In his 2004 JJ Thiessen Lectures, John Swinton addresses the theme of disability and time. Dr. Swinton’s central thesis is that disability is all about time.[1] Essentially, Dr. Swinton uses the experience of ‘disability’ as an apophatic tool to expose the rebellious modern conception of time and it’s connected anthropology. Swinton makes a similar move to the one that various critics of technology, such as Illich, Marcuse and Heidegger make, whereby, once we grasp the horror of the situation, an alternative can be imagined or envisioned. Swinton contrasts the efficient, managed, reified ‘clock time’ of modernity with the slow, patient, surprising time of the kingdom of God. By focusing our attention on ‘time’, Swinton gets us to the heart of the experience of living in a technological society and the anthropological and political vision that accompanies this; his constructive alternative points us in exactly the right direction: only by entering into the fullness of God’s time can we live out a subversive and constructive alternative to the domination of technique.
Swinton locates our technological society’s primary engagement with time in the experience of anxiety. It could be persuasively argued that our society is founded in rebellion to Jesus’s call in the Sermon on the Mount to “not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.” (Mat. 6:25) Instead, our society works to manage all risks and ‘externalities’, to ensure that the future turns out as we would like. On this conception of things, ‘time’ is reified as a limited, static, economic resource to be managed, and used effectively. Having tried to control time, time instead controls us, and we are paralyzed by a constant anxiety to make the most of our time, to use it well, to be in schedule, to be on time, to make the meeting. Perhaps this is another example of Illich’s notion of paradoxical counterproductivity: The more we try to have time under our control, the less time we seem to have. Essential for this conception of time is the anthropology of the atomized, efficient, ‘economic man’ who uses time as a tool to pursue his own creatively chosen ends.
As Swinton point out, the ‘disabled’ are those who, by definition, cannot function within this conception of time. By the criterion of this technological anthropology, the disabled are a ‘drain of resources’, ‘a waste of time’, and ultimately ‘useless’ because they are not economically productive. Swinton produces quotes from Richard Dawkins and Mary Warnock to this effect. Further, the institutions that are nourished by this conception of time, simply do not have the time or resources for the disabled. As Brian Brock argues in Wondrously Wounded, the medicalized language of ‘normalcy’ effectively weeds out those are an ‘economic drain’ before their birth via selective abortions.[2] The loss of cultural and communal belonging within our technological society, and the fragmentary individualism that reigns, contributes significantly to this as well. The disabled are isolated within large and complex technocratic structures. Without others who can guide them through, or communities who can provide alternative care, the disabled often fall through the cracks.[3]
If all this represents what Swinton describes as a ‘fallen’ conception of time, what might it look like to live in redeemed time? This question drives us to the heart of what real resistance and a genuine alternative to our technological ways of being might look like. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his followers to seek first the kingdom of God, and then all these things (i.e., the things we shouldn’t worry about mentioned in 6:25 quoted above) will be added to you. (Mat. 6:33) The call not to worry about the future, and the call to faithfulness to the way of the kingdom, orients us towards a completely different way of relating with time. We are called into an abundant conception, in which ‘time’ is not a limited resource in our own hands, but a gift from God of which there is always enough for all. Swinton gives a beautiful anecdote about a disabled man who takes forty-five minutes to tie his shoelaces. For this man, this was not a ‘waste of time’, but simply “how long this task takes.” Our world would be a fundamentally different place if we had this orientation towards our encounters with others, our work, and our lives more generally. Albert Borgmann speaks of focal practices, that is activities that bring people together in a rich, profound, and grounding way. Focal practices, such as a shared meal, prayer, deep reading, communal events, deep conversations and so on, require us to engage life with a stance of “how long this task takes”. Deep, meaningful, genuine engagement only comes with taking time for others, and resisting rushed time management. After my father died in 2020, one thing that struck me about his legacy more than anything was how he always took the time. We often think that ‘changing the world’ is most effectively done by getting thousands of people in a room and then telling them all the right things to think over the course of a 60-minute lecture. But my father touched people’s lives—not by managing and using his time effectively—but by taking the time, being present, and building a genuine “heart to heart” connection. In this, he was following the patient speed of the 3-mile an hour God.
If our technological society is oriented by an anxious need to control the future, a key feature of this is the elimination of surprise, risk, or ‘externalities’. We don’t like surprises because surprises disrupt our schedule. What we want to eliminate from our minds all together are unpleasant surprises, like a sudden death, because these remind us that we are mortal, and that time is not ours to manage. There is perhaps nothing more subversive to technique and technological ‘time’ then recovering the remembrance of our own death. We live within a techno pseudo-eternity, in which we see our technological society as ‘fallen from heaven’ and progressing without cost forever and ever; We see our projects of consumption, self-creation, and job advancement as ultimate, eternal, and never ending. It’s not so much that we think we will never die, as that we don’t really think about it, and secretly assume that technology will eventually fix it. But what death, if rightly experienced throws open, is the eternity contained within each moment, the finitude and fragility of the person before you, and the futility of our selfish projects. The remembrance of death thrusts us into the world ‘underneath’ our shopping, working, planning, and worrying, and into the economy of God’s time where there is always enough, and each person and each moment is “a small gate through which the Messiah enters.”
But of course, as Swinton reminds us, real life is not always (perhaps never) romantic. Disability can be deeply tragic, painful, and agonizing for both the one with the disability and those who love and care for him/her. It is no wonder that we want to avoid the experience of death, because it brings us face to face with the tragedy and absurdity of existence. The alure of technique and technological time is that it gives us the sense that we are in control, that we can shape the future to our projects, and avoid unpleasant experiences. Thus, we live in a world where down syndrome babies are weeded out before birth, the elderly are put out of sight and out of mind, our bodies are plastic to be molded, and we fantasize about transcending the human condition altogether. In such a world, resistance takes the strange shape of suffering. In such a world, we are called to suffer our reality and to suffer the reality of those we love. Rather than living in fantastical futures of our own devising, we are called into the present to be attentive to the suffering of those who are near us. This is not only a resistance to the reign of technique—whichhas no time or patience for suffering and seeks only a technological ‘fix’ or panacea; but it also orients us to a constructive alternative grounded in the work of God. Faithful, patient, loving, attentive care to the people and places around us, is constructive work of an alternative future grounded in God’s time, rather than in our rebellious ‘clock time’. As Wendel Berry reminds us, we cannot hope to do good in the future by doing badly in the present. Swinton points us home: “Christians are not called to change the world but called to be faithful to the time that has been given us. It is in the seemingly insignificant gestures of timeful love, that Jesus is made available to the world. Transforming the world is God’s job, being faithful to our tasks is our job.”[4]
[1] John Swinton, “Lecture 1: Time and Disability: Why disability is fundamentally an issue of time”, Canadian Mennonite University, filmed Oct. 14, 2004, Video of lecture, 1:30-140, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6owf5AEtlWI&list=PLetwI-M-5VVlspf7UWH9XYX8zwYgFysZD&index=22
[2] Brian Brock, Wondrously Wounded: Theology, Disability and the Body of Christ, (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2019), 122.
[3] Brock, Wondrously Wounded, 124-127.
[4] John Swinton, “Lecture 3: Becoming a Timeful People: Disability and the art of being with Jesus”, Canadian Mennonite University, filmed Oct. 15, 2004, Video of lecture, 46:00-46:28, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3xjPfqjZZw&list=PLetwI-M-5VVlspf7UWH9XYX8zwYgFysZD&index=24
Coffee with Kierkegaard 