Daily Archives: June 10, 2008

Literature, Writing

Does Google Make Us Stupid?

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70  bar steady  29.81  0mph NNW  dew-point 52  Beltane, cloudy and warm

                  First Quarter of the Flower Moon

“When life gives you lemmings, jump over the cliff.”  A quote from an unusually cynical book I’m reading right now.

Am also reading an article from the Atlantic which asks the question, “Does Google Make Us Stupid?”  The author says that he and other his literary friends now find it difficult to read a whole book, to sustain a long and complex thought process, to do anything more than speed read blogs.  They attach this tendency to the Web and their constant web presence, searching, reading, researching, writing. 

It makes for an arresting article title.  I wanted to read it.  The argument doesn’t track for me, however.  Unless it’s my age (compared to theirs), their experience does not match mine.  I don’t find reading a book a challenge.  I do notice that I have a shorter attention span at times, something I correlate more to the span between commercials on TV programs;  but, when I need the focus for a subtle or complicated book, it is there.

When I write a novel, it comes in daily chunks, not one long, intricate thread.  It must get there, of course, but it happens in discrete, manageable bites.  Reading complex material is the same process for me.  I read it at a pace that makes it accessible to me.  

When I started college, I took the Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics Program.  I remember two things.  One, if you want to read fast, take an index card and follow it as you move it down the page, taking in lines whole, from the center, rather than left to right.  Two, no matter how fast you read, the material determines the pace you can read.  Where 1,000 words a minute might be possible for fiction, when reading philosophy 150 words a minute is fast.  This squares with my own experience and factors into the topic, too.     

News of the Strange

Hammer Head

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70  bar falls 29.81 0mph ESE dew-point 52  Beltane, sunny and warm

                  First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Check out the sophisticated medical  technology used in this strange story.

“George Chandler said he feels fine, even though a nailgun fired a 2.5 inch nail into the top of his head on Friday. Chandler and a friend were doing a project in a backyard when the nailgun hose became tangled, causing the tool to fire one nail.

Chandler said Monday he told his friend he didn’t know where the nail went, but he felt a sting on the top of his head.

They discovered that the nail was driven deep into Chandler’s head, so they called an ambulance and he was rushed to a hospital.

Chandler said a doctor used a common claw hammer to remove the nail.

He said he feels “very lucky, very, very lucky” to have escaped serious injury.”

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

Can We Count on an Escape to the Stars?

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63  bar rises 29.81  0mph ESE dew-point 51   Beltane, cloudy and cool

                 First Quarter of the Flower Moon

“Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.” from a New York Review of Books article by Freeman Dyson

Here’s a bit from his own webpage: Freeman Dyson is now retired, having been for most of his life a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Dyson is a smart guy and no follower of the crowd.  His article reviews books which count the cost of global warming.  His real point, though, seems to be that those who would silence the critics of global warming may find themselves on the wrong side of history, much like the Catholic Church and Gallileo, for example. 

Here’s another quote:  “In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.  It may–or may not–be that the present is such a time.” 

He seems to look toward a more nuanced stating of the case along the lines of this quote from Ernesto Zedillo, editor of  Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto.  “Climate change may not be the world’s most pressing problem (as I am convinced it is not), but it could still prove to be the most complex challenge the world has ever faced.”  Dyson has written elsewhere that he believe global poverty, starvation and epidemic treatable diseases like malaria, cholera and typhus are more important than global warming.  These are, he argues, clear and present realities.  We should not let climate change take attention away from them.

This is important stuff for me since I got word last night that I will serve on the Sierra Club’s political committee this year.   I believe in the Great Work Thomas Berry describes in his book by that name, namely, that our generation is the one that will have to change the human presence on the earth to a sustainable one.

Still, I take the point of some conservative critics who wonder if the emphasis on the health of mother earth detracts from our specie’s self interest, i.e., our own survival.  My belief is that the two have become, or, better, we now recognize that they always have been, intimately related.  Only in the most optimistic space opera science fiction sense can we imagine scenarios in which our species escapes earth to colonize the stars.  Short of that we have to dance with the planet we were given.  This one.

Somehow we must make progress to mitigate the affects of climate change and to slow it down.  We must make that progress, though, in a way sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the human inhabitants of earth, our fellow creatures.

Faith and Spirituality, Woolly Mammoths

Gotta Take That Wild Last Ride

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61  bar steep rise 29.76  4mph W dew-point 53  Beltane, sunny and cool

                First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Decided to cancel the Gettysburg leg of my trip.  Need to be at home.  Another time.  Gettysburg is not going anywhere.

A bit more about radical individualism.  Last night I proposed, as I wrote here yesterday, that civilization, especially through work and love, constrain the unfettered, natural–wild part of us.  There was good criticism of that position, i.e. part of the natural state of humanity is life in family, in relationship.  Another position asserted that deconstructing (I’m not sure about this use of the term, but it is what was used.) ourselves so that wildness could break out denies the process of integration of the mature person. (individuation, perhaps?)  Wildness, in this view, must somehow come together with all of psyche’s zoo or, better, pantheon (my terms) to define a full person.

It is true that the very nature of what it means to be human gains its definition in a social context.  In that sense, yes, to be human is to be in a family, a clan, a community.  It is also true that the integration model of maturity requires a delicate balancing and harmonizing of disparate impulses, desires and drives into a well-functioning individual. 

Even so.  A first reaction over against both of these arguments is this:  we all die alone.  This is the existentialist’s key and, to my eye, keen observation.  It can be pushed back through life itself.  We are all born alone, that is we are the only one to emerge from the womb as that distinct individual.  Even triplets are born into different bodies, at a slightly different time, and have unique life experiences.  In life we inhabit our body and no other.  We may, more or less, empathetically walk in another person’s shoes, but we can never get in there while their foot is in the shoe.  You are unique and, whether you wish it to be the case or not, can have it no other way.

Second, the Jungian model of individuation, which I embrace, calls us to live into our Self, to become, that is, whom we already are.  This may involve harmonization and balancing, but it may also include embracing aspects of our Self heretofore submerged or repressed.  The journey is not to maturity in this view, rather it is toward the clearest and most distinct realization of our uniqueness.

As a note I read moments ago by James Hillman said, the individuation process prepares us to die.  Last night I did not mention my final thought on wildness.  The last wild act of our life is death.  It is that moment most natural, most terrifying, most awesome, least understood and never tamed.  Death is, for each of us, our wildest moment.  Individuation ensures that we come to that last natural divide, that last wild place, as who we are, shorn of cultural convention and psychological repression.  That we come dressed only in the clothes which our psyche had for us to wear from the very beginning.  That we come to the most wild moment in our life, in other words, as the natural, wild Self into which we were born.

This journey, this ancient trail, is the ancient trail.  It is one we walk alone from birth until death.  It is this realization that makes me a radical individualist, proud and happy to live in community, yes, but as a person free and unfettered.