Talking Tuesday: Sanctuary

 I finished Shoshana Zuboff's book The Age of Survelliance Capitalism a week ago, and while I stand by my initial thoughts about it, there were some interesting things she brought up in the final few chapters that I wish she had parsed further.  This is my main criticism of books like this: too much diagnosis, not enough prescription.  As I wrote previously, David Brooks' recent Atlantic article is a elegantly written piece that better articulates much of what Zuboff is arguing, using social science as the dive point.

That said, here are some additional thoughts I have about both Zuboff and Brooks.  Technology (used here to refer the Internet) is embedded in our lives, and short of some wide-scale catastrophe, screens will be part of our lives and our children's lives, and with it, the social media services that form the scaffolding for Internet use.  Social media encourages a kind of Narcissus-like fixation on the self that prevents users from both being able to self-differentiate from tribe, but also to see the other side of an issue.  By allowing ourselves to be lured into spending much of our lives online, we lose the ability to formulate things for ourselves as our attention spans and capacity for deep thought erode, our vocabulary narrows and with it the range of possible thought, and the small predetermined menu of options given us by the tech industry begins to feel like an inevitability, and indeed, the small parameters of our lives (Zuboff, 467). 

Ceding so much power to a handful of tech companies in the form of limitless data collection (the so-called shadow text of any online interaction) means we all live in glass houses with no exit.  Aside from being a guaranteed path to madness, it throws aside centuries of hard-won dignity, individual responsibilities and obligations, and the ability to make a life of one's own (Zuboff 185, 469).  Zuboff proposes that humans have the right to sanctuary, a place where private life can occur and flourish, where the spirit can fly and be at rest (Zuboff, 5, 477).  Such opacity is a basic human dignity, and should be protected against incursions by an increasingly aggressive capitalist mien. 

Matthew B. Crawford makes a similar argument when he writes about the attentional commons in The World Beyond Your Head: that the right to occupy public space free from noise and advertising is increasingly available only to those who can afford it.  Taking that point a step further in Why We Drive, he notes that the attentional commons has even colonized your car, so that now even your driving experience, formerly one of individual agency and freedom from the relentless demands of commercial life, is peppered with data mining and advertising opportunities, further degrading our attention and increasing distractability (Crawford, Why We Drive, 307-308).  "Do we want to make the basic animal freedom of moving your body through space contingent on the competence of large organizations?' (Crawford, Why We Drive, 298, emphasis in original).  Moreover, as Zuboff notes, "In this new product regime the simple product functions that we seek are now hopelessly enmeshed in a tangled mixture of software, services, and networks.  The very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product or service as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying" (237).  It's no longer enough to make a useful thing.  The thing must be "smart" and provide goods back to its maker in the form of data.  Consumers do not want or need "smart" things, but Big Tech's survival depends on convincing large swathes of the population that such things are better than their "dumb" alternatives.  Because: advertising and legibility produce huge profits for a handful of powerful people.

The public sphere is now given over to making humanity as legible as possible to both the tech companies and the governments that have climbed in bed with them, gobbling up data about our habits, preferences, private thoughts and letters, political leanings, religious faith, purchases, health history, and much more.  When was the last time you were in a public place that did not have a screen in it, or loud music playing?  Even if the music is inoffensive, it is still an intrusion into the private space of your mind, and the ability to think deeply without distraction or commercialization.  

There is a small restaurant in my neighborhood that is in a converted row house.  The dining area is in what was the living room portion of the house, and was formerly cozy and intimate, with small tables, a roaring fire, and dark wood.  The food was a bit pricey, but very good and fresh.  It felt like a quintessential English pub.  A few years ago, the owners decided to install three 60" television screens in the 200 square foot dining room, making it difficult to maintain eye contact with a dining companion and conversation of any sort impossible.  (I don't care how intentional you are about resisting screen distraction, when three 60" televisions are on and blaring in a 200 square foot room, you cannot ignore them).  The best one can do in this new and "improved" space is to hope that whatever is on the screen something inoffensive like a ball game and your food comes quickly so you can get the meal over with.  It does not inspire me to eat there.  Even outdoor spaces have been colonized for advertising and data collection, as cities install sidewalk chargers for mobile devices that also hoover up any data in the vicinity.

Zuboff points out many other troubling aspects of social media and Big Data, including the ability of Facebook or Google to quietly engineer elections or subvert democratic process, without people ever being aware of such machinations (298-303).  It turns out that democracy is an existential threat to the economic model of Big Tech.  The big firms of Silicon Valley are not regulated by or overseen by the government but have enormous power over how things actually work out legally and otherwise in society, all done beneath a shroud of secrecy.  Ironic really.  Silicon Valley puts everyone in a glass cage, but expects to be able to live in peace and quiet in an iron fortress with no more than a "trust me" assurance that no stones will be lobbed our way.  "The commodification of behavior under the conditions of surveillance capitalism pivots us toward a societal future in which an exclusive division of learning is protected by secrecy, indecipherability, and expertise....These markets do not depend upon you except first as a source of raw material from which surplus is derived, and then as a target for guaranteed outcomes" (Zuboff, 327). 

Living in a glass house is psychologically paralyzing.  Everyone has the right to have secrets and anonymity, or at least they should.  We need places of refuge, places of quiet sanctuary to keep ourselves together and grow strong and resilient.  "Those who would eviscerate sanctuary are keen to take the offensive, putting us off guard with the guilt-inducing question "What have you got to hide?"  But as we have seen, the crucial developmental challenges of the self-other balance cannot be negotiated adequately without the sanctity of 'disconnected' time and space for the ripening of inward awareness and the possibility of reflexivity: reflection on and by oneself.  The real psychological truth is this: If you've got nothing to hide, you are nothing" (Zuboff, 479, emphasis in the original).  

We need opacity for the sake of our souls, and true human flourishing is found in the protection of private spaces for the individual and family.  The health of our minds and bodies rests in qualities of "contemplation, autonomy, rejuvenation, confiding, freedom, creativity, recovery, catharsis, and concealment.  These are experiences without which we can neither flourish nor usefully contribute to our families, communities, and society" (Zuboff, 479).  Life involves a great deal of uncertainty and insecurity, and we stand to lose a good deal if we blindly hand over our privacy in pursuit of safety and security.  There is mystery in the unknown, deep intimate knowledge that can only be gained in an unrestrained milieu.

Unfortunately, as a societal measure, individual privacy entails a great deal of social trust, which is in great decay in the present time.  David Brooks notes the many ways we do not trust each other or our institutions, and how much that has changed in the last 50 years or so.  It is also true that the decay of trust is somewhat cyclical in societies, and share common features.  Brooks writes: "People feel disgusted by the state of society.  Trust in institutions plummets. Moral indignation is widespread.  Contempt for established power is intense.  A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene.  It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation.  Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system.  These are moments of agitation, excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion" (Brooks, The Atlantic, October 5, 2020, hereafter Brooks, Oct 2020).  While Brooks does not explicitly say so, I would also argue that these moments follow what Yuri Slezkine details as apocalyptic millenarianism, in which a disenfranchised minority group seizes control of power and culture to try to achieve a utopia, usually through violent means.

