So What Am I to Know?

If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength being small;

if you hold back from rescuing those taken away to death, those who go staggering to slaughter;

if you say, “Look, we did not know this—”

Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it?

And will he not repay all according to their deeds?

—Proverbs 24:10-12

It’s my habit to stream music when I do chores, often going to my list of “liked” songs to make menial tasks a bit more enjoyable. Recently, while I was cleaning the dishes and tidying up the kitchen after dinner, a song came on that stirred a significant memory of my adolescent awakening.

The year would have been 1984 or thereabouts. When the final bell rang out at Edmonton Christian High, my friends and I would routinely hop on our bikes and take a 35-block ride into the heart of downtown Edmonton to visit the central public library abutting Sir Winston Churchill Square. Our target was the record section, where we could peruse thousands of LPs to discover all the new music, mostly punk and post-punk, that we were so eager to get our hands on.

I particularly remember pulling one record out of the stacks by the Australian band Midnight Oil, with the intriguing title 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Although this was the fourth studio album by the band (originally released in 1983 in North America), it was their first North American release, and they were still relatively unknown in Canada at the time. (This was before their 1987 album Diesel and Dust came out, with its global megahit “Beds Are Burning”.) Upon seeing the record in my hand, one of my mates told me with some enthusiasm, “That’s a great record. You should definitely take that one home.”

I did, and as the needle hit my parents’ record player for the first time (I had to make sure they weren’t home), I wasn’t quite prepared for what came next. From the opening song, “Outside World”, the album embarks on a relentless and devastating sonic assault on the sources of global suffering and violence that were then tearing wide swaths of destruction through the world (as they still do today). The highly accomplished musicianship and driving rhythms perfectly served the emotional intensity of the band’s message. The political analysis was savvy. The band brought receipts and were not afraid to point fingers at the culprits (one song even bearing the title “US Forces”).

By the time I got to the fourth track (“Read About It”), however, I learned that one of the culprits was me.

“Read About It” indicts the Western world’s wilful ignorance of the devastating havoc that centuries of Western colonial and capitalist ambitions have wrought upon the rest of the world, an ignorance of which I immediately recognized myself to be a product.

Adopting the guise of those who profess such innocent ignorance, the song repeats a haunting refrain:

Nothing ever happens

Nothing really matters

No one ever tells me so what am I to know

This is immediately followed by the chorus that had me feeling so indicted:

You wouldn’t read about it

Read about it

So simple. Like the wisdom saying in Proverbs, Midnight Oil were telling me that I couldn’t simply say “I didn’t know” about these injustices, or claim that such ignorance was in any way exculpating. With a modicum of empathy and curiosity, I could learn about these events. I could read about it.

But isn’t it too painful to learn of these things? What good does it do to expose oneself to the horrific news cycle day after day? What is the point if we remain powerless to do anything?

In the face of such a question, Proverbs 24:13-14 suggests that, to the contrary, such learning, if done in the right spirit, might in fact open a path of possibility and hope that we could not see while we persisted in our wilful ignorance:

My child, eat honey, for it is good,

and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste.

Know that wisdom is such to your soul;

if you find it, you will find a future,

and your hope will not be cut off.

The writer here promises us that wisdom is honey for our souls, both fortifying and sweet. Indeed, if we find it, we will discover the path to a future of hope. With wisdom, we can become empowered to, in however many small ways, join hands with others to repair the breach that we have opened in God’s good world.

But we need to learn what caused the breach if we have any hope of repairing it. We need to read about it. (A good place to start is with a great little new book, co-written by my former PhD student Dean Dettloff and Matt Bernico, entitled Enough Is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology.)

While what we learn when we open ourselves to the world’s suffering and injustice might indeed be painful (and I am definitely not recommending a steady diet of sympathy-numbing exposure to the relentless 24-hour news cycle), if we approach this task with wisdom, we might just keep our souls alive and our hearts soft and fleshy, vulnerably awake to the suffering of others while insisting and acting in the confidence that this suffering will not get the last word.

What is honey for our souls, then, might finally be what keeps our hearts from turning to stone. As Midnight Oil says in another song on the record, “Power and the Passion”: “Sometimes you’ve got to take the hardest line.” ◆