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May. 28, 2010

FACEBOOK: Please know it’s not you, it’s me!

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture, Psychology
[3] Comments 

I am not one for bold moves, or vocal statements against technology and how its dooming our society (leaving aside my choice to make the group “Facebook wall-posting is kind of like having a private conversation with megaphones“). I like to think of myself as the guy who is on the cutting edge of technology, the early adopter, a maven of sorts. After all, why should I trust some unknown CNET reviewer or a friend with different tastes when it comes to new technology (Answer: because I am poor).

One technology wave that I hopped on in abandonment was internet social networking: I have a blog, I have a website, I have Gmail account and I use gchat with regularity, I have a synced Google calendar, I have used Google wave, I work on shared Google docs, I ‘tweet,’ and I have a Facebook account with far too many ‘friends.’

But, having crossed to the other side of the early adoption wave, I say with some confidence that I might have crested the peak of benefits from this world and am now reaping its dark-side.

And so, Facebook… while I hate to say this after all we have gone through… I am sorry, but I think we need a break. And though it may be hard for you to believe me on this, its really not you, it’s me!

(Ok… extended footnote…. That may be harsh, but I don’t think I am being too outlandish here. I know no one really buys the whole, “it’s not you, its me” line… but let me try to clarify. I want to make it MORE THAN clear that my analysis of Facebook is not applicable to everyone and that my concerns come in large part out of my own personality and the situations I find myself within. In other words, if I wasn’t so damn quirky, if I was a bit less socially needy, if my yet-undiagnosed OCD was a tad less extreme, or if I didn’t have a job that puts me in charge of my own time with a significant amount of flexibility taking place in front of a computer, Facebook and I might still have a future).

But, it is what it is. So, here we go.

Facebook,

I want to start this out by saying I really love you for the way you help me connect with people. I have been able to better stay in touch those who otherwise would be off my grid. You help me stay connected with people I meet on the fly. Even friends from my past who I otherwise would have forgotten I can now FB chat, direct message or even gift with a witty wall post. You have made me seem like a better friend when I remember birthdays. For that I will be forever grateful. Facebook, I love you… in theory.

But, I can’t lie… I really struggle with you in practice. Too often, I find myself starving by trying to feed on other people’s digital crumb traces. Lives of friends, ex-friends, acquaintances, girlfriends, interests, ex-girlfriends, colleagues, and friends of friends are constantly updated in my newsfeed. Picture updates of these lives flood me with a sense that I ‘know’ them more than I do, and often leave me with a sense that I am missing out on something. It’s like watching The Bachelor… alone!  Too often, I feel like staying in touch this way is a worthy supplement to real communication…. I know you didn’t tell me to do this, but it is who I have become!

Facebook, I want you to know that I don’t think you are evil. You are a GREAT technology, and I know there is the right match out there for you (probably billions of great matches, you player you). You are an amazing technological advancement, and it’s possible to develop healthy or destructive relationships with you. You are like today’s nuclear energy—on one side, making possible the nuclear bomb (oops), while also being a potential way around problems of energy dependence, and the decreasing supply of easy-to-reach oil. Ok, that might be extreme, but you get the idea.

I know that many people have found the way to reap your benefits, all the while avoiding the problems of being too seamlessly integrated into our lives. Many people like how you are an awesome, fluidly updating address book (I am one of those), and don’t feel too pulled into your digital hurricane. I envy these people because they get to use you for what you can be in all your potential: a social technology that makes us a small step away from almost anyone else in the world.

But I also fear there are others just like me, people who have been shaped by this technology in ways that they might not see as ideal. I wonder if anyone else feels too dependent on being “in the know,” of needing the affirmation of wall posts or message responses, and not liking the way that it takes so little effort to stay in touch with friends. I wonder if there are others who feel like something might have been lost in the gain of accessibility.

I am sorry Facebook, but, I just need a break.

I guess I have learned that I am too easily and unintentionally shaped by my daily actions. I am not some floating mind that gets to decide who I am, what I value, what resonates with my sensibilities, and then act accordingly. I am embodied as a creature, and my day-to-day practices shape who I am and what I want to be. I might be in part a mind who thinks and chooses how to act apart from external stimuli, but even that is shaped by my thinking’s deep embedding in a physical, neurological system, connected by synapses to a body that moves, eats, sees, touches, feels and is seen. My actions matter in that I cannot stay unchanged and stay on the straight and narrow. And that has implications, whether those actions be on the internet, in the sports I play, how I approach eating and playing, or how I physically interact with friends, lovers, enemies and strangers.

Facebook, I need you to know that you have done everything right. I saw your note the other day, about the changes that you made to privacy for me. That was really sweet of you… but know it was never about that for me. Its not that I need my information to be secret, it’s just that I just need a little space from everyone else’s day-to-day. But … please please please don’t change anything about yourself… you are wonderful and I need you to know that.