The current drive to utopia is in reaction to the individualism and liberation of the Baby Boomer generation, whose drive to pursue their own happiness placed much of society in a precarious and insecure position.  Boomers had the benefit of an older generation that provided foundation security, but that foundation is now long gone.  Families are rarely intact these days, and the economy is a disaster of unfettered raw capitalism, undigested through the laws of democracy.  Many younger people have been excluded from financial and personal security, and now seek it in any form possible, even if that means social credit systems, government and Big Data surveillance, and the general loss of privacy as a norm and right.  

Writes Brooks,

"Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety.  Thus the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice" (Brooks, Oct 2020).

Attachment theory says that several dichotomies or dyads exist within all of us, that either bind or alienate us from our circumstances.  Either we feel safe or at risk, lost or at home, broken or whole.  Capitalism is heavily invested in making our attachments insecure--feeling unsafe, lost, and broken--so that we will be more likely to buy the products and services that promise to alleviate those feelings, or at the least, surrender our data so that we can be aggressively marketed to about our attachments.

Social trust is part of the larger picture of attachment, and the collective experience of the past 40 years or so has betrayed trust again and again, as institutional leaders are shown to be morally or financially corrupt (or both), institutions seek to shore up corrupt leaders rather than root it out, and the economic system fails to serve a large percentage of people.  The reason why institutional health is important is that institutions are supposed provide the basis for personal formation as well as a place to belong.  Instead they become performative and sterile, unable to do any of the hard work of transformation.  "The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves" (Brooks, Oct 2020).  And that's at the macro level.  

On a personal level, our close social interactions are fraught with instability and moral liquidity. "The evidence suggests that trust is an imprint left by experience, not a distorted perception" (Brooks, Oct 2020).  The instability of the economy means shallow roots in physical communities, as people pull up stakes to go where the jobs are, rather than staying close to family and friends who provide the thick bonds of social trust.  While we don't need to be intimately attached to society at large, we do need to be securely attached to one another to flourish, and when we attach securely to one another, that thriving ripples out into larger society.  This bonds are frayed and worn, notes Brooks. "In the age of disappointment, our sense of safety went away.  Some of this is physical insecurity: school shootings, terrorist attacks, police brutality, and overprotective parenting at home that leaves young people incapable of handling real-world stress [or conversely, absentee parents who leave children to fend for themselves]" (Brooks, Oct 2020).  

In short, we live in a time of chaotic instability and distrust, where finding a secure place to belong and flourish is increasingly rare.  When we cannot trust those around us, we try to make ourselves invulnerable, impermeable to the hurts and disappointments that could be shared in trustworthy relationships.  We look for external ways to measure trustworthiness, and Big Tech is all too happy to oblige, for the price of your private self in the form of data mining.  True intimacy declines in the face of such external measurements (Zuboff, 206-207), and is replaced by entertainment and abstraction.  We seek security in rigidity, ideology, and tribe (Brooks, Oct 2020).  It follows that we are in the midst of a grave existential crisis.  The job of culture is to respond to common problems, but when the problems change, the common response must shift as well, which is almost always fraught.

"The cultural shifts we are witnessing offer more safety to the individual at the cost of clannishness within society.  People are embedded more in communities and groups, but in an age of distrust, groups look at each other warily, angrily, viciously.  The shift toward a more communal viewpoint is potentially a wonderful thing, but it leads to cold civil war unless there is a renaissance of trust.  There's no avoiding the core problem.  Unless we can find a way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function" (Brooks, Oct 2020).

So how do we rebuild trust and provide refuge for ourselves and others?  Mostly in the small invisible ways that will not show up on a news feed, or help us economically or socially climb a ladder of success.  It is in cultivating virtues of reliability and dependability in ourselves.  Providing a soft place to land for those we love.  In challenging ourselves to make promises--being open and vulnerable in a radical way-- and hold fast to those promises, we extend a fragile branch of trust to others around us.  If they are able to return it to us, then trust builds.  Trust breeds truth, and vice versa.  So the path to trust is a long one, and will not happen overnight.  

Vulnerability in relationships is hard, because we don't want to be hurt, particularly if we have been hurt badly in the past.  But I think we humans hunger for vulnerability.  I see it in the stories we tell ourselves--the books that are lodestones of culture.  We want to be in intimate relationships, but not all of us know how to achieve that sort of radical vulnerability.  It means handing the inner most parts of yourself over to someone else and trusting that they will hold them and not use them as a weapon against you.  It means having faith that the people you love and trust can hold not just the air-brushed public self, but the flawed inner self--your worst self on your worst day.  We can't begin to trust people with our worst selves if we are forced to live in glass houses with no exit.  

We need places of sanctuary--places free from prying eyes and listening ears and glowing screens.  It is not enough to pursue invisibility within the glass house.  We need fortresses of refuge, behind thick solid walls, curtained windows, and manned defenses.  Keep secrets--yours and others.  Get to know the landscape of your place in the world through real, lived experience.  The future is likely to be digital in many ways.  That does not mean we have to sacrifice our humanity on the altar of inevitability or cede our private lives to the glass-housed public square.  

Build a fortress, and guard it with your life, even if only in your mind.

Sources:

Brooks, David. "Collapsing Levels of Trust are Devastating America," The Atlantic, October 5, 2020.

Crawford, Matthew B. Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.  New York: Public Affairs, 2019.

Yarn Along: Life in progress

This post is a bit long, so I recommend some junky chocolate and a fizzy beverage--ha!

~knitting~

 I finished my movie theater scarf!  It turned out much better than I expected, and the second half of the knitting was very enjoyable to me.  The garter tab start was also new (I started this scarf before the linen one on the same pattern), and I like the finish it gives the top edge.  

  I decided to integrate several bands of different stitch patterns from a couple of other patterns, to make the bottom half more interesting.  I'm glad I did!  The scarf blocked out differently from what I expected, and I'm quite chuffed with the result.  

 It is lightweight and a nice size for my style preference.  (I did panic a few weeks ago, and started to pull it back because I thought it was coming out too big, but after I got it off the needles, I realized it was just fine, so then had to thread something like 400 stitches back on the needles and get myself back into the pattern I was on.  It...took a while). 

After that, I decided to start my Kate Davies scarf kit that I bought when it came out in the late spring.  I'm normally not one for lace work, or charts, but Kate has never let me down, and so far so good.  (Who am I??)  I swatched quite a few needles for gauge, and ended up picking one that produced denser fabric, but I think it will be more to my liking in the end.  I'm quite a tight knitter, and generally, I get gauge on the needle Kate suggests, but in this case, I had to go up to size 9 (from the suggested 6) in order to get gauge and I did not like the fabric. 

 The garter tab at the beginning looked terrible, so I dropped back down to 7 and that seems to be fine. (Although it did take me about five tries to get the thing set up correctly.  Word to the wise: there are way too many stitch markers recommended).  I realize my piece will be denser than the sample, but I'm okay with that.  I'd rather have a better yarn+ needle match, particularly when I'm working with a pattern that is challenging.  The yarn is so pretty!  The tweedy flecks are so nice, and the color (a bright strawberry red) is lovely.  I don't love how the yarn is spun a bit unevenly, and tends to break with high tension, but I'm trying to be gentle while knitting to avoid that.  

