In the final third of the 1989 movie Glory about the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, there’s a scene between the commanding officer, Col Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick) and Trip (Denzel Washington) one of the most hard bitten soldiers of the outfit. In one of the first scenes after establishment of the regiment, Trip had demonstrated himself to be a bully of sorts. He’s not a regulator so much as a rat catcher. In the regiment’s first action of the war Trip distinguishes himself by his courage and relentless attack of the enemy.
Shaw: Sergeant Rawlins has recommended that you receive a commendation.
Trip: Yes, sir?
Shaw: Yes, and I think you should bear the regimental colors.
Trip: Well--
Shaw: lt's considered quite an honor.
Trip is ambivalent for reasons that he shares in the ensuing dialogue, but later comes to recognize something about this honor.
For the ground-pounding forces, regimental colors are flags that represent the regiment and in some cases are bestowed by some dignitary at initial formation of the regiment. By the troops that bear the regiment’s name, these colors are treated with honor. Also known as “the colors,” they may be inscribed with the names of battles or other symbols representing former achievements.
Synonyms for colors are standards, flags, or guidons. Aside from the powerful symbolism, at a very basic level these objects of reverence represent a visual marker of where the regiment should physically align their location on the battlefield. In the cacophony and chaos on a battlefield due to smoke and dust, soldiers needed to be able to determine where their regiment was.
Even in times of peace, flags have been used to identify the proper location for a specific group of people in very large gatherings, whether Boy Scout Troops at a Jamboree or the tribes of Israel around the Tabernacle:
Outside of battle a standard, regimental or otherwise helped identify proper location, whether a Boy Scout Troop at a Jamboree or around the Tabernacle.
Numbers 2:1–3 (ESV)
2 The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, 2 “The people of Israel shall camp each by his own standard, with the banners of their fathers’ houses. They shall camp facing the tent of meeting on every side. 3 Those to camp on the east side toward the sunrise shall be of the standard of the camp of Judah by their companies, the chief of the people of Judah being Nahshon the son of Amminadab,
In that early use with respect to location i.e., be here, not there, there was an element of accuracy (not precision). How close are you to the accepted value, in this case to the location of the standard?
This the definition of standard expanded over time to include the following
That which is established by sovereign power as a rule or measure by which others are to be adjusted. Thus the Winchester bushel is the standard of measures in Great Britain, and is adopted in the United States as their standard So of weights and of long measure. (1828 Webster’s Dictionary)
A rule or measure by which other [devices, amounts, or quantities] are to be adjusted.
There was a stock phrase from my Surface Warfare Officer (SWO) days:
“in accordance with standards.”
The standard in question could be the verticality / alignment of one’s gig line or the range of weights associated with one’s height and sex, the power output of a radar, time to set Zebra (affording the ship the greatest degree of subdivision and watertight integrity) to prepare for battle. Outside the military, there is cleanliness of surgical utensils, proper framing of a doorway, the distance required for a first down in football, etc. For endeavors in which accuracy is of utmost importance, calibration is required.
What is calibration? It is a comparison between a device under test (or examination) and an established standard, such as UTC(NIST).
When the calibration with respect to UTC is finished, it should be possible to state the estimated time offset and/or frequency offset of the device under test with respect to the standard, as well as the measurement uncertainty.
In a manner of speaking soldiers on the battlefield would attempt to minimize their physical offset from the regimental standard. On warships which rely on various equipment for which parameters such as pressure, temperature, salinity, and current must be within specific ranges, the devices that monitor those values must be kept in calibration.
It was toward the tail end of my executive officer tour in KIDD, that it really dawned on me that as the soon-to-be commanding officer, I had better be sure that I had a comprehensive understanding of what it was that made that ship a good one up to that point. There is a saying “as goes the captain, so goes the ship.” The captain I would be relieving had big shoes to fill. I had known that 17 years before when I was only relieving him every six hours on the SUWC console in the Combat Information Center of CG-59 on our first Navy deployment. Like most organizations, the Navy talks about culture being the difference maker for organizational success. Two destroyers from the same builder and separated by one hull number might produce widely different results in performance all due to different cultures. What comprises culture though? And how could I orient myself correctly as the captain and therefore the ship?
As I meditated on that idea, I settled on the working definition that culture equals the sum total of a group's values, beliefs, history, language, traditions, rituals, etc. It was in my deep dive of ritual that I came across the following book and read it the first time. You Are What You Love by James K. A. Smith. It is a book on Christian discipleship, but even as an atheist at the time I saw connections between the idea of discipleship and training for success in commanding a ship, therefore it piqued my interest.
Ships have rituals or as Smith alternatively describes them, liturgies. We call them the ship’s routine, the plan of the day (POD), the plan of the week - a standardized order of events that reinforce values and the attainment of desired end states: a warship ready for tasking. I would not have those ship specific orders of service liturgies originally, but it was this deep dive that separately caused me to reconsider “religion.”
If you are what you love, and your ultimate loves are formed and aimed by your immersion in practices and cultural rituals, then such practices fundamentally shape who you are. At stake here is your very identity, your fundamental allegiances, your core convictions and passions that center both your self-understanding and your way of life. In other words, this contest of cultural practices is a competition for your heart—
A ship’s crew could tell itself that it values operational readiness, but if the Plan of the Week did not set aside enough time for complex maintenance and the spot checks of said maintenance, then the leadership would just be paying lip service to said value.