I guess I have just realized that there is a future Peter out there that I really want to grow into — a thoughtful, social, engaged person who lives with just enough simplicity. And this is in tension with the ways I am being shaped and molded by my hanging out with you in the day-to-day. Facebook, you have become a daily ritual of a quasi-religious form, and I think I am becoming a bit too fundamentalist for my own good. I want to be less in need of affirmation, more genuine in social interactions, and a bit less voyeuristic… and I’m going to need your support in giving me some space. I really hope you understand.

And so with that, I say goodbye, for now. Maybe I’ll see you when I am a bit more able to resist your charm.

Always your friend, just not currently in a Facebook variety,

Peter

 

Feb. 8, 2010

Is ‘beauty’ a proper way to orient the ethical life?

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture, Education, Psychology
[5] Comments 

James Cameron’s Avatar has garnered a lot of attention of late, most recently with its impressive 9 academy award nominations.

Outside of these accolades, one of the more intriguing phenomenon associated with the film has been the relatively large number of individuals experiencing depression and/or suicidal thoughts following the film. In general, some people seem to be captured by the beauty of this world that ‘earth’ as we know it feels drab, and something only worthy of escape.

One viewer, Ivar Hill, wrote of this experience on a Avatar message board saying:

“When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed … gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning. It just seems so … meaningless. I still don’t really see any reason to keep … doing things at all. I live in a dying world.”

We are all drawn towards the beautiful in some fashion or another. No doubt, we all pursue this beauty… whether that be in romantic relationships, in the work or life we find appealing, or even in a draw towards music that resonates with our sense of what is true. But can beauty be a way to orient the ethical life? Can one seek after beauty and call this ethical?

In other words, is the ethical life best pursued by a legalist or an artist?

Part of me hopes that the answer to my question is the artist. I tend to think that the person who does something because they think it is a beautiful way to act conveys a more appealing picture of ethics than the tactician following a set of laws. But is this just a personal pipe-dream?

To be honest, I don’t know the answer to this question, but I want to try to flesh something out in the next post. Three question that might start the discussion… chime in as you feel appropriate.

  1. Does our experience of beauty make our experience of the ugly depressing and leave us with a posture of an escapist (e.g. Avatar), or might it spur us on to create beauty when it is lacking?
  2. How are our senses of what is beautiful conditioned by things which might make this intuition unethical or untrustworthy (e.g. Nazi’s perceiving the beauty of a pure Arian race, and thus the ethical act becoming genocide)?
  3. In what ways is the subjectivity of beauty a benefit and a drawback from the rigidness or objectivity of a ‘law’ based morality?
 

Jan. 20, 2010

on aging

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture, Education, Psychology
[4] Comments 

There are several interesting things that happen as people move from the college years to their professional 20s.

Let me start with the premise that college is the Mecca of idealism, and in many ways, idealism of a somewhat selfish variety. People dream big in learning environments that reward asking big questions with little in the way of personal set-backs. By saying selfish, I am not trying to say that people don’t have genuine dreams of wanting good things to happen (e.g. “I want international public health projects to flourish”), rather, I am arguing that such goals are often rooted in the self-reference (e.g. “I want a job at Partners in Health”). These pursuits give us meaning, and we’d like to think in our heart of hearts that their success is dependent on our involvement.

For example, while this might be a cynical way of looking at the following statistic, I have a hard time explaining the record enrollment in Teach for America from the 2009 graduating class (16+% of Yale’s 2009 graduating seniors for example) solely as a function of a massive increase in the number of people deeply concerned with education. Rather, I start by assuming people are interested in living a PERSONALLY meaningful life, and TFA has grown in exposure as a route that meets those criterion. This idealism is optimistic in college in that such needs can be partly fulfilled when one envisions one’s future life in these roles, apart from any actual involvement.

Fast forward a few years. Recent graduates are now neck-deep in their first or second job, and along with this often come some feeling of misalignment between reality with the past’s idealistic expectations. Not everyone will be the rock-star investment banker that they thought they would be… nor will everyone get to marry the cutest girl in their high school because that girl gets to choose only one spouse (usually)… and not everyone will have the salary or leadership opportunities they envisioned. Others feel a similar misalignment between their idealist goals (e.g. educational reform) and the resulting desired outcome. To use the previous example, TFA teachers, many of whom are my close friends (and family), begin to see the way in which the systems undergirding problems like educational inequality are difficult to move, and thus their individual pursuit of meaning/ purpose a bit blocked. At the very least, their agency in accomplishing this goal seems minimal.