 ~reading~

I finished Why We Drive by Matthew B. Crawford and it was well worth the reading.  I wrote a bit about it here, but have more to say as soon as I organize my thoughts a bit better.  In the meantime, I loved this review of the book.   The main takeaways (at the moment) are that we are meant to live a fully embodied life, in the real world, encountering and solving problems that are not easily solvable, requiring us to dig in when the going gets tough, and to know what is under the hood of our lives.  Simply put, we should understand how to fix things, how to parse problems to find solutions instead of clicking a predetermined menu of options.  (And also, stop letting the tech people produce solutions to problems that they created, for which humans already have the skills to solve).

The State's efforts to produce legibility in the population generally do not benefit humanity, only the bureacucracy, and we should be very wary indeed of handing over our privacy and autonomy to a faceless, technocratic entity that doesn't care about us. (Crawford draws brilliantly on James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State, a fantastic book I read in grad school.  It has survived numerous book purges, it is just that good).  Rather, it is the human byways of life, usually roundabout, somewhat messy, and not in neat straight categorized lines, that we find humans working through the messiness of social interaction and getting along.  That said, I do think one of the main priorities of modern civil governance should be to maintain order and prevent anarchy, and that requires adherence to a legible set of rules and laws, and requires a certain level of corresponding virtue in the population to agree to live by those rules.

~sewing~

 Mostly, I'm altering things I made earlier this year to fit better or suit better, and fixing stuff from the rest of the family or making things for the house.  I'll do a dedicated post on my alterations soon, as I think I've cracked a mystery.  I've also been making underwear and am close to a long laundry cycle's worth.  I'll do a separate post on that as well.  

 I made a linen Rose skirt hack back in June that I was saving for September, and I made a point to wear it for the first time last week.  I had made it with my Mint Emerald in mind, but I think it will be a great transitional skirt for me.  My Spice Cake skirt just didn't fit my palette very well; I think this Nutmeg skirt will be a great strange neutral.  Besides, we all know how I feel about rust.  I took the Spice Cake skirt apart and will probably cut it down for Birdie sometime in the next year.

~watching~

Last month, I forgot to mention a great movie about the Cold War that I watched around the same time as Mr. Jones.  (If you haven't seen Mr. Jones, please do.  It's an important film).  

The other film I forgot to say is called Red Joan, and is the true story of a British spy who gave the Soviets the nuclear research to build their own bomb, and thus usher in the age of mutually assured destruction.  She wasn't caught until she was in her 80s.  In defense of Joan, she did it to prevent another Hiroshima-style disaster, as she felt that no one nation should have proprietary access to such a destructive weapon, and that sharing it with the USSR would level the playing field.  After all, they were Allies of the UK and US in WW2.  Judy Dench plays her as an old woman, but most of the story is set during the 1940s during the race for the bomb and is full of British character actors I enjoyed watching.

The latter half of August was hit-the-wall time for me emotionally, so I am rewatching Person of Interest, because I enjoyed it so much the first time, and it is easy to have on while sewing or knitting.  Michael Emerson is just brilliant in that show, and Jim Caviezel's character is such a treat--so complex.  I also find the issues of privacy and security raised by the show to be more pertinent than ever, and I'm struggling to know what to do with them.  Perhaps there is nothing to do but submit to the Borg of Silicon Valley, but vis-a-vie Crawford, I think there has to be a better way to exist with screens and technology.

~domestic~

I'm on a mission to lighten up the house, and to feel less oppressive to me.  Row houses can be dark since the windows are only on the front and back of the house, and we have a lot of dark woodwork.  I put some sheer valances on the living room windows, which helped that room feel much brighter, and then I decided to swap out hardware throughout the house.  The mission-style stuff I had picked 13 years ago annoyed me because it was noisy.  I went with cast iron (or "soft iron") handles and knobs where I could.  

It turns out that mission style hardware is pretty hard to swap, having non-standard size holes, and me not keen to drill new ones everywhere.  But I'm in the home stretch, finally.  I also did some things to brighten up the 2nd floor bathroom, and swapped out some fixtures that were starting to show their age.  My next project was to paint Piglet's bedroom, since it was one of two rooms that we skipped in 2016 when the rest of the house was repainted.  I went with the pale gray (Behr Silver Polish) that we used in most of the rest of the house and the room feels so bright and airy and fresh now.  I can't wait to put the pictures back on the wall, but it needs to cure for a month first.

 

The painting project was a bit more than I bargained for physically, however, as it was three days of physically intensive work in high heat and humidity, and then a fourth day of putting everything back together and cleaning up.  But it felt really good to move like that, and to get that project done.

I be hot.

Somehow I strained a tendon on the top of my foot, probably crouching for the cut-in at the bottom of the walls, so I spent the rest of the past weekend hobbling around, strapping my foot with k-tape, taking ibuprofen, and putting my foot up when I could.  It does feel better today, but I'm going to try and take a few days of quiet before tackling another big project (painting the bathroom cabinets...send help).  

Finally, we celebrated Dormition on August 28, and I actually remembered to take a photo or two--the bier is so pretty at the church, and I always forget.  (In fairness, I try to leave my phone at home, so I don't always have a camera handy).

 The church also has a plaschinitsa for the Theotokos (which is unusual).

 I made kuleyabaka again, this time making it a bit more "saucy" and it turned out quite well, if I do say so myself.  It was also a brilliant way to use up some fasting odds and ends.

 I picked a few herbs from the garden to bring on Dormition to be blessed.

Whew!  That was a lot for one post--congratulations for making it all the way to the end!

 Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along!

Talking Tuesday: Toward Telos

My kids went back to school today (hooray!).  In the rush of all the last minute back to school stuff that needed to happen yesterday, I had lots of ideas for the things I wanted to do when the house was empty again for a good period of time--the first time in six months.  There are shelves to clear out, rooms to paint, things that need repair and maintenance, and general chaos of lock down to be sorted and organized, to say nothing of getting back on a regular writing/art making schedule. 

Our walk to school was oddly quiet--we are still not fully open here and most schools are teaching remotely, at least to start the school year.  The hustle and bustle of the city is no more, its energy drained by the extended lock down.  And there are many places that have shuttered for good; it is hard to know what will replace them if the high-rise offices that largely drive the surrounding commercial corridor do not bring their workers back to the office.

I wrote last week about Matthew B. Crawford's latest book, Why We Drive.  I finished the book over the weekend, and there is still much more to write about it, but I have to sort my thoughts first.  I read back through some of the pieces I wrote about Crawford's earlier work, out of curiosity, and was struck by one theme that runs through all three books: that of human agency as necessary for human flourishing.  What that means is that in order for us to find meaning in our lives, we need to feel that we have some control over what happens to us and the decisions we make about our lives.  In practical matters, it is about working through the physical reality of our lives (i.e. fixing things).

Increasingly, Crawford notes, individual human agency is being leeched away in dribs and drabs, and that power locked into a black box of algorithmic technology, unaccountable to anyone except perhaps the gigantic tech corporations who make such boxes.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and giving it over to black boxes (and the faceless corporations who control them) is a sure path to human misery. 

