We Are Not Cyborgs!
Genesis 1:26—2:3
Lent 3 (series)
March 23, 2014
Lent 3 (series)
March 23, 2014
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
Have you ever tried to convince a
toddler to take a nap? Toddlers need a
lot of sleep and they need naps, but they don’t think so. I guess they don’t want to miss out on
whatever is going to be happening while they are asleep. Whatever their reasons they resist taking a
nap even when it’s obvious they need one.
They can be cranky and fussy. Their
eyes can be puffy. Their cheeks can be
bright red patches. They can even be swaying
on their feet. But do they think they
need a nap?
I confess I don’t
understand. Imagine if someone came up
to you, say, at two in the afternoon and said, “Gee, you look tired. Why don’t you lie down for an hour or
two? Don’t worry about your work: someone
else will do it, or it will wait, or it really doesn’t matter.” Would you stomp your feet? Would you say, “No! I’m not tired!”? Would you burst into tears? Would you respond, as a little girl of our
acquaintance did once, to the invitation to take a nap so that she would be
rested and happy, “I’m happy now!”?
I don’t think so. I sure
wouldn’t.
We are short of
sleep. It’s not a new problem. Something happened to time at about the same
time that the factory system was developed.
Before that, our lives were shaped by the rhythms of night and day, summer
and winter, the waxing and waning of the moon, the ebb and flow of the
tides. Our lives as human beings were
lived according to human rhythms of life.
Factories changed
that. Factories—and they were textile
mills at first—housed large numbers of looms, machines that ran by
themselves. The workers were needed to
change spools of thread and to tend to needed repairs. Humans had to adjust themselves to the
operation of machines. No production
meant no profits for the mill owners. One
the biggest challenges faced by early factory owners and managers was getting
workers to work with machine-like rhythm and without stopping for rest. Machines do not need rest. Idle machines meant no production.
The biggest hurdle
came when artificial light made it possible to operate factories around the
clock. Workers had to become even more
machine-like by denying their bodies’ demand for sleep during the night and
tend the machines instead.
Our system would
like to figure out how we could go without sleep altogether since, except for
mattresses and linens, when we are asleep we neither produce nor consume
anything. Any activity that involves
neither production nor consumption is, in our system, by definition, worthless,
valueless, useless. Over the last
century Americans’ average amount of sleep has fallen from ten hours a night to
six and a half. There is no reason to
believe that the pressure toward less and less sleep will stop. In fact, along with other military forces
around the world, the US military hopes to reduce the hours of sleep needed by
soldiers while leaving their abilities unimpaired so that soldiers may fight
without fatigue for forty, sixty or even ninety hours.[1]
What might be justified in the life-or-death of combat is finding its
way back into “ordinary” life. Drugs—amphetamines
or modanifil—are being used by college and even high school students to
increase concentration during studying or high-stakes test-taking.
Our beastly system
is finding ways to cure us of the so-called faults—like needing sleep—that come
along with being human. Our sleep
deprivation is not the gift of more useable time; it is the beast’s theft from
us of our birthright.[2]
It robs us the ability to become fully human. It turns us into cyborgs: a half-human and
half-machine state in which it is impossible to tell whether we are the organic
extension of our tools or they are the technological extensions of us, a state
in which we gain a world of super-powers at the cost of our true life.
Our enforced
sleeplessness is not new. Reducing human
beings made in the image of God to mere beasts or machines is an old
story. It is a feature of our treasury
of shared stories and memories that form our scriptures. In fact this story of oppressive over-work
and under-rest is a central theme in the single story that lies at the heart of
ancient Israel’s memory. This story is
so important that it provides the lens through which Israel sees itself, its
experiences, and its world.
It is a story of unending
work. Israel had become a cog in the
Egyptian imperial machine. Pharaoh had
set Israel to making mud bricks to build the warehouses needed to store the
wealth of his empire. As the account in
Exodus puts it, “The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the
Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick
and in every kind of field labor.”[3]
The Israelites were
miserable, but they had no recourse. Pharaoh
was their master and he served the gods of Egypt. The oppression of the Israelites was not an
accident. It was part of the imperial
system. There was no one they knew to
whom they could appeal, so their cry was not to God; it was an incoherent cry
to the universe at large. But it did not
go unheard.
Yahweh, the God of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob “heard their groaning…God looked upon the Israelites, and
God took notice of them.”[4]
So God set in motion the rescue of Israel that we call the Exodus. God recruited Moses to be a leader for the
Israelites and a spokesperson in God’s dealings with Pharaoh.
