I just finished reading a reflection by Ken Myers' of Mars Hill Audio Journal on an essay in the latest edition of Atlantic ("Is Google Making us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr) on how technology and media effect and shape our mental lives. I have not yet had the chance to read the essay in question, but Ken's reflections on it are thought provoking in their own right.
"There's some science behind Carr's troubling sensation [that his own reading habits have changed for the worse under the influence of the Net]. Among other experts, he cites Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University, who "worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts 'efficiency' and 'immediacy' above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace." Note that the printing press didn't make such works (and the interior experience they enable) possible, just more widely available."
This prompted some reflection of my own on my reading habits and the internet. I'd been thinking about this on my own recently when I noticed that after an hour or so of web reading (usually of reasonably high quality writing, e.g. from the online versions of various periodicals as well as webzines like slate.com my weekly reading of Roger Ebert's reviews) I often am hard pressed to recapitulate or summarize what I've just read. It all becomes a mash of information that I've consumed in short order: the latest LA Times headline article blurring with the pithy observations of Ebert and a book review of Hans Kung's latest from the Christian Century all read within a half hour. It struck me that it would be potentially beneficial to slow down, read less, read deeper, and in particular to recap to myself what I've read, to put it into perspective. But such reading goes against the grain of the seductive possibilities of the Net--so much information, and so little time.
Myers quotes the Catholic writer Romano Guardini (from the book Prayer in Practice):
"To a large extent man lives without depth, without a center, in superficiality and chance. No longer finding the essential within himself, he grabs at all sorts of stimulants and sensations, he enjoys them briefly, tires of them, recalls his own emptiness and demands new distractions. He touches everything brought within easy reach of his mind by the constantly increasing means of transportation, information, education, and amusement, but he doesn't really absorb anything. He contents himself with having 'heard about it', he labels it with some current catchword, and shoves it aside for the next. He is a hollow man and tries to fill his emptiness with constant, reckless activity. He is happiest when in the thick of things, in the rush and noise and stimulus of quick results and successes. The moment quiet surrounds him, he is lost."
Jun 29, 2008
Jun 2, 2008
subjectivity and objectivity
the following is from an essay in the Westminster Theological Review by John Porier that attempts to respond to James K.A. Smith's book "Who's Afraid of Post-Modernism?"
"What Derrida fails to realize is that the real world is always rushing in upon our language, and that, just as it is impossible to have a purely objective thought, so also it is impossible to have a purely subjective thought. (As H. Richard Niebuhr noted fifty years ago, "The subjective can no more be meaningfully abstracted from the objective than vice "Our language can never shut out the real world. This allows for critical means to exist for improving our interpretations' relation to reality. The deconstructionist observation that all interpretation is dependent on other interpretations is just a minor facet of the more generally recognized truth that there is a perpetual gap between language and reality (or between knowledge and truth). The question before us is how we should conceptualize the imperfection of that perpetual gap. Derrida and other deconstructionists seem to overstate the problem, as if our access to the world might be symbolized by a hopelessly lost courier or a broken telephone line. The Apostle Paul sums up the dilemma with the comparatively hopeful metaphor of a lens—a darkling lens, but a real lens nonetheless (1 Cor 13:12). In contrast to the lens metaphor, deconstruction fails to recognize any work of transcendence in the phenomenon of reference."
My philosophical training was in the continental tradition that Poirier reacts to and which, despite the best attempts by James Smith and others to enlighten, he and many others seem to still misunderstand. However I find the quote from H. Richard Niebuhr to be quite prescient. This is precisely the point on which those thinkers descended from Heidegger and those descended from the Anglo realist school get so hung up on--the paradoxical relationship between reality and our perception of it. Each emphasizes one side of the paradox and damns the other for not recognizing it, while both recognizes the paradoxical nature of the subject at hand. This grossly understates the complexity of the discussion and the acumen of those on both sides, but I still believe a good deal of the rhetoric is based on miscommunication.