There is a lot to unpack there, and I want to keep this brief today, so I'll just leave it there for now. 

Talking Tuesday: Crawford and Why We Drive

If you've been hanging around here for a while, you will know my long-standing admiration for Matthew B. Crawford's excellent work.  (I have a whole tag dedicated to my ramblings about it!)  So it should come as no surprise that his latest book, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road, is just as excellent as his previous work. 

The title may seem like a strange one, particularly if you are like me, and you don't especially love to drive or tinker with old cars.  Crawford owns a custom motorcycle shop and has spent a lot of non-academic time messing around with engines.  His book is about the joy of driving and tinkering (what he calls "folk engineering"), but it is also about the dangers of automation on human flourishing. 

It is this last bit where the book really has my interest.  I'm not a gearhead by any stretch of the imagination, and to be perfectly honest, a lot of the technical stuff he writes about engines sails right past my head.  (Although, it must be said, I am mechanically-minded, and do a lot of the heavy-duty fixing around the house, so I'm not completely without interest in the inner workings of an internal combustion engine). 

Crawford uses the real experience of driving (and pushing the limits of a car's capabilities through driving skill acquired through time and testing) to illuminate how handing over our brains to automated processes actually takes something away from us.  When we complete mechanical tasks, the ideal is a task that requires enough skill to engage the brain, but not so much that it drains the energy for sustained work. 

As our cars have been taken over by computers, flashing screens and alerts, our brains have less to do, which mean that most people have a difficult time resisting the dopamine glow of their smartphones while driving.  With the predictable consequences we've all experienced on the road.  Crawford notes that as long as many of us drive as if our cars were already self-driving, it makes sense to push self-driving cars (5).  On the other hand, if driving required more skill (skills that humans already had), then self-driving cars would be unnecessary. 

Our cultural creative energies would be better served in making skilled demands of people, rather than cultivating some consumer experience.  "Manufactured experiences are offered as a substitute for direct confrontation with the world, and this evidently has some appeal for us.  We are relieved of the burden of grappling with real things--that is--things that resist our will, and thereby reveal our limited understanding and skill.  Experiences that have been deisnged around us offer escape from the frustrations of dealing with other people and with material reality.  They allow us to remain cocooned in a fantasy of competence and empowerment that is safe from the kind of refutation that routinely happens when you...ride a skateboard, for example" (114).

Why does it matter?  Some people are enamored of the idea that big cities could be free of traffic jams and congestion; commutes could be productive work times instead of frustrating time lost behind the wheel.  But Crawford warns that such thinking is dangerous.  The time behind the wheel can be a great time of mental freedom--to let the mind wander and think.  It is in that sort of quiet thinking time that solutions present themselves, or we can rejuvenate our souls. I personally find I get a lot of good thinking done while driving. 

But it is more than for just the freedom to quiet the mind that Crawford advocates retaining skilled driving.  He is not anti-technology; he freely acknowledges the improvements in automotive technology that have made cars safer, but those changes largely occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, invisible to the average driver.  Whereas the automation changes occurring now actually impede safety to a degree by disengaging the driver's mind, and invite further incursion on the driver's autonomy in the name of safety. 

But embodied skill is important, and contributes heavily to human happiness and flourishing.  "The new skills that we add to our repertoire when we learn to use tools and prosthetics become indistinguishable from those of the natural human body, in terms of how they are treated by the brain that organizes our actions and perceptions.  The crucial fact that makes this integration possible is that there is a closed loop between action and perception: what you perceive is determined by what you do, just as it is when we make use of our own hands.  Or a 1963 Volkswagon" (111).

There is a growing body of research that finds physical effort gives psychological rewards that lead to greater human resilience. The basic tasks of securing our bodily needs, long a labor-intensive process involving the whole body, has largely been outsourced to automated processes.  Crawford speculates that the concomitant rise in rates of anxiety and depression may be a partly a result of this disengagement with the physical world, particularly the work of our hands (64).  As our work has gone online and turned to computing and knowledge skills, the loss of skilled embodied work has been a disaster, both economically and culturally.  We were not meant to live in the world of the Jetsons, however attractive the wiz-bang technology of that landscape seems.  Our brains crave agency over our environment and ourselves, and when denied it through effortless-driven rewards, turn to maladaptive practices instead.  The same body of research also finds that when we inhabit the natural world, with the resistance to our will and real-consequences problems to solve, we thrive on solving those problems with far less stress (64).

It is also true that our management of the road requires a certain level of social cohesion that our culture is rapidly losing.  Writes Crawford, "...our ability to share the road together smoothly and safely is based on our capacity for mutual prediction.  This is a form of intelligence that is socially realized, and depends on the existence of robust social norms that can anchor sound expectations of others' behavior.  Automation may become attractive, then, as a response to declining social cohesion: it is an attempt to replace trust and cooperation with machine-generated certainty....this is an approach that is likely to cause the further atrophy of our skills.  Among these are the skills of collective self-government, rooted in shared habits of cooperation.  A science of behavior management becomes necessary" (121). 

The basic point is that if you never learn to share your toys, to negotiate the complexities of social interaction in the real world, and let things get messy, as life is wont to do, you will have no idea how to react when there is no algorithm to guide you through a menu of predetermined options.  Crawford repeatedly cites the humans in the Pixar film Wall-E, who have so forgotten the basic embodied skills of humanity that they must be hauled around on automated flying saucers, talking only to screens instead of face-to-face.  He also notes the level of social control the humans allow themselves to be subject to, and cautions his readers against it, for this way lies madness. 

Which brings me to the next point, that of embodied life.  Humans were not meant to serve an algorithmic life, mediated by screens and whatever our Tech Overlords want us to think and see and do.  We were not meant for "cultivated consumer experiences" or the inscrutable wisps of whatever exists in the cloud. 

We were meant to fully inhabit our bodies and our world, in all the messiness that entails.  We were meant to stick our hands into actual dirt to grow things.  To care for actual animals to rear for food and clothing.  To raise our children, with all the bodily fluids that entails.  To stand on the shoulders of giants to move and progress.  "But tradition can itself be an engine of progress.  It organizes the transmission of knowledge.  It also provides an idiom for some shared endeavor, and a set of historical benchmarks, such that one can imagine oneself outdoing particular human beings who came before, and who worked within the same basic limitations.  Tradition thus provides a venue for rivalry in excellence, the kind that sometimes bring a whole community to new and unexpected places" (136).  There is a thingness in embodied space, physical habitation, and real things that simply cannot be replicated online without some loss of ontological self. 

There is a role for technology and the Internet in our world, but we must never lose sight of the fact that it is a tool, and we the wielders of it, rather than the other way around.  When automation becomes a way to deskill humans and rob them of the flourishing that comes with skilled, meaningful work, it has overstepped its purpose.  A tool can become an extension of our bodies through long use and acquired fluency, but it can also get in the way.  Does technology allow us to remain in touch with far-flung family members and to maintain relationships that would otherwise wither?  Yes, undoubtedly.  Does it also get in the way of in-person interaction by inserting itself loudly into intimate conversations?  Absolutely.  Does it allow us access to an unimaginable wealth of knowledge and information?  Of course. But it also provides platforms that debase our common humanity, and reduces the quality of our interactions by increasing the noise in our heads. 