So what happens to this group psychologically/ existentially, and how is this same world experienced differently? Though depressing for me to admit, I believe these experiences tend to push people from hopeful idealism to negative cynicism. To ease the tension between goals and outcomes, we lower expectations so our small contributions don’t feel so meager, or sometimes stop pursuing a goal all together. I can’t help but wonder if these reactions– let’s call them naïve optimism and negative realism– are the only ways forward, or if there might be a third way.

Let’s first consider if these two options are really that different at their core. I would argue that, though very different in behavioral manifestations, these ways of viewing the world share quite a bit in common in terms of motivation. Specifically, at the center of each impulse is a radical centering on one’s self, a radical sense of the necessity of finding PERSONAL meaning, achieving PERSONAL enlightenment, living with a tangible personal purpose. In his fascinating book “Saving God: Religion after idolatry,” Princeton philosoher Mark Johnson argues this self-oriented worldview emerges primarly from the structure of our consciousness:

Constantly finding oneself at the center, one finds oneself to be privileged– as something to be protected, as something to be prized. Thanks for our extended self-consciousness and our capacity to articulate what we find, what we in the higher animals merely an organizing form of animal self-protectiveness now becomes something more. It becomes a more or less explicit deliberative theme, a default starting point in one’s practical reasoning: one’s own interests just seem paramount (2009: 86)

When the self is radically important, optimism reigns when these goals seem achievable (college), and pessimism takes the stage when obstacles emerge (the professional 20s). I can almost hear Ernst Becker screaming out from the grave… “Can’t you see what I have been saying all along… your life is often a work in self-promotion, a project emerging out of your deep down fear of death, the death of all meaning.” The ancient sages roll over in their tombs, “Why didn’t you listen” asks the writer of Ecclesiastes, “when I said vanity of vanity, ALL is vanity!”

But hold up, before all seems lost. Might there be another way? Might there be a way to live between the tension of idealism and realism? Do we have to close our eyes to reality in order to dream? Johnson continues later in the book:

There is an experience– some would say it is a metaphysical experience; some would say it is inchoately religious- of being, as Ludwig Wittgenstein once put it, absolutely safe. (Wittgenstein appears to have had experiences of this sort when, as a medical orderly in the trenches in WWI, he was in danger of being shot, gassed, or blown up. Marcus Aurelius, another man of the trenches, describes a similar experience in his Meditations). Part of the content of this experience, as opposed to the content of its subsequent interpretation, is that no matter what happens, everything that is fundamentally precious will remain intact (p. 110).

Is not this the way forward, between the false forced dichotomy of idealism and realism? Specifically, it is not by achieving everything we expect for ourselves that we break free of this tension, but rather we grow by a fading of the self from the forefront, where we can finally stumble upon this realization that ‘everything precious’ often includes things outside the self, and thus is worth pursuing apart from our potential personal gain.  Is it not only with this posture that the TFA teacher can sit back and passionately engage rigid structures of educational injustice, even though their role in that change might be small? Is not this the only way to have the mind of the realist, and the heart and soul of a romantic?

 

Jan. 12, 2010

unconditional love and incentives

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture, Miscellaneous, Uncategorized
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image from http://farm1.static.flickr.com/58/220279254_17c20cbec5.jpg

Consider the contrast of the following two quotes:

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” – e.e. cummings

* * *

“Call it what you will, incentives are what get people to work harder.” – nikita khrushchev

Two quotes, and two very different view on the role of incentives (rewards as conditional on who we are) and unfaltering support (rewards as unconditional on who we are or what we do) in shaping behavior. Let’s consider the difference with regards to one common and important human emotion and behavior… love.

The Khrushchev quote is what underlies much of our market economic system (pay for performance, etc), and also often underlies much of the way we interact with others. Speak all we want about the joy of unconditional love, we are highly conditional with how we interact with each other. We love our spouse… if they take out the trash. We trust our friends… to the extent that they prove trust worthy. We seek out the companionship… of those who seem interesting. We seek people conditionally. We stay with people conditionally.

E.E. Cumming’s quote displays a different logic. We cannot fully be ourselves until we feel something unconditional. Until we feel full support, the logic goes, we can never be true friends, real lovers, great parents. In this way, our behavior is not fundamentally moved by constraint (you do this because you fear what happens if you do not), rather it is enabled by the fact that we feel unconstrained, and more free to be ourselves. In other words, two lovers approach “curiosity, wonder, spontaneously delight, or any other experience which reveals the human spirit” not because they are afraid failing doing so will result in punishment, but rather because something relationally allows them to pursue the behavior. This is not to say that relationships don’t have incentives and punishment, but that there is also something deeper at work in such situations.

* * *

But how does this develop? Take a relationship. Two people go on a first date. They posture, they pose, they wear their best clothes. The other person likes them, in part, because of such moves. Charmers are more likely to get second dates, as well as those who are physically beautiful. In this way, liking and eventually loving grow out of a structure of conditionality. The relationship grows in trust as each person proves trustable. Love emerges in some pattern of exchange.