A young newly married Lieutenant could tell himself he loved and cherished his wife who just quit her career in musical theater based in NYC to become a “Navy wife” in San Diego having only known the young Lieutenant on shore duty, but if he did not set aside time to help her in the transition before throwing himself into his make-or-break-for-command-at-sea job, then he would just be paying lip service to said value.
That epiphany did not come until after I had given up command and read the book for a second time during my professional “get well” tour. Ironically, that period, that job set me on the path to get well personally, spiritually.
If I am what I love and my loves are aimed at a telos—oriented toward some version of the good life—then the crucial question I need to ask myself is: How does my love get aimed and directed?
Looking back at my career, I’d realized that my telos, my life goal, had been professional success and love of self. In the chapter “You Might Not Love What You Think,” Smith shares insight from a movie called Stalker. It is a dystopian work, the center of which is The Room. Two men are being led by Stalker to the Room…For in the Room, he tells them, they will achieve their heart’s desire. In the Room their dreams will come true. In the Room you get exactly what you want.” Professor and Writer hesitate because it dawns on them: What if I don’t know what I want?
Smith goes on to quote the author of a book on the movie states the truth of the matter very plainly:
What if the desires they are conscious of—the one’s they’ve “chosen,” as it were—are not their innermost longings, their deepest wish?
Smith elaborates. What if the desires they are conscious of—the one’s they’ve “chosen,” as it were—are not their innermost longings, their deepest wish? What if, in some sense, their deepest longings are humming under their consciousness unawares? What if, in effect, they are not who they think they are?. He goes on to quote Zona’s author again.
“Not many people can confront the truth about themselves. If they did they’d run a mile, would take an immediate and profound dislike to the person in whose skin they’d learned to sit quite tolerably all these years.”
As a Christ-follower now, for me the following Truth resonates with above insight all the more.
Jeremiah 17:9–10
9 The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
10 “I the Lord search the heart
and test the mind,
to give every man according to his ways,
according to the fruit of his deeds.”
Re-reading this chapter caused to me to embark on a Zone Inspection of my heart, exploring the deep bilge pockets of my desires cockles of my heart. Professionally I’d learned that I was not quite the leader I fancied myself to be, but now more importantly I had the opportunity to consider whether I was the man I had fancied myself to be. This question that I could not shake off made me an illustration from the preceding chapter:
In 1914, not long after the sinking of the Titanic, Congress convened a hearing to discern what happened in another nautical tragedy. In January of that year, in thick fog off the Virginia coast, the steamship Monroe was rammed by the merchant vessel Nantucket and eventually sank. Forty-one sailors lost their lives in the frigid winter waters of the Atlantic. While it was Osmyn Berry, captain of the Nantucket who was arraigned on charges, in the course of the trial Captain Edward Johnson was grilled on the stand for over five hours. During cross-examination it was learned, as the New York Times reported, that Captain Johnson “navigated the Monroe with a steering compass that deviated as much as two degrees from the standard magnetic compass. He said the instrument was sufficiently true to run the ship, and that it was the custom of masters in the coastwise trade to use such compasses. His steering compass had never been adjusted in the one year he was master of the Monroe.” The faulty compass that seemed adequate for navigation eventually proved otherwise. This realization partly explains a heartrending picture recorded by the Times: “Later the two Captains met, clasped hands, and sobbed on each other’s shoulders.” The sobs of these two burly seamen are a moving reminder of the tragic consequences of misorientation.
His steering compass had never been adjusted in the one year he was master.
Where Smith really got my attention was when he linked a quote by noted theologian, Martin Luther, “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your god” to a somewhat famous commencement speech by David Foster Wallace from Kenyon College in 2005 called “This is Water.”
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
We worship what we love. We become more like what we worship. If ultimately all the things we truly invest our time in are in service of ourselves, we worship ourselves, we become subject to recursive self-degradation, a concept in AI described thusly: AI models collapse when trained repetitively on its own generated data.
Smith again, “the reminder for us is this: if the heart is like a compass, an erotic homing device, then we need to (regularly) calibrate our hearts,” to a standard outside of ourselves. To avoid AI human recursive self-degradation we need to conform our hearts to a greater standard…The Standard.
2 Corinthians 10:18
18 For it is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commends.
It does not matter how we think of ourselves, it matters what our Creator thinks of us, his creation. Do we measure up to the purpose for which we were created? Are we oriented to the right telos? To glorify ourselves and enjoy ourselves for 75.8 to 77.4 years? Or
Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.
In that get well tour I began to ask myself, “to what standard in this struggle, this battlefield called life, had I been looking amid the confusion, the chaos, and even self-deception, to know where I should be, how should I be on this earth?”
From the summer of 2017 to the fall of 2018, I realized my steering compass heart had never been properly adjusted in the 42 I had been master. I had never allowed myself to put on the test bench of life for proper comparison to The Standard.
Romans 12:2
2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
In Exodus Chapter 17, verse 15 after the Israelites defeated the Amalekites, Moses built an altar and called the name of it, The Lord Is My Banner - Yahweh-Nissi.
The Lord is My Banner!
Standards—What happens with them.
Standards—What happens without them.
What is true on the scale of a ship’s company and culture can be widened out and projected to what happens to the “Ship of State”.
We The People have become rudderless because We have rejected standards that once were standard.
This one hits home, hard.