I suppose the (long, rambling) point to all this can be boiled down to the following: Do stuff with your hands in the real world.  Learn to fix things that are broken, how to mend that which has ripped, develop new skills beyond a keyboard, and get your hands dirty while doing so.

There is much more to say about this book, and I hope to revisit it in a future post.

 

Talking Tuesday: The World Beyond Your Head

At last we come to a discussion of Matthew B. Crawford's excellent book, The World Beyond Your Head.  I've talked previously about the broad strokes of the book, so I'll just dive into the nitty gritty and hope for the best.  I keep poking away at this, and I think I just need to post it and move on--I'm reading so much these days that dovetails with Crawford, that I'm never going to be able to incorporate it all.

Let us begin then, with the shape of things.  The premodern Western world thought about time and space as intertwined three-dimensional space.  I wrote my master's thesis on these ideas, and you can find an abstract of them here.  Basically, the idea is that all time is contained within a sphere, and everything that was, that is, or that will be is contained within that sphere.  We do experience time in a more or less linear (but not progressive) fashion, with one event following another, from birth to death, but the linear experience is still encapsulated in the larger sphere.  God exists outside that sphere in what best be termed the Eternal NOW.  For God, all time is happening all at once.  He is Eternally Present for all of humanity's existence.

If we start from this premise, and proceed to the idea that man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever whilst pursuing theosis (or complete communion with God by purifying oneself of passions and coming back to a Christ-like mindset and habitation), then the world is an objective, knowable truth.  It is something to be discovered outside one's self, as part of the salvation journey.  In the premodern world, everyone was a pilgrim on a journey to a concrete destination.  We learn from those who walked the Way before us, gain solace from their struggles, joy in their triumphs as we work through our own within the larger community.

In the premodern mind, the world is corporeal; Christ was resurrected bodily, not just in spirit.  The Resurrection is an historical event, anchored in a particular place in time, but is also continuing its work in the world, as part of the Eternal NOW.  The worship of the premodern Church was physical, involving prostrations, crossing oneself, smelling the incense, seeing the icons (and in the westernmost part of Europe, the statuary), all while dealing with the weaknesses and passions of the physical body.  There was a whole-hearted belief in the spiritual dimension--in the world we cannot necessarily see with our eyes or feel with our senses, but inhabits our world, and has a direct effect on it.  God made the world and everything in it, and remains actively at work in His ongoing Creation.

(If this sounds a lot like Orthodox Christianity, it is!  The Orthodox Church was largely unaffected by Enlightenment thought).

The ideal of the premodern world is sanctity through intimate knowledge of God, obtained through fasting, prayer, and the sacraments of the Church.  Sanctity is something to actively pursue because heaven and hell are real places, and one's place in the afterlife is of utmost importance.  This life is built on the foundation of centuries of lived experience, custom, and corporate wisdom (what some call Tradition)

The art of the premodern world invites one in, to discover the truth of what is out there; it is what Charles Taylor calls "memesis" (A Secular Age).  Icons in particular are called windows to the soul, as they depict reality beyond themselves, and invite the worshipper to enter into them.

Writes Crawford: "We live in a world that has already been named by our predecessors, and was saturated with meaning before we arrived.  We find ourselves "thrown" into this world midstream, and for the most part take over from others the meanings that things already have." (The World Beyond Your Head [hereafter referred to as WBYH], pg 145)

The premodern world, with its objective truth, layered reality, involved Creator, and rich historical foundation, produced robust people who created some of the most stunning architecture, discovered and developed new technology (cf. Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel, by Joseph and Frances Gies) and created art that remains unsurpassed.  Status derived from acquiring the skills and knowledge of the elders instead of from one's own "gumptions and mental capabilities" (WBYH, 162). They were able to attend to the world around them with sensitivity and purpose that was unhampered "by radical personal responsibility and instead rested secure in a knowledge and trust in the processes/wisdom that had come before.  There was no need for perform for the world" (WBYH, 162).  They were untroubled by questions of individual sovereignty or existential crisis.  Meaning and truth were all around them, waiting to be discovered.

We can now contrast the pre-modern world with the modern world--shaped by the so-called "Enlightenment."  I would rather call it The Great Flattening.  The round, multi-layered cosmos inhabited by premodern man has been made flat and one-dimensional in our modern age.

Let us move on to Decartes.  "Decartes began his inquiries by putting aside all supposed knowledge received from "example or custom" in order to "reform my own thoughts and to build upon a foundation which is completely my own." (WBYH, 130).  Basically, this is the sort of tabula rasa mentality that is so pervasive in education and modern culture today.  Rather than discovering the cosmos outside oneself, and to find the objective truth of God working in Creation, we moderns think of ourselves as existing in the vacuum of our minds, born blank and pure, with no connection to what has gone before or will come after, no sense of the fallen condition of mankind.  The ideal then becomes the proverbial brain in a jar.  As such, the modern self has no interest in learning about or from the outside world.  Indeed, the outside world becomes a threat to one's own autonomy.  We've become obsessed with "authenticity" as Charles Taylor notes in A Secular Age.  "To live authentically, Norman Mailer would write a century later, one has to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self" (WBYH, 130).

The ideal life that is presented to us by a pre-packaged medium is the solitary person, standing on a vista somewhere, existing without ties or bonds to keep him in place.  Any threat against individual autonomy ("identity" would perhaps be an appropriate stand-in for autonomy) must be rooted out and destroyed.  Anything that takes our attention outside ourselves and joins it to the physical world must be regarded with suspicion (WBYH, 131).

In short, the thinkers of the Great Flattening have given us our intellectual inheritance and cultural mandate:

• "We are enjoined to be free from authority--both the kind that is nakedly coercive and the kind that operates through claims of knowledge.  If we are to get free of the latter, we cannot rely on the testimony of others.

• The positive idea that emerges, by subtraction, is that freedom amounts to radical self-responsibility.  This is both a political principle and an epistemic one.  

• We achieve this, ultimately by relocating the standards for truth from outside to inside ourselves.  Reality is no self-revealing; we can know it only by constructing representations of it.

• Attention is thus demoted.  Attention is the faculty through which we encounter the world directly.  If such an encounter isn't possible, then attention has no role to play." (WBYH, 116)

Consider how these principles inform our sense of things: man's chief end is no longer to glorify God and to pursue theosis, which is something that naturally must occur in the embodied world, that is, in God's creation.  Man's chief end in modern terms is to glorify himself and seek knowledge and understanding only within himself, a disembodied being, apart from the corporeal world.  Worship becomes less corporeal and more of a spectator event, "mediated by representations" (WBYH, 170)

Crawford gives a  number of examples of how our attention and ability to attend to things in the embodied world has fractured and been given over to abstractions.  Modern cars are built to be incomprehensible to all but a computer expert; machines provide manufactured experiences, somethings to the point that we perceive them as "better" than the real thing.  (Taking a photograph of a magnificent sunrise, and adding a filter to "enhance" the image is a good example of this).  Images themselves become a kind of mediated reality--we're all quite familiar with the phenomenon of the social media constructed self.  (The recent Pokemon GO mania is another good example of mediated or constructed reality).  Crawford points out that we've ceded a lot of power and agency to the corporations who manufacture these experiences for us, and that the subsequent feelings of alienation and loneliness that are the hallmarks of our modern age are natural results of this loss of agency.  "For such a self-choosing from a menu of options replaces the kind of adult agency that grapples with things in an unfiltered way" (WBYH, 117).  

