom does not create community. That kind of wisdom creates disorder and conflict, wickedness and disputes. It is driven by envy and selfish ambition. But James says there is an alternative wisdom that must be cultivated in community, and that alternative wisdom is “from above.” Wisdom “from above” is the kind of wisdom that comes to us individually and together when we make an effort to draw near to God who draws near to us, as James 4:8 puts it. The wisdom from above, said James, is the wisdom that should form our lives and shape our behaviors and our perspectives on the world. It’s not driven by envy or selfish ambition or cravings. Instead, it is pure and peaceable, gentle and willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits without even a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.
This morning I want to offer two examples of individuals whom I would like to hold up as persons who were fully engaged in the emergence of our information society and our knowledge economy, but neither one of them forgot the importance of the wisdom community. Both of them died this week, and that put them on my radar screen.
Chances are, you have never heard of Horace Carter. In North Carolina journalism circles in which I had my fair share of selfish ambition for a time when I was younger, Horace Carter was a living legend. In 1947, Horace Carter founded the Tabor City Tribune. And at the ripe old age of 33, he won a Pulitzer Prize. Now for those who aren’t familiar with it, the Pulitzer Prize is like an Emmy or a Grammy. It’s the biggest award in the business; it’s the highest prize a journalist or newspaper can win. Horace Carter won the Pulitzer Prize at the age of 33 because between 1950 and 1952 there was an enormous uprising of the Ku Klux Klan in Columbus County, North Carolina, and Horry County, South Carolina, the two counties which Horace Carter had decided his newspaper, the Tabor City Tribune, would serve.
This is what he wrote in the first editorial in the first edition of that newspaper. The editorial began, “‘In the beginning, God created’—and so goes the Bible. And this is the beginning of a newspaper designed to serve peoples of all races and colors who live in Columbus County, North Carolina, and Horry County, South Carolina” (emphasis added). That was the mission statement that he wrote in the first editorial of the first edition of the Tabor City Tribune. So in 1950, when the uprising of the KKK began in those two counties, Horace Carter had to decide between his mission and his popularity, between his mission and his personal safety. And during those three years he engaged in investigation after investigation, wrote article after article, wrote editorial after editorial confronting and condemning the Klan and refusing to stand down or be intimidated by the Klan’s violence and vigilantism and its domestic terrorism. There were threats on his life, threats on his family’s life, threats on the lives of his pets. He was threatened that he would be run out of business and run out of town, but he did not stand down, and with him stood advertisers and merchants and others in Tabor City who also refused to back down to the threats.
It’s a remarkable story, really, that a young man born to uneducated parents in a mill village in Albemarle, North Carolina, who graduated from a high school from which no male student had ever completed college won a Pulitzer Prize. Why? Not because he had better information than anyone else. Not because he had more knowledge than anyone else. But because he was committed to a community of wisdom in which he had been nurtured. He received a biblical grounding and principled rearing in a strict Southern Baptist family and a Southern Baptist church. And he had a profoundly influential mentoring experience his senior year in college when he was the editor of The Daily Tar Heel, and he sat on Sunday evenings with Frank Porter Graham, the president of UNC-Chapel Hill, as they talked about the problems that the university faced and the state faced and the world faced. Horace Carter was nurtured in a wisdom community, and that’s why he was prepared to do amazing and courageous things in a small town in North Carolina in a troubled and troubling era of that state’s history.
But you don’t have to start out poor or without means in order to cultivate and create and live out the kind of wisdom James espouses. Unless you’re a Virginian, you probably don’t know the name Frank Batten, Sr. Frank Batten, Sr., was born in Virgina seven years after Horace Carter was born in North Carolina. He was born a child of privilege, an heir of a family fortune. But he worked himself up from the bottom of a newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, the Virginian-Pilot. He worked himself up from the bottom of the paper to become its publisher. In 1958, the governor of Virginia ordered the secondary schools in Norfolk to close rather than to comply with a court order to integrate. Alone among Virginia’s major papers, Frank Batten, Sr.’s Virginian-Pilot stood against the governor and against the prevailing winds of the “Massive Resistance,” as it was called in Virginia. He stood against it editorially, and he stood against it personally. He helped to mobilize business people and socialites of Norfolk to support re-opening the schools—re-opening them peaceably and re-opening them integrated—which happened in 1959. And for his efforts, Frank Batten won a Pulitzer Prize and became a legend in Virginia journalism circles. He had no different information at his disposal or no special knowledge that other publishers at other newspapers in the state of Virginia did not have. What he had was wisdom without partiality or hypocrisy. And he parlayed that wisdom into becoming one of the most important media moguls of the twentieth century in the United States, acquiring newspapers and television stations and then launching what some people said would surely be one of the greatest follies in the new cable television business. When he came out with the business plan, people told him it would never work. No one would ever watch it, they said. Nobody would watch a 24-hour “Weather Channel”! He believed in it, and he kept working on it, and the rest, as they say, is history. A part of that history is that Frank Batten, Sr., became one of the foremost philanthropists of higher education in the United States, especially in Virginia.
But what I like best about the story of Frank Batten, Sr.’s life is that a few years ago, when someone asked him in an interview how he would like to be remembered, he didn’t talk about the Virginian-Pilot; he didn’t talk about his media exploits or his corporate venture on cable; and he didn’t talk about his breath-taking philanthropy. This is what he said: “I’d like to be remembered as someone who did some worthwhile things.” “I’d like to be remembered as someone who did some worthwhile things,” he said, and Professor James smiled. Doing “some worthwhile things,” pure and peaceable, gentle and willing to yield, full of mercy and bearing fruits without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy is what James is calling us all to do. You don’t have to be born poor, and you don’t have to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth. It’s not about how much information you have or how much knowledge you acquire. It’s about being a part of a community of wisdom that cultivates discernment and values and principles that inform the decisions we make and the lives we lead as we make our own effort to draw near to God who draws near to us.
Information society? You bet. Knowledge economy? You better believe it. Wisdom community. May it be so. May it be so.
This material is Copyrighted © 2009 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
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