There is something magnificently unequivocal about a hurricane. For a while early last week, Floyd stood on the cusp of mushrooming into one of the most powerful hurricanes on record. As people in the Bahamas and the Carolinas and even New Jersey discovered, the elemental forces of a hurricane are not to be trifled with. Even an average hurricane expends each day through wind and rain an amount of energy equal to eight thousand times the electric energy generated each day in the U.S. Put another way, the force of a typical hurricane is equivalent to the daily explosion of 500,000 atomic bombs of the 20-kiloton Nagasaki type.
Which is why I found the scene at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral last week so compelling. There in three huge hangers sat $8 billion worth of space shuttles and $36 billion worth of hardware that will be assembled over the next four years into an orbiting space station. These symbols of human ingenuity and technological achievement, immensely powerful in their own right, were no match for the elemental energy of Floyd, a storm created by the mere shining of the sun and the warming of the water and the air. If Floyd made a direct hit on the Cape Canaveral, our nation's entire space program could be wiped out. "We've tied down, covered and secured everything we can, and now we're just going to ride it out," said a NASA official. "We know we have a lot at risk here."
The fragility of the space shuttles in the face of Hurricane Floyd is an apt and sobering reminder of how fragile we and our finest creations are when compared to the forces of nature. But the juxtaposition of the hurricane and the shuttles also reminds us how much human life has changed, and how different are the gods we now serve. With the rare exception of a week like the one just past, we seldom pay homage to the divine powers of nature worshipped by our ancestors. We no longer revere the spirits in the heavens from whom come the sun that grows our food and the air that fills our lungs and the water that cleans and sustains us. These days, most of our reverence-our penchant for worshiping celebrities and sports heroes aside-goes toward people who use their knowledge to create things. We adore people who know enough to launch space shuttles and fight diseases and create IPOs and invent new software applications and discover innovative ways to probe the workings of the human mind. In that respect, the staggering achievement represented by the space shuttle has less to do with the process that actually built it than with the vast body of human knowledge that made it possible in the first place. What each shuttle vehicle is mostly made of is knowledge. That's what we tend to worship these days: not nature, but knowledge.
For that reason, you and I pay relatively little attention-again, with the notable exception of times like this past week-to the way forces of nature shape our lives. We are far more interested in the way our knowledge can transform our world and our lives. And the changes wrought by advances in human understanding can be quite dramatic. Thomas Stewart talks about the difference knowledge can make in his recent book titled Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations. His main point is that wealth today is not generated principally by factories, as it was in the Industrial Age. Nor, I would add, is it generated by how much land you own, as it was in the Agricultural Age, or by how many gods with whom you have curried favor, as was thought in some ancient time. Rather, says Stewart, wealth today is generated by intellectual capital-by how much we know.
He illustrates his point in part by talking about beer cans. Three decades ago, beer cans were invariably made of steel. Aluminum had been introduced to the public at an international exposition held in Paris in 1855, and aluminum companies were eager to replace steel with aluminum wherever they could. But the cost of refining aluminum-although it's the earth's most common metallic element-was outrageously expensive, because it required so much electricity. Even after the development of hydroelectricity reduced the cost of electric power, aluminum makers still couldn't compete with steel cans-unless they could devise a way to make a can using less metal than a steel can required.
What researchers found was that an aluminum can could be made of extremely thin metal, so thin that it's easily crushable. Have you ever wondered why soda and beer cans don't collapse when stacked in towers six feet high on the floor of a supermarket, or thrown around by delivery crews or bounced over potholed roads? It's not the strength of the metal; a young child can crush the can. What keeps the can rigid is the gas inside. The carbon dioxide bubbles in a beer or a soda in exert up to ninety pounds per square inch.
Stewart says "That first aluminum can represented a triumph of know-how over nature. Weighing just two-thirds of an ounce, about half what a steel can weighed, the aluminum container substituted knowledge-years of research-for raw material. Today, an empty beer can weighs less than half an ounce, about three fourths as much as the first aluminum can. The can contains less material and more science." Like the space shuttle, a beer can is not merely a product of our industry, it's an expression of our ingenuity. What we use to create our world is not just material found in the ground any more. Increasingly, what we use is the knowledge found inside our heads.