But life changes, doesn’t it? Fast forward 30 years and you now have two individuals, not 21 and fluttery with feeling, but 50+ with many things changed through the years. What sustains them now? There love is still in some way conditional (if you cheat on me, I will leave), but in other ways, it extends beyond conditionality. Consider North Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson and his decision to forgive and stay with his wife after her public extramarital affair.  His speech, viewable here, is not one of his love being a result of her good behavior (it obviously was not), but something at least approaching unconditional love (i love you because i love you, because you are worth loving despite your mistake). Or what about an even more common example– the fact that as everyone ages, they look different, and often less “attractive” by normal standards of youth-centric beauty. While some couples obviously split for this reason, many couples obviously stay together. Yet, had they met looking their worst, its very likely the relationship wouldn’t have developed.

Two questions:

  1. What is the process by which conditional liking changes to (more) unconditional love? Is there a clear tipping point? When does it tip back and why?
  2. In a relationship, what are the ways in which conditional liking (incentives) and unconditional love enable or constrain behavior, respectively? In other words, why is cummings right, and in what ways is khrushchev on the ball?
 

Jan. 9, 2010

entrepreneurial education as (guided/random) emergence

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture, Education
[4] Comments 

Animal Collective’s record “Marriweather Post Pavillion”  is arguably one of the top albums of 2009 (listen here). According to Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson:

With their constantly evolving sonic identity, in-your-face vocal mannerisms, and open-ended ideas about what their music might “mean,” Animal Collective seem designed to inspire obsessive fans and vociferous detractors in equal measure.Merriweather Post Pavilion, their latest full-length, has been anticipated to an almost ridiculous degree, with blogs and message boards lighting up with each scrap of new information or word of a possible leak. No one who’s been looking forward to it should be disappointed. Everything that’s defined the band to this point– all those strands winding through their hugely diverse catalog– is refined and amplified here.

So, what is it about them as individuals that makes their work so effective? What allows them to create music that has a sense of ‘strands winding through their hugely diverse catalogue’? Let’s briefly consider one aspect of their biography:

In parallel with his environmental policy and marine biology studies, Weitz hosted a noise show at WKCR, Columbia’s college radio station. On weekends, he and Portner borrowed Avantgarde music records and listened to them all night at Weitz’ dorm room which rapidly broadened their musical horizon

In other words, it seems that it was not primarily their formal music education that enabled their musical creativity. While they needed musical knowledge/ training to be able to integrate what they learned, it seems that the learning that really enabled their unique sound took place in a more fluid/ random environment. To put it another way, their formal education was necessary but not sufficient to the development of their unique music stylings.

If this is indeed the case, it seems to suggest that there is in fact something emergent about the way our learning takes place in our stories. But do our university systems allow for this type of natural emergence? Do the carefully crafted educational paths we prepare for our selves/ children/ students (going from prepatory school, to top university, to top graduate programs, etc) really  facilitate this type of development?

In the following article, Louis Menand suggests that there is something antiquated about our educational systems with their primary focus on knowledge transfer. It is an approach which I would argue crowds out the potential fluid nature of learning, while simultaneously failing to teach the creativity necessary to solve the more interesting social problems, and/or to make the most interesting music:

The American university is a product of the nineteenth century, and it has changed very little structurally since the time of the First World War. It has changed in many other ways–demographically, intellectually, financially, technologically and in terms of its missions, its stakeholders, and its scale–and these changes have affected the substance of teaching and research.

But the system is still a late nineteenth-century system, put into place for late nineteenth-century reasons. The extraordinary series of transformations of higher education after 1945 have strained it. To the extent that that system still determines the possibilities for producing and disseminating knowledge, trying to reform the contemporary university is like trying to get on the Internet with a typewriter, or like riding a horse to the mall.

If there is something emergent about the ways our minds learn, something non-linear about the development of authenticity in our own stylings (music or otherwise), might it be true that we don’t become true selves and unique in style through following a predefined path. Rather, might it not be possible that we could best develop authenticity in styling (music or otherwise) by following paths, in fits and starts, towards some gradually (but consistently) emerging personal mission.

So can this be built into educational systems, and specifically into classes that are to teach something about the creative/ entrepreneurial process? What if the best way to teach entrepreneruship is not the way we have tended to organize such courses (example here) but rather by providing a space to minimally guide the non-linear emergent learning situations, while also providing the theory and tools to harness such visions into successful businesses (or albums, or art pieces). It is the challenge of finding the right balance between chaos and structure.

 

Dec. 16, 2009

parentheses

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture | Tags: , |
[4] Comments 

“You’re an escape from real life… a parentheses.”