The irony of all this radical atomization and mediated reality is that individuality is actually in decline.  We are unable to attend to things that are less engaging than the menu of options presented to us, and "[w]hen we inhabit a highly engineered environment, the natural world begins to seem bland and tasteless,  like broccoli compared to Cheetos.  Stimulation begets a need for more stimulation; without it, one feels antsy, unsettled, hungry almost" (WBYH, 17).

Crawford notes that it takes Herculean effort to resist the cultural pressure to conform, to become the late modern consumer self, presented through layers of filters, abstract from the real world.  Who wants to eat broccoli when piles of cake are sitting there, calling your name?  "What sort of outlier would you have to be, what sort of freak of self-control, to resist those well-engineered cultural marshmallows?" (WBYH, 17)

So where does that leave us?  We can't very well shove Pandora back into her box and return to a premodern world.  Our world is thoroughly disenchanted, as Jamie K. Smith notes in How (Not) to be Secular.  In order to reclaim our attention and agency, Crawford suggests submission to authority, two words that seem antithetical to the whole Western ideal of the fully autonomous individual (WBYH, 24).  If, in our modern Western mindset, autonomy (self-rule) is good, and heteronomy (rule outside the self) is bad, because is threatens the autonomous self (WBYH, 24), then we have to consider that autonomy might be antithetical to true human flourishing.  "To emphasize this (heteronomy) is to put oneself at odds with some pervasive cultural reflexes.  Any quick perusal of this self-help section of a bookstore teaches that the central character in our contemporary drama is a being who must choose what he is to be, and bring about his transformation through an effort of will.  It is a heroic project of open-ended, ultimately groundless self-making.  If the attentive self is in a relation of fit to a world it has apprehended, the autonomous self is in a relation of a creative mastery to a world it has projected" (WBYH).  This is very much in keeping with the idea of liquid modernity.  We are no longer pilgrims on The Way, but rather tourists, flitting about from one place to another, no particular destination in mind.

How do we reclaim our ability to attend to the embodied world, to submit to authority outside ourselves, to seek God in Creation as the chief end of our lives, and seek heaven as the destination of our embodied souls?

We must first resist the temptation to mechanize human behavior--to understand people in purely mechanical or technological terms.  Humans are not machines.  People are often unpredictable and react in ways that can't be reduced to an algorithm or steam engine metaphor.  The ways we talks about ourselves and our minds must be informed by this fact.  We need to stop deferring to machines and bowing down to the anonymous masters who made them.  Yes, machines make our lives easier and more convenient in many ways, but once a machine starts constructing reality for large numbers of people, it is a problem.

Let us train our minds to attend.  This means reading real books, putting aside screens for a specific period of time--the mind will resist such mental exercise, but it is ultimately good to retrain the mind to attend to longer-form reading and to be able to ruminate on it in a quiet environment.  We will need to prepare for discomfort during this process, as we retrain ourselves away from constant stimulation and entertainment toward quiet contemplation in order to attend to the state of our souls and our journey of theosis.  This will be hard, as we live in a highly processed post modern environment that goes to great lengths to prevent silence and stillness without mediated reality.

Let us celebrate art that explores the object truth in reality--art that looks to reveal that which might not be obvious by inviting the viewer in.  Let us gravitate toward art as memesis--what Taylor describes as reflecting what is already out there rather than fetishizing art as creation: originality with whatever subjective connection the mind projects.  

Let us inhabit our bodies, with their frailties and strengths, in order to learn to tame the passions of body and mind.  Let us not be disgusted by the work of the Creator in making us, and instead embrace physical reality, from birth to death.  It will be messy, unsanitary, and real.  Let us be present at the deathbed, and relearn the ways of preparing the body for death.  Let us stop running from and fearing death.

Let us leave our atomized selves behind and become familiar with our history, the physical landscape, and our place in it.  Let us work with our hands, learning within a longer tradition of making.  Let us be humble and acknowledge the wisdom of our elders.  Let us be prepared for the general messiness of real human interaction, and be willing to walk with people through trials and triumphs, despite whatever personal discomfort or inconvenience that may bring.  

While we may not inhabit an enchanted world, we can work to re-enchant ourselves, our communities by acknowledging the ongoing work of the Creator in the world, of training the spiritual eye of our hearts to see what the eye does not see, to be sensitive to the spiritual dimension.  

Let us journey on as pilgrims, together.

References:

Juliana Bibas, "The Orthodox Clock and the Map of the World." Road to Emmaus Journal, Vol XII, No. 1 (#44).

Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2015.

Rod Dreher, "Pilgrims Vs. Tourists", American Conservative Blog, September 8, 2016

Jamie K. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor.  Michigan: Eerdmans, 2014.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Talking Tuesday: Houellebecq and the Consumer Self

I read excerpts from Michel Houellebecq's novel Submission sometime last year; my husband read the whole novel sometime in late winter or early spring and enjoyed it immensely. I think it is an important novel for the ways that it pokes at our fragile culture and brittle consumer self. 

I find myself reflecting on the modern self as primarily consumer a lot lately, as I work through my thoughts on Matthew B. Crawford, Jaron Lanier, and Charles Taylor. I dislike the idea that I am merely consumer: that I am nothing more than the sum total of my desires. I've said several times before that one of my goals in life is to recapture a premodern mindset, to thoroughly re-enchant my way of viewing the world.  If I'm to do that, I must order my passions with God's help, and learn a measure of content with the world as it is rather than what I wish it would be, or how clever advertising has made me feel it should be.

Theodore Dalrymple (a pen name) writes of Houllebecq's created world:

"In Houellebecq’s world people buy without need, want without real desire, and distract themselves without enjoyment. Their personal relations reflect this: they are shallow and no one is prepared to sacrifice his or her freedom, which is conceived of as the ability to seek the next distraction without let or hindrance from obligation to others. They are committed to nothing, and in such a world even art or cultural activity is just distraction on a marginally higher plane – though it is a natural law in this kind of society that the planes grow ever closer, ever more compressed.

For Houellebecq, the institution that best captures the nature of modern existence is the supermarket, in which people wander between stacked shelves making choices without discrimination or any real consequences, to the sound of banal but inescapable music. This music is like the leprous distilment that Claudius pours into the ear of Hamlet père as he sleeps in his garden once of an afternoon. The shoppers in the supermarket are not asleep, of course, but they are sleepwalking, or behaving as quasi-automata. At any rate, they are certainly not alert (most of them don’t even have a list of what they need, or think they need), and the drivelling music makes sure that they do not awake from their semi-slumber.