Behind Poirier's latter comments seems to lie a basic assumption that may be responsible for the clash of rhetoric between postmodernists and anti-postmodernists, viz. the assumption that there is only one complete and accurate account of the way the world is which our accounts may approach asymptotically. A contrasting perspective is captured in some comments I recently heard from Ken Myers over at Mars Hill Audio Journal commenting on the use of the word "worldview" by evangelicals. Ken noted that the word is often used as a short hand to (somewhat reductionistically) refer to a set of propositions or doctrines, as in "the Christian worldview is..." Myers noted that this attitude is shallow and reductionist, not taking into account the richness and complexity a worldview. By way of illustration Myers noted that he knows of two or three truly excellent interpreters of Schubert who do justice to the richness of Schubert but approach his music in idiosyncratic ways. A moderate post modernist like Myers or myself would want to insist, contra those like Poirier, that accounts of the way the world is may be idiosyncratic and yet true to the thing itself. However, acknowledging the plurality of valid, authentic, or respectful interpretations does not commit us to saying all interpretations are correct--our accounts can be idiosyncratic and wrong.
"What Derrida fails to realize is that the real world is always rushing in upon our language, and that, just as it is impossible to have a purely objective thought, so also it is impossible to have a purely subjective thought. (As H. Richard Niebuhr noted fifty years ago, "The subjective can no more be meaningfully abstracted from the objective than vice "Our language can never shut out the real world. This allows for critical means to exist for improving our interpretations' relation to reality. The deconstructionist observation that all interpretation is dependent on other interpretations is just a minor facet of the more generally recognized truth that there is a perpetual gap between language and reality (or between knowledge and truth). The question before us is how we should conceptualize the imperfection of that perpetual gap. Derrida and other deconstructionists seem to overstate the problem, as if our access to the world might be symbolized by a hopelessly lost courier or a broken telephone line. The Apostle Paul sums up the dilemma with the comparatively hopeful metaphor of a lens—a darkling lens, but a real lens nonetheless (1 Cor 13:12). In contrast to the lens metaphor, deconstruction fails to recognize any work of transcendence in the phenomenon of reference."
My philosophical training was in the continental tradition that Poirier reacts to and which, despite the best attempts by James Smith and others to enlighten, he and many others seem to still misunderstand. However I find the quote from H. Richard Niebuhr to be quite prescient. This is precisely the point on which those thinkers descended from Heidegger and those descended from the Anglo realist school get so hung up on--the paradoxical relationship between reality and our perception of it. Each emphasizes one side of the paradox and damns the other for not recognizing it, while both recognizes the paradoxical nature of the subject at hand. This grossly understates the complexity of the discussion and the acumen of those on both sides, but I still believe a good deal of the rhetoric is based on miscommunication.
Behind Poirier's latter comments seems to lie a basic assumption that may be responsible for the clash of rhetoric between postmodernists and anti-postmodernists, viz. the assumption that there is only one complete and accurate account of the way the world is which our accounts may approach asymptotically. A contrasting perspective is captured in some comments I recently heard from Ken Myers over at Mars Hill Audio Journal commenting on the use of the word "worldview" by evangelicals. Ken noted that the word is often used as a short hand to (somewhat reductionistically) refer to a set of propositions or doctrines, as in "the Christian worldview is..." Myers noted that this attitude is shallow and reductionist, not taking into account the richness and complexity a worldview. By way of illustration Myers noted that he knows of two or three truly excellent interpreters of Schubert who do justice to the richness of Schubert but approach his music in idiosyncratic ways. A moderate post modernist like Myers or myself would want to insist, contra those like Poirier, that accounts of the way the world is may be idiosyncratic and yet true to the thing itself. However, acknowledging the plurality of valid, authentic, or respectful interpretations does not commit us to saying all interpretations are correct--our accounts can be idiosyncratic and wrong.
May 13, 2008
Water-Striding
"All children are water-striders. We skate along the top skin of the pond each day, always threatening to break through, sink, vanish beyond recall, into ourselves."
--Ray Bradbury, "I Sing the Body Electric"
Having spent the last month and a half working with urban middle and high school students this turn of phrase caught me. Too often the children I encounter skim the surface only momentarily, allowing me to glimpse who they really are for brief moments. What lies below the surface for these youths is far darker than the adolescent angst of my own childhood. For these kids it is nothing too remarkable to ruin a shirt soaking up the blood of a friend beaten half to death after school, and yet, like any eighth grader, they still manage brief moments of skating.