-Alex Goran, “Up in the Air”

I finally saw “Up in the Air” last night, a movie that I previously endorsed, pre-release, as a film that would resonate strongly with my generation. Having now seen the entire movie, I can only reiterate my previous sentiments. “Up in the Air” is a poignant story that succeeds in striking up questions of what gives us meaning, what encapsulates excitement, and how we ought to approach a life filled with ambiguity and risk.

At several few key points in the film, the main characters grapple with whether the specific things we pursue with life with commitment– relationships, job, rootedness in a place– constrain or enable personal meaning and happiness.

In one especially relevant scene, Ryan (George Clooney) and Alex (Vera Farminga) comfort the younger Natalie (Anna Kendrick) after she is hearbroken from a text-message dumping by a long-term boyfriend. Over drinks, and in response to the question of whether he was “the one,” Natalie begins to chronicle what it is that would make her feel as though her life was fulfilled– corner office, children, and a husband who likes the outdoors, works a great finance job, and drives an SUV. When asked what her criterion were in a man, the older Alex responds by saying she is looking for someone who wants to have children, who has a great smile, who listens and cares for her– someone who is not an ‘asshole,’ to use her exact words. Natalie retorts that this feels a bit sad, and too much like settling.

In this moment, we find one of the most personally uncomfortable points of both the movie, and I would argue, of our own lives. Like Natalie, we often think we will find meaning in life through some glorified version of ourselves in it… the living out of a Garrison Keiler’s Lake Wobbigonian world “where all the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the children are above average.” More to Natalie’s sentiment, a world where “I am strong, my spouse is good-looking, and my children are above-average.” It is THIS life that will give us meaning, and it it from such a place that we will finally find the holy grail of personal fulfillment. It is the hope of this potential world that keeps us pushing through the mundane, so long as we can convince ourselves that these are but stops along the way to greatness. Consider the following poem by David Slavitt (2006):

Each morning, as I confront my closet’s array,
I have to admit again that the life I lead
is hardly good enough: I have not been named
ambassador to Malta; I am not on the board

of any college or large corporation; I shall not
receive a major prize today and pose
for photographers. Those suits, the shirts, the ties
are ready, but I am not, and the shoes are shined

as they wait for different occasions than I imagined
on the tailor’s block, when I shopped for a dandified
future brighter than what I expect or deserve.
Even for weddings and funerals that require
a suit, I choose from the second best, reserving
that one for the dream into which I yet hope to awake.

On the other hand, Alex’s ‘settling’ story seems to suggest the potential of something a bit more modest, where life is not defined by the perfection of various dimension, but rather by finding some beauty in the ordinary (in wanting imperfect kids who are loved, a job one finds meaningful in some fashion or another, and in loving someone who likes to listen and finds us interesting).

<NOTE: Spoiler Alert>

But can we really take Alex’s articulated life philosophy at face value without wrestling with the fact that the story feels too tight, perhaps too idealized, and maybe more livable on paper than in reality. In one of the latter scenes of the film, we find out that Alex does have all those things– the ‘important job,’ a kind husband, the cute Chicago brownstown filled with laughing children– and yet, still pursues the escape of this life in her jet-setting relationship with Ryan. He was to her, a ‘parentheses’ in life, which provided a (route towards meaning and excitement) amidst the mundane of her husband, her kids and the life she lived at home.  As an audience, we are left with the uncomfortable realization that what Alex outlines as meaningful to Natalie did not seem to provide her with enough meaning in reality.

And so, are Alex and Natalie really that different when we get down to it? One (Natalie) yearns for something to give her life meaning– a crafted dream ripped from the page of Restoration Hardware. Another (Alex) has what might seem meaningful from the outside, and yet she yearns for some escape, some parentheses to interject (meaning) into the everyday.

In his magisterial text “A Secular Age,” Charles Taylor begins to articulate and explore what it is that these characters might be missing. Drawing from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Taylor articulates how the best poetry often captures the ‘inscape’ of a particulate thing– the deeper ‘oneness’ of an object or a life, the way in which it is located within some larger framework of meaning. As Taylor writes, such poetic approaches are needed because, ” our language has lost the power to Name things in their embedding in this deeper/ higher reality” (761). The film, in my eyes, is a profound articulation of our inability to ‘see’ the inscape of things, the inner beauty of the ugly, the preciousness of the mundane, and our failure to name such things as part of a ‘higher’ space/ framework of values.