What this means is that now and in the future, our lives are limited less by what we can make than by what we can imagine. And this first decade of the Information Age has demonstrated in new ways how fertile the human imagination can be, how much knowledge our minds can create, how much information we can produce. So long as an occasional hurricane happens along as a cautionary reminder to us of where we stand in the scheme of things, the expansion of human knowledge is a wonderful thing.
Compared to the bygone ages built on agriculture and industry, the new world created by our intellect and imagination is infinitely more open and varied. Almost anything is now possible, it sometimes seems. Options and possibilities multiply almost exponentially. Its symbol could well be a computer screen-in many colors. In the old days, we made do with three primary colors and four secondary ones. Now we have computer screens like the one I used to write this sermon that can display 16.7 million different colors.
Why do I need 16.7 million different colors in order to write a sermon? I don't: therein lies a second caution for us in the Information Age. I don't need 16 million colors. I just need two: black for the characters, white for the background. I suppose I could use chartreuse characters on a yellow background, or aquamarine characters on a slate background. But I don't think the sermon would be any better. And it certainly would take longer to write, since I'd have to spend time and energy choosing two colors from among all those millions of colors. The experience would be only slightly worse than standing at the video store in front of a display of 10,000 videos when all I want is one good movie.
As possibilities multiply and options mushroom, the challenge that we face changes, and may become even more daunting. Sometimes it seems that we know how to make virtually everything-or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we know how to make everything virtually. But at the same time we may also be forgetting how to make anything real. And that's what matters in the long run: those simple things that are palpably real, like a late-summer storm, a friendly face when you're feeling lonely, a bowl of homemade soup, a hug when you're feeling sad, a sunrise, a melody played with care.
The musician Brian Eno became concerned about this problem when he was in a recording studio working on his latest album. For those of you not familiar with his work, Brian Eno's first success came in the early seventies when he and Bryan Ferry formed the band Roxy Music. Since then Eno has played on or produced more than two hundred albums, working on his own and with groups such as U2, The Neville Brothers, David Bowie, and The Talking Heads. But he has been even more influential as the originator of ambient music, which combines sound, sculpture and lighting effects in a particular place to create environmental soundscapes, such as Music for Airports. It's the concept behind the music and light experience found in the underground transitway between the concourses of the United Airlines terminal at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. More recently, Eno has begun to explore what he calls generative music, which uses computer software to compose music interactively, so that the computer actually does some of the composing.
But his fascination with computers was tempered recently when he spent three days working with what is possibly the most advanced recording console in the world. It has more than 10,000 controls on its surface and a computer inside, and the experience was, according to an article Eno wrote for Wired magazine, horribly unmusical. Instead of flipping a switch or turning a knob when they wanted to make a musical adjustment, Eno and his engineer were forced to stop their musical conversation while they executed a complex series of computerlike operations.
The trouble, in his opinion, begins when we equate more options with greater freedom. This mindset assumes that if you can make a control panel with 10,000 controls, then you should, unless you can make one with 10,000 controls and 16 million colors. But in Eno's experience, the musical instruments and tools that truly endure (because they are loved people who use them) are ones that have fewer options and sometimes obvious flaws. What we want as musicians and as people, he concludes, is not endless options but deep intimacy, an emotional rapport with someone or something we know well precisely because we know their limits and understand their flaws.
In other words, the quest for knowledge can sometimes take us in the wrong direction. Sometimes the more that we want is not more information or more options, but more real. The poet Daniel Halpern put it this way, when speaking of how we grow as human beings-as people who do not have perfect information or endless options, who sometimes fall short and sometimes go beyond the limit. Growth is "hunger in any form looking for satisfaction-something of substance to take home, something whole to keep."
In a world where were can imagine virtually everything and produce everything virtually, the hunger for something of substance to take home and something whole to keep keeps us restless, on a quest for what is real. Today, on the cusp of a new church year, that hunger brings us yet again to this congregation and to each other. I don't know exactly what you long for this morning, what need brought you here to the corner of 80th and Lexington. My guess is that each of us came for a different reason. Perhaps to discover ancient wisdom and timeless truths, or to be moved by the winds of the spirit and the sound of familiar voices. Maybe to be uplifted by the music or shopped short by the silence. For all our sakes, I hope we can together find what we are looking for: something of substance to take home, something whole to keep. That's why I'm here. I'm glad we are here together. Welcome back to church. Copyright AllSouls 1999