Moses and his
brother Aaron approached Pharaoh to demand that Pharaoh release the Israelites so
that they could observe a festival and make sacrifices to God. But this was something Pharaoh could not
permit. Pharaoh could recognize no claim
higher than the claims of the empire and its gods. Pharaoh responded by increasing Israel’s
burden, commanding the taskmasters,
“You
shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks, as before; let them go
and gather straw for themselves. But you
shall require of them the same quantity of bricks as they have made previously;
do not diminish it, for they are lazy; that is why they cry, ‘Let us go and
offer sacrifice to our God.’ Let heavier
work be laid on them; then they will labor at it and pay no attention to
deceptive words.”[5]
Productivity,
profit, and power are the values of empire.
Nothing must stand in the way of meeting brick quotas, certainly not the
humanity of the workers who are making them.
If workers have time to complain, they can move faster. This is life under the beast in its Egyptian
form.
So it is no wonder
that when God rescued Israel and provided a blueprint for how Israel would live
in its new-found freedom from over-work, regular, community-wide rest was a key
part of the plan. It was even built in
to the creation story. In the first
telling of the creation story, Yahweh creates the world in stupendous creative
acts, spread over six days. The last,
the pinnacle, of the creation is human-kind, human-kind created in the image of
God.
And then God does a
remarkable thing. God does nothing for a
whole day. And in that wonderful phrase that
is sprinkled through the stories of the saints: mirabile dictu,
“marvelous to tell,” the universe does not fall apart. It is such a good creation that it doesn’t
need God’s constant attention. It will
go on without any intervention. Even God
can take a day off.
And because God
takes a day off, so can we. If the
universe does not need God’s constant attention, then it certainly does not
need ours. We can stop producing, stop
consuming, and go off-line. We can
rest. We can sleep. There is room for all of that built into the
structure of the universe itself.
If we think we
cannot rest. If we think we cannot
sleep. If we think we cannot go
off-line. If we think we cannot stop
being busy, for long enough to rest and recover, for long enough to be
recharged and recreated, then we are lying to ourselves.
But we didn’t invent
the lie. We were lied to. We are being lied to.
Sometimes those lies
are pretty subtle, pretty sophisticated, pretty hard to detect. But sometimes the lies are so brazen and so
obvious I wonder how they think that can get away with it. The Quaker Oats Company has an advertisement
running. A woman is asleep in a
bus. A woman and a man are both nodding
off while sitting and waiting on hard chairs.
A six year old child falls asleep on his homework (Why does a six year
old child have homework? He should be
outside playing with his dog who is also falling asleep on the floor beside the
child’s chair! Or better yet, why
doesn’t he take a nap?). A female
voice-over declares, “Oh, there’s an energy crisis, all right: a human
one. And it’s time to fight it.” In the meantime round cartons of Quaker
Oatmeal are falling from the sky, like mannah, only with
parachutes.
Americans are
sleep-deprived and tired. The Quaker Oat
Company’s answer is to encourage us to “Quaker Up” by buying and eating its
products. This is how our system
responds to our lack of sleep; it urges us to buy and eat. This is the work of the beast.
This is not the life
we were meant for. Yes, we were meant
for a life of vigorous work for the common good. We were meant for a life of learning about
ourselves and each other and everything that the universe contains. But we were also meant to take time to be
with our families and friends, time to do something besides working, time to
celebrate the mere fact that we are alive, and, yes, time for sleep. A lot of sleep. Eight hours or more.
Of course it is one
thing to decide that we need more sleep.
And it is another thing entirely to get it. We have people all around us who expect us to
do this or that. We have expectations of
ourselves. We have a powerful and
invasive system that tells us that the more we do, the more we work, the more
we buy, the better people we become. There
is always more to do than we can do in the time we have to do it. We imagine that we can do more by sleeping
less. And we even have the Quaker Oatmeal
Company telling us that we can substitute food for sleep.
What we could use,
among other things, is a community that could help us to make a change, a group
that could help us make a decision and deal with the pressures that come with
making any important changes, pressures
that come from other people and from the
voices in our heads that try to guilt trip us.
This could be a Bubble Up ministry and the “group” could be as simple as
a Facebook page that the members could check in with periodically. If you’re interested in pursuing that, let me
know.
In the meantime, let’s
get some sleep, take a nap, eat lunch somewhere besides our desks, and take a
deep breath every once in a while. The
universe will survive. Even God took a
day off. And we are not God. We aren’t cyborgs, either. We are made in the image of God. We are human beings.
This
work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit
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[1]
William Saletan, “The War on Sleep. There's a Military Arms Race to Build
Soldiers Who Fight Without Fatigue,” Cited 22 March 2014, Online: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/superman/2013/05/sleep_deprivation_in_the_military_modafinil_and_the_arms_race_for_soldiers.html.
[2]
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London
& New York: Verso, 2013), 10.
[3]
Exodus 1:13-14a.
[4]
Exodus 2:24-25.
[5]
Exodus 5:7-9.
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