While it is easy to love the beautiful— be that Natalie’s dreamed or Alex’s realized life of idealized job, model spouse, and perfectly individualized lifestyle– beauty alone is not inscape, as Hopkins outlines. In fact, identifying beauty alone as value might be a poor excuse for learning to find beauty in the everyday and thus engaging people and things in their broken reality. Ryan Bingham pursued shallow relationship because they were fun, because these people were beautiful. In his work, he could give an engaging motivational speech and still dash out the door before the motivation halts in the face of the inertia of the everyday. Alex Goran pursued Ryan Bingham because he provided an escape from what had become mundane about her family.  Ryan made her feel desired, and provided her with comfort on the road away from her family and self-declared ‘real life.’And Natalie Keener could only see her life as having meaning once she found the right job/ husband/ kid/ fill in the blank. But were any of these characters really able to ‘name things in their embedding in a deeper/higher space”? At the very best, these moments were fleeting, and peripheral dimensions of their character. Maybe that is why, while partly turned off by these characters, in the end we cannot turn away. Their struggles are fundamentally our struggles, and we are not so far from the sentiments that prevented them from capturing and/or creating fragile meaning in life.

The canned-line used by Ryan and Natalie’s firm when firing an employee is that, “anyone who has ever built empires or changed the world has sat where you are sitting today.” Delivered well by the charming George Clooney, this line does make the fired feel better, if even for but a moment. It quells our troubled souls to think that we might yet be the ones to build up worlds which will be remembered far after we are gone. And yet, I can’t shake off the feeling that such advice is like throwing salt to the thirsty. Maybe what Ryan, Natalie, and Alex all needed to hear in their own sort of way, is that all of us already stand on something worth naming as an empire, even if formed by the dust of the earth and wrapped in the reality of imperfection.

 

Dec. 4, 2009

recapture ‘tag’

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture, Miscellaneous
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Tag

You're it!

Volkswagen has a great experimental project called the fun theory. The idea behind the endeavor is that “something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better.” They encourage visitors to the site to “be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.”

One of the examples I like the most is making stairs into a piano keyboard to make people take the stairs over taking the escalator.  Check out the video below… I think its ingenious.

And yet, while I love the idea, here is the problem… I already take the stairs. In fact, I usually work out, I generally eat pretty healthy, and shower with a good deal of regularity. I even recycle moderately frequently, and brush twice aday. Heck, I keep floss in my shower so I remember to do that with increasing regularity.

The things I struggle with are more interpersonal. Telling people that I care about them. Getting bogged down by the day to day and failing to see those moments of transcendent in the everyday. Moving day to day, and then realizing that time has too quickly slipped by without having pursued things that really matter. Or maybe not thinking about what matters to us enough. How do we pursue those things with ‘fun’?

In line with VW, I think we should all go out and play ‘tag’ with someone today. You know… tag, the things that kids play. Go, find someone you care about and leave them a note. Tag them. And make sure they know the game doesn’t end there. Maybe they have to get you back, maybe someone else. Regardless, maybe living like a kid for a bit allows us to recaptured that “period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth — two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age” (Ambrose Bierce). Maybe there is something to that.

 

Nov. 22, 2009

story and action

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture, Psychology
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“we moderns not only continue to be animals who make stories but also animals who are made by our stories.”

-Christian Smith “Moral, Believing Animals“

In a recent op-ed in the Georgetown Hoya, Professor Patrick Deneen makes the following claims about the personal impact of studying economics:

Much of the explanatory strength of economics rests on a narrow and even unrealistic understanding of human behavior, particularly an understanding of the human creature as a utility-maximizing rational actor. Stripped of conflicting devotions, shorn of history and culture, reduced to a few basic motives (especially fear and greed), economic man became highly analyzable data point, but arguably only insofar as he has ceased to be truly human.

Far from being merely “descriptive,” the basic assumptions of economics – that human beings are acquisitive individual utility-maximizers living in a world of scarcity – deeply shape modern humanity’s view of itself.

Stories and theories do shape us, and they profoundly shape our action by making certain actions more plausible, or certain routes more appealing. Such stories shape what type of work we want to pursue, the priority we give to relationships, what we see as the value of place, or whether we primarily see necessity or limitations in rootedness of various forms. A student who studies political science, or literature, or philosophy might arrive at a different set of assumptions about the ‘goods’ of life than those who study economics. To fit in with a certain guiding narrative, we often homogenize, muting aspects of ourselves which do not as easily cohere.

But if we acknowledge the problems of this, and desire to be ‘authentic’ to something deep in ourselves, how do we live into different narratives, build into our lives a different set of stories?  I deeply believe that such changes only happen when we root ourselves in certain traditions and routines, and cultivate a sense of awareness of the ways in which our actions and stories do not leave us untouched.

Take cell phones as an example. I love having my blackberry, and especially the way in which it adds convenience to my life in being connected with, and connecting with others. But what are my actual physical behaviors with this phone? I constantly check my pocket for emails. I wait patiently for text affirmation, often sending out a note and judging its worth (my worth to others), by the speed and content of their response.