--Ray Bradbury, "I Sing the Body Electric"
Having spent the last month and a half working with urban middle and high school students this turn of phrase caught me. Too often the children I encounter skim the surface only momentarily, allowing me to glimpse who they really are for brief moments. What lies below the surface for these youths is far darker than the adolescent angst of my own childhood. For these kids it is nothing too remarkable to ruin a shirt soaking up the blood of a friend beaten half to death after school, and yet, like any eighth grader, they still manage brief moments of skating.
May 1, 2008
poem: who the meek are not
the following came to my attention through my wife through a friend who sends daily poems throughout poetry month:
"Who the Meek Are Not"
by Mary Karr
Not the bristle-bearded Igors bent
under burlap sacks, not peasants knee-deep
in the rice paddy muck,
nor the serfs whose quarter-moon sickles
make the wheat fall in aves
they don't get to eat. My friend the Franciscan
nun says we misread
that word meek in the Bible verse that blesses them.
To understand the meek
(she says) picture a great stallion at full gallop
in a meadow, who -
at his master's voice - seizes up to a stunned
but instant halt.
So with the strain of holding that great power
in check, the muscles
along the arched neck keep eddying,
and only the velvet ears
prick forward, awaiting the next order.
"Who the Meek Are Not"
by Mary Karr
Not the bristle-bearded Igors bent
under burlap sacks, not peasants knee-deep
in the rice paddy muck,
nor the serfs whose quarter-moon sickles
make the wheat fall in aves
they don't get to eat. My friend the Franciscan
nun says we misread
that word meek in the Bible verse that blesses them.
To understand the meek
(she says) picture a great stallion at full gallop
in a meadow, who -
at his master's voice - seizes up to a stunned
but instant halt.
So with the strain of holding that great power
in check, the muscles
along the arched neck keep eddying,
and only the velvet ears
prick forward, awaiting the next order.
Apr 30, 2008
Another stab at this
So I'm going to try to get back into the swing of this thing and start posting again. I created this blog a couple of years ago as part of a class assignment and always intended to carry it further but never did. Now I'm chilling on the classes for a quarter and doing an internship so I hypothetically have more time to sit and muse for no apparent purpose. Also my interest was piqued a week or so ago reading a First Things article (by Alan Jacobs if I recall correctly) about using a blog as a "common place," in the medieval definition--in other words as a place to record the thoughts, ideas and words of others that one has read/heard/interacted with rather than simply as a soap box. There being enough soap boxes in the world and not really expecting any one to read this thing but myself and a few friends, I thought it would be worth trying.
So, first posting comes from an LA Times Op/Ed piece a month back by Michael Dyson reflecting on Jeremiah Wright and black theology. Mr. Wright seems quite intent on cultivating his radical and over-the-top image, and I by no means endorse his rhetoric, but Dyson uses this as a chance to look back at some of the harsher words of Martin Luther King Jr. and draws some interesting points. His final paragraph is particularly striking to me:
"Obama has seized on the early King to remind Americans about what we can achieve when we allow our imaginations to soar high as we dream big. Wright has taken after the later King, who uttered prophetic truths that are easily caricatured when snatched from their religious and racial context. What united King in his early and later periods is the incurable love that fueled his hopefulness and rage. As King's example proves, as we dream, we must remember the poor and vulnerable who live a nightmare. And as we strike out in prophetic anger against injustice, love must cushion even our hardest blows."
So, first posting comes from an LA Times Op/Ed piece a month back by Michael Dyson reflecting on Jeremiah Wright and black theology. Mr. Wright seems quite intent on cultivating his radical and over-the-top image, and I by no means endorse his rhetoric, but Dyson uses this as a chance to look back at some of the harsher words of Martin Luther King Jr. and draws some interesting points. His final paragraph is particularly striking to me:
"Obama has seized on the early King to remind Americans about what we can achieve when we allow our imaginations to soar high as we dream big. Wright has taken after the later King, who uttered prophetic truths that are easily caricatured when snatched from their religious and racial context. What united King in his early and later periods is the incurable love that fueled his hopefulness and rage. As King's example proves, as we dream, we must remember the poor and vulnerable who live a nightmare. And as we strike out in prophetic anger against injustice, love must cushion even our hardest blows."
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