The whole of modern life is an existential supermarket, in which everyone makes life choices as if the choices were between very similar products, between Bonne Maman jam, say, and the supermarket’s own brand (probably made by the same manufacturer), in the belief that if they make the wrong choice it can simply be righted tomorrow by another choice. Life is but a series of moments and people are elementary particles (the title of a book by Houellebecq)....If you watch crowds shopping in any consumer society you cannot help but think that they represent the sated in search of the superfluous."

~Theodore Dalrymple, "Houellebecq and Call." The New English Review Blog, August 2016

Dalrymple goes on to discuss a bit about the economics of modern consumer society, and how our language is so informed by the realities of the modern consumer self.  He ends by stating that he does not seek status in labels or horsepower, but I think even that sort of side-steps the point: most of us in the West do not worry about whether there will be clothes on our backs, or food in our cupboards.  We have the economic leisure to worry about esoteric things at worst, existential things at best.  

Another of my stated goals (particularly for this blog) is to think about what it means to live in this hyper-consumer society in a simple way.  How to separate wants from needs.  How to live in a simple manner that leaves plenty of room for the spiritual life to flourish.  My experience of simple living has been hugely influenced by staying in monasteries like St. Herman of Alaska in Platina, CA, and also of living overseas in Russia, and two Habitat builds in Central Asia.  The conditions for that life are hard to replicate here, however, living as we do in great abundance and even ennui with such abundance.  I was always shopping when I lived in Russia, in part because that is how you live there: daily groceries, checking markets on the way to work for various needful things like soap and eggs that sometimes can't be found other places, and keeping eyes open in the garment stalls for a sweater or a pair of warm boots that might fit and replace something that is full of holes.  The accessibility of consumer goods is spotty, so when your sweater wears out, you can't be sure of finding an easy replacement.  I learned to keep my eyes open, even when I was just going to see a friend.  That habit has followed me here, where it serves me poorly.  

I've lately caught myself shopping either online or in stores simply because they are there, and I'm always kind of looking.  Looking for what, I don't know.  My closet is more than adequate, I make most of what I wear anyway, and I don't especially need anything ready-to-wear right now.  I think the mindless perusal is the pursuit of something that will make me feel better--shopping as anesthesia.  The clothing industry in particular is good about selling the idea that new clothing=happiness, and that the right dress is all that stands between me and a good state of mind.  Intellectually, I know that idea is total bollocks, but it still whispers in my ear enticingly.  

Musings upon homecoming

Apologies for the radio silence these last weeks.  We took our annual Midwest pilgrimage to visit my parents and sisters in Missouri, and then tacked on a short visit to see old friends in Iowa as well.  The week prior to our trip I was rather short on babysitting time, so I was squeezed to get everything done before we left.  Our trip was mostly good, except for the longish road trip portions, which were not.  (Would you believe the only photos I took were on the very last day, in the hotel and at a playground in Iowa?  My mother said she would send me copies of whatever she took during the Missouri leg) I'm grateful we had the chance to catch up with our friends--the fellowship will see me through the hungry months of sickness ahead.

The day and half back have been a flurry of unpacking, grocery-getting, school supply-ordering, school uniform-logo-ing (is that a word?), doctor's appointments, mail retrieval, phone call returns, and general madness.  I find myself in a somewhat contemplative state of mind as we begin the slow shift away from summer and toward the school year.

I went on a kind of internet-fast while we were away.  My husband checked out an ipad from his work to take along so that he could continue work on his ongoing Supreme Court cases, and I checked my e-mail about once a day, just to make sure nothing came up that needed attention.  I almost thought not to, but there were a few things that needed responding to before we returned home.

After the enforced technology fast, I find myself in a bit of an internet binge, mostly because I'm at loose ends at the moment (no excuses, but there it is).  I've been doing laundry almost non-stop since we got home (none of it folded or put away yet!) and trying to drive away the urge to purge everything in the house.  Summer always means a lot of extra clutter--pool towels constantly on the drying rack, along with swim suits, craft projects started and abandoned (but heaven help me if I try to throw it away!), glitter and books constantly on the floor, and children's drawings badly taped all over the walls (part of some elaborate fire station play about a month ago).

Yesterday I went around and tore down all the red paper fire buzzers and random assorted papers that had been tacked up all over the place.  It felt great (and none of the kids has noticed).  What with being away for our parish's feast day, and then leaving the following Saturday, we have about three weeks' worth of recycling and trash that need to go out next Monday; I can't wait.  The basement is just overflowing.  It feels like a maze.  Thankfully, I did get a thrift shop pick up shortly before we left, so at least the donation piles aren't too much at the moment.

I find August to be a weird time of breath-holding, waiting for the next thing to happen.  Birdie is scheduled to have a procedure at the hospital in two weeks that will involve an overnight stay.  I'm hoping it will give us some better information to more effectively treat her symptoms, because it has been a bad summer for her, health-wise.  We usually get a break in the middle of the summer, but this year we didn't.  (To be fair, May was uneventful, so perhaps I should think of it as our break).  We had to travel with a nebulizer and oral steroids, just in case; we've never done that in the summer time.

I'm scheduled to see my throat doctor later this afternoon; I'm hopeful that he will have some ideas of where to go from here, because I'm fresh out.  My insides feel like raw meat, and swallowing has been going particularly badly.

I find myself somewhat mentally fatigued.  I keep trying to get back to Crawford, and the article, but every time I do, my brain just shuts down and says, No.  I read a book on the trip (I'll blog about it on the next Yarn Along) that was very affecting, and I think I'm still trying to process it.  I'm worried about what might happen in this country after the election, whatever the outcome, given the charged atmosphere.  We've had a lot of protests here over the last few years, and while they have so far been peaceful, it is unnerving to have choppers overhead for days at a time.

But on to more cheerful things.  How's about fall sewing, hmm?  I don't have that much planned, actually.  Three dresses, and perhaps a skirt, depending.

I bought this dark teal fabric at Joann's in a clearance bin on our trip.  I've looked at it online several times, but never bought it because I wasn't sure about the colorway.  After being able to pet it in person, and put it up to my skin, I think it will work fine as a fall dress.

This is destined to be the Liberty #2 dress, and is a cotton lawn from the same Robert Kaufman London Calling fabric line as my other lawn dresses.  It is the same print, but different colorway of the Liberty #3 dress.

Finally, an Alexander Henry cotton that I bought on sale from Joann.com sometime in the spring, intending it for fall.  It is a little different from my usual florals, but I think it will make a fine fall dress.

I did some mindless accessory knitting on our trip, but am looking ahead to more substantial knitting soon.

The ruby Balance O-Wool is finally wound into balls and ready for swatching.

I picked up my L'Enveloppe as soon as I returned home, and am happy to be working on it again--it is a quite soothing knit, despite the seed stitch.

As ever, I continue to consider getting older, and how that is affecting me sartorially and otherwise.  I do wish things would just settle into something, but it seems like a shifty foggy cloud, never quite getting clear.  I suppose a nearly decade of babies and toddlers and chronic illness will do that to a person.

Well, there's August to be getting on with.  And Mount Washmore to scale.

Tally-ho!