Consider as well the pursuit of self-development in education. How does buying into the notion of building a brand to distinguish oneself on the market shape the way I see and interact with the world. For the past several years, I have been trying to pursue the  right set of activities in high school, the right set of leadership opportunities in college, being at the ‘right school,’  pursuing the ‘right graduate degree at the right institution. And while this has obviously set me up to do interesting things, can I really claim being untouched with regards to what I deem as interesting and worthy of pursuit?

I agree wholeheartedly with the quote from Christian Smith on the way the stories we tell shape us and our understanding of the world. I doubtlessly clap my hands in approval of Deneen’s assertion that certain stories, namely economics, radically simplify the complex and conflicting set of desires that we hold, making us self-improve frameworks that conceivably limit such our ability to see what is worth experiencing in life. But I know from personal experience that ‘ratioal-emotive’ therapical approaches have sometimes fallen short with me. Telling myself to be a better person, or to pursue things that matter, or to be more vulnerable in relationships (or any other number of things), often leaves me feeling the post New Years Resolution of failed goals and similar behavior.

But stories are deeper than words we embody them within. Being different and living different narratives requires rooting oneself not only in certain tales, about also concrete sets of behavior which help cultivate in us a posture towards the world that is deeper than theoretical knowledge. In my previous post on Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” I noted philosopher Jamie Smith’s characterization of humans as needing and being formed by such quasi-litergies. I then brought up one such moment in the book where the father physically pursues keeping his son safe:

He kicked holes in the sand for the

boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat

holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it.

All of this like some ancient anointing.

It is these actions which shape us, these behaviors which orient us desired ends, and cultivate in us a posture towards what matters. These behaviors, these rituals are more forming than reading a book about how ‘parenting is important,’ or conceptually realizing that “love is difficult.’ It is a deeper kind of knowing/feeling which, though potentially spoken or theorized about, must be felt, must be lived, must be embodied in routines. To use McCarthy’s words, we must “construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them,” a breath which acknowledges the transcendence of the everyday, of the profane, of the mundane.

 

Nov. 19, 2009

Cormac

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture, Film, Psychology | Tags: , , |
1 Comment 

This past weekend’s Wall Street Journal has a fascinating interview with Cormac McCarthy, the author most recently known for his book “No Country for Old Men” made in the award-winning film by the Coen Brothers. Among other things, McCarthy also wrote “The Road,” set for release in film version of November 25th. If you are not familiar with “The Road,” it is a post-apocalypic story of a father and son journeying towards the coast, their only potential place of survival in a world nearly destroyed by some past, yet rarely spoken of cataclysmic act.

The Road is a poignant, heart-wrenching tale.  It pulls out emotion that are severely unpleasant in experience: specifically, the dull sense of loneliness and the profound experience of potential loss. While these are not emotions we actively seek out, it’s fair to say we are better from their experience. Recalling a recent conversation with Krista Tippet of NPR’s “Speaking of Faith,” my good friend Dave expressed that one of the most important things Tippet expressed was the sentiment that we are limiting ourselves when we seek a narrow version of ‘happiness.’ Rather, she suggested that we ought to seek a type of flourishing that encompasses a wider set of emotions and experiences, all which speak to the varied experience of humanity in both its good and bad forms. Cormac pulls you into these moments, highlighting the importance of relationships and the ways in which we often experience them most profoundly with the potential of their loss.

In the interview, McCarthy suggests that the story comes in large part out of his own attachment to his young son. And yet, the love between father and son in the book is different than often portrayed in traditional Hollywood love stories. For example, in The Road, the father and son never explicitly say “I love you.” About this, McCarthy states:

“A lot of the lines that are in there are verbatim conversations my son John and I had. I mean just that when I say he’s the co-author of the book. A lot of the things that the kid says are things that John said. John said, “Papa, what would you do if I died?” I said, “I’d want to die, too,” and he says, “So you could be with me?” I said, “Yes, so I could be with you.” Just a conversation than two guys would have.”

Similarly, McCarthy’s complex relationship with religion comes out in the the way his characters wrestle with the notion of god the seeking of transcendence, even while not ‘stating’ religious words, or calling to mind a ‘religious’ book or film. But like the love never stated, religious imagery and themes pervade his work. For example, near the end of The Road, the narrator states that the father, “knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.’” While not traditional religion in the sense of sitting in mass, reciting creeds, or experiencing prayer, there is something spiritual in how the father feels a certain duty to his son’s protection, and acknowledges of the beauty in the world admidst the ugliness of the post-apocalytic setting of the novel.

Cormac’s own religious committment has seemingly adjusted over time, even if it appears his connection to religious orthodoxy was never very very strong. In the interview, speaking about his Irish Catholic upbringing, and religion in his life today, McCarthy summarizes:

I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it’s meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person.

It seems that the type of spirituality that interests McCarthy is profoundly about an existential commitment to living out love in the world, all the while acknowledging his own impotence in this matter. Cormac, like the father in the novel, feels a certain pull of duty, and desires to see the transcendent in the profane. For McCarthy, this duty and transcendent comes in relationships and his desire to find in narration transcendent relationships in contexts typically narrated devoid of them. This posture towards life commits McCarthy to writing novels that, “take years of your life and drive you to suicide.”

It is this existential relationship to all things religious that ultimately makes McCarthy’s novels so profoundly gripping. He calls up religious questions, but doesn’t feel confident in the traditional institutionalized answers. To use the words of philosopher/ theologian Miroslav Volf, McCarthy is reacting against the ‘thin’ view of religion that often rely on cliches, acknowledging the importance of a thick meaningful framework, all the while simultanously doubting its existence.

But isn’t this in itself a TYPE of thick religious understanding, even if not orthodox in the traditional sense? In a review of the book, philosopher Jamie K.A. Smith weaves together the actual practices of father and son and what the mean for the characters, ultimately suggesting that they participate in a form of world-building through the nearly litergical nature of their interaction. Smith writes that, “the book is suffused with ritual and thus a kind of sacramentality. Quasi-liturgies both make and hold together the remnants of a “world” for father and son.” For two men depending on each other in a severely broken world, they needed a way to construct meaning, and live into a ‘reality’ not yet present. Smith highlights one such moment of life re-narration, recast in liturgical form:

The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not

topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the

boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat

holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it.

All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the

forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out

of the air and breathe upon them

Perhaps it is such ‘quasi-liturgies’ that we, as the religious and non-religious alike, need more than anything.

 

Nov. 4, 2009

Texting and Relationships

Posted by Peter Boumgarden under Culture, Psychology, The Media
[2] Comments 

David Brooks recent op-ed in the NYTimes is provocative in arguing for a link between the growth of text-messaging and the decline of committed love. Specifically:

Technology, especially cellphone and texting technology, dissolves obstacles. Suitors now contact each other in an instantaneous, frictionless sphere separated from larger social institutions and commitments.

People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners.

The opportunity to contact many people at once seems to encourage compartmentalization, as people try to establish different kinds of romantic attachments with different people at the same time.

It seems to encourage an attitude of contingency. If you have several options perpetually before you, and if technology makes it easier to jump from one option to another, you will naturally adopt the mentality of a comparison shopper.

A few bloggers have taken issue with Brook’s analysis. Matthew Yglesias writes that love really hasn’t changed that much, and in the ways it has changed has not necessarily been for the worse (cue reference to love and relationship in Mad Men). He also cites the attached visual on the growth of cell-phone use and sarcastically points to the absurdity of arguing for a direct relationship between love’s decline and technological growth (0 bad relationships -> 95% over the last 15 years?). Screen shot 2009-11-04 at 10.34.31 AM

Ezra Klein takes a different rebuttal approach in pointing to how technology played a role in the development of a committed relationship with his current girlfriend:

Columns like Brooks’s irk me because they demean not only my lived experiences, but those of everyone I know. To offer a slightly more modern rebuttal, Sunday was my one-year anniversary with my girlfriend. A bit more than a year ago, we first met, the sort of short encounter that could easily have slipped by without follow-up. A year and a week ago, she sent me a friend request on Facebook, which makes it easy to reach out after chance meetings. A year and five days ago, we were sending tentative jokes back-and-forth. A year and four days ago, I was steeling myself to step things up to instant messages. A year and three days ago, we were both watching the “Iron Chef” offal episode, and IMing offal puns back-and-forth, which led to our first date. A year ago today, I was anxiously waiting to leave the office for our second date.

In general, I like Brook’s article, but don’t have to take it the whole way to see its general point. Technology does allow us to connect with a greater quantity of people (send out mass twitters, be followed by a multitude of people on facebook, text multiple people at the same time), but along with such potential comes less accountability between our digital profile and the actual way we interact with people. Technologies like texting and twitter create a potential to navigate multiple budding relationships at once in a way that was more difficult in previous years.

At the same time, taking Yglesias’ point the actual correspondence between technology and relational decline will obviously not be linear, and to Klein’s point, technology is somewhat neutral in that it might be used for either good or bad (see: Einstein’s role in the development of nuclear technology…)

The kernel of truth in Brook’s article is his assertion that cultivating a posture of openness to options, in this case enabled by technology, can be detrimental to investing in a particular person. Think of it with careers… leaving oneself open to multiple options is a great hedge strategy, but at a certain point one has to open a specific door, move through it at the expense of others, with all the risk that comes along with such choice. Brooks is right that these technologies allow people to hedge in relationships for a longer period of time. In reality, this might be a good thing seen by lower rates