Ross hosts tech-entrepreneur-turned-polymath (and recent Christian convert) Jordan Hall for a conversation about the church, the commons, vocation, education, currency, community, & the future of civilization.

To watch the video, or to find more content like this, visit PatientKingdom.com.

Jordan Hall has a mind like few others. After a successful career as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur (retiring in his mid-thirties), he has since become a philosopher focusing on the relationship between technology and culture and the nature and future of civilization. Then, about a year and a half ago, he and his wife were baptized into the Christian faith (praise God). We met not long after that, through a mutual friend, and have kept in touch ever since. 

In our first public conversation, Jordan and I consider his notion of “The Commons,” the sacred, the future shape of community, vocation, education, and the role of church as an antidote to what he calls “The Metacrisis.”

Here’s a snapshot from our conversation:

The Commons is more fundamental than the state or the market. The Commons has been largely lost physically, psychologically, and spiritually. As it turns out, the Commons is the same as the sacred. This is a gap that’s very difficult for most people to get across. It took me about a year to work my way through that, but that’s the actual reality. Or, to put it another way, the space is actually the sacred. And over time, it became known as the Commons. And then eventually the commons sort of dried up. So imagine a lake slowly evaporating. And the restoration of that is necessary from the point of view of simple proper geometry. Many, many things live in that category that have been evaporated into the either the state or the market or some combination of the two. So we live in the false dichotomy of the state and the market. Some people think that the market should do x, y, or z. Let’s go with education. Others say the state should do x, y, or z. Let’s say, education. But in point of fact, education is something that should be living in the Commons or the category of the sacred.

A lot of interesting things come from that. The category of the sacred, as we know, is governed by relationship and relationality. One of the version of governance that is almost certainly proper to the category of the Commons comes from late Exodus where Moses establishes the hierarchy of Judges. But the point being that the judges are relational—they are embedded in and understand the local context. So notice that there’s an Executive, Legislative, and Judicial trinity as well. And the Judicial maps more closely with the Commons than either of the other two. So a Commons government is judge-led, to put it in a certain way. There’s a lot.

When you think about it in terms of the concept of the economy—and I’ve been calling this “the divine economy” with tongue in cheek—you would then think about what it would look like when everybody is oriented toward their vocation. So, instead of people’s work being governed by the market (which is to say, where they can make the most money) or their work being governed by the state (which is to say, where some bureaucrat tells them to go based upon perhaps that bureaucrats best intentions), their work is governed by what in fact their actual calling is. And everybody is collectively working to help them discern that, and then helping them to cultivate their capacity to discern and then to deliver on their vocation. And that would be the divine economy. And you could imagine what would happen if more and more of life was actually living in that space; and that that particular space—the Commons—was perceived as more fundamental. Meaning render unto God what is God’s and then render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s...but in that order.