Talking Tuesday: History and Memory

A bit late today, but I wanted to share a great article about history and memory by Jonathan Sacks.  I think it works well with what I'm working on for the piece about Matthew B. Crawford's excellent book, The World Beyond Your Head.  In it, Crawford argues that from the so-called Enlightenment onward, we in the West moved from a pre-modern mindset that seeks objective truth outside oneself, in the world and beyond it, to find one's place in the larger history of the world and to submit one's will to the wisdom of those who've gone before, to a post-modern mindset that seeks nothing beyond the subjective reality of one's own mind and views any incursion of the outside world as a threat to one's self.  The self reduced to the sum total of its desires: the Platonic consumer.

I think this relates to Sacks' article because he argues first that we Westerners have been far to quick to discard our history and our memories, and that the distinction is important, as is the virtue that arises from knowing both.

In Standpoint, Sacks writes:

“I want tonight to look at one phenomenon that has shaped the West, leading it at first to greatness, but now to crisis. It can be summed up in one word: outsourcing. On the face of it, nothing could be more innocent or productive. It’s the basis of the modern economy. It’s Adam Smith’s division of labour and David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage that says, even if you are better than me at everything, still we both gain if you do what you’re best at and I do what I’m best at and we trade. The question is: are there limits? Are there things we can’t or shouldn’t outsource?

“The issue has arisen because of the new technologies and instantaneous global communication. So instead of outsourcing within an economy, we do it between economies. We’ve seen the outsourcing of production to low-wage countries. We’ve seen the outsourcing of services, so that you can be in one town in America, booking a hotel in another, unaware that your call is being taken in India. This seemed like a good idea at the time, as if the West was saying to the world: you do the producing and we’ll do the consuming. But is that sustainable in the long run?

“Then banks began to outsource risk, lending far beyond their capacities in the belief that either property prices would go on rising forever, or more significantly, if they crashed, it would be someone else’s problem, not mine.

“There is, though, one form of outsourcing that tends to be little noticed: the outsourcing of memory. Our computers and smartphones have developed larger and larger memories, from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes, while our memories, and those of our children have got smaller and smaller. In fact, why bother to remember anything these days if you can look it up in a microsecond on Google or Wikipedia?

“But here, I think, we made a mistake. We confused history and memory, which are not the same thing at all. History is an answer to the question, ‘What happened?’ Memory is an answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’ History is about facts, memory is about identity. History is his-story. It happened to someone else, not me. Memory is my story, the past that made me who I am, of whose legacy I am the guardian for the sake of generations yet to come. Without memory, there is no identity. And without identity, we are mere dust on the surface of infinity."

~Jonathan Sacks, "Rediscovering Our Moral Purpose", Standpoint Magazine online, July/August 2016 issue.

I read an excerpt of different article from Standpoint from the same issue that noted that our Western heritage is in danger of being forgotten as we engage in collective amnesia.  I think author Daniel Johnson overstates his case a tad, but he notes that 

"The diagnosis, surprisingly, is more complex than the cure. There are numerous viruses attacking the Western body politic, but only one medicine. To face the future unflinchingly, we must return to the past: listen to the patriarchs and prophets, the ancestral voices of our literature, break open the arsenal of our intellectual history, and mobilise the resources of righteous indignation against the dominions, principalities and powers of darkness that threaten to overwhelm us. The great books, from Homer to Shakespeare, from Plato to Pascal, from Dante to Bellow, must once again not only be assigned to every student, but learned where possible by heart. The music of the masters, from Gregorian chant to George Gershwin, from Sebastian Bach to James MacMillan, from Palestrina to Arvo Pärt, must not only float across the courts and quads of our colleges, but fill our airwaves and headsets."

~Daniel Johnson, "What Made the West Great Is What Will Save Us", Standpoint Magazine online, July/August 2016 issue.

I've noticed that the more I think about our post modern world, and how to reclaim a pre-modern mindset, particularly in trying to disengage the notion of myself as primarily a consumer, rather than a child of God, the less time I have for popular culture, particularly music.  I occasionally enjoy a tune or two, but I don't want it to be to the mainstay of my aural diet.  It feels like the aural equivalent of living on gummy bears.  I find myself craving substance in the music I listen to, and am drawn to the storytelling style of folk music, as it speaks of past events, of history and memory, bound up in melodies that stay with you, become part of you.  (There is also liturgical music, but I put that in a different category).  I also live with a lot more silence than I used to.  

I suppose having a sort of physical ascesis forced on me by circumstance has brought me to a place of somewhat more restraint in terms of what I want to live on in my soul.  I am drawn to books and programs and movies that explore the truth of the human condition out there, and particularly ones that acknowledge the extra dimensionality of the spiritual.  I know I keep banging on about episode seven of the BBC's War and Peace, but it really blew me away.  The book also has several other scenes of immense truth and spiritual beauty that I keep returning to in my mind.  In season two of Outlander, episode seven (what is it about seven??) was breathtakingly, heartbreakingly beautiful and spoke so much truth to me about loss in motherhood, about the challenges that face a marriage in the face of that loss, and what comes next.  The book is even more intensely beautiful.  

I continue to work through my thoughts on Crawford.  I wrote several more pages last week, and have a rough first draft, but after several days' thinking, it feels like a rubbish first draft, so I may scrap it and start again.  I can't really decide how to tackle what I want to say; I'll get there eventually.  I keep telling myself to be patient, let it marinate.  I keep talking with different friends about various aspects of the book and related reading I've been doing, and that helps me to refine my thoughts as well.

Talking Tuesday: Crawford and the Attentional Commons

I'm still working through my notes on Matthew B. Crawford's excellent book, The World Beyond Your Head, but how's about I leave you with a little appetizer to whet your whistle?

A great deal of the book is focused on how our attention is constantly being diverted by external forces, and how those externals have a negative impact on our well being as humans.  Crawford works through a lot of examples of how this plays out, sometimes to devastating consequences.

Writes Crawford:

"Yet, it does not occur to use to make a claim for our attentional resources on our own behalf.  Nor do we yet have a political economy corresponding to this resource, one that would take into account the peculiar violations of the modern cognitive environment.  Toward this end, I would like to offer the concept of an attentional commons.

There are some resources we hold in common, such as the air we breathe, and the water we drink.  We take them for granted, but their widespread availability makes everything else we do possible.  I think the absence of noise is a resource of just this sort.  More precisely, the valuable thing that we take for granted is the condition of not being addressed."

Crawford notes that the right to not be addressed is being constantly trampled upon by global corporations eager for eyeballs on advertisements; every blank space, every quiet moment is slowly being monetized.  That monetization has a tremendous affect on our ability to attend and self-regulate.  Crawford goes on to say:

"Self-regulation, like attention, is a resource of which we have a finite amount.  Further, the two resources are intimately related.  Thus, if someone is tasked with controlling her impulses for some extended period of time, her performance shortly thereafter on some task requiring attention is degraded.

Without the ability to direct our attention where we will, we become more receptive to those who would direct our attention where they will--to omnipresent purveyors or marshmallows [referring to the famous "marshmallow experiment" of the 1960s]"

~Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, pp 11, 16

Stay tuned--I'm hoping to strategize some ways to reclaim attentional commons, even if only in the home, or in small ways, plus I have a lot more I'd like to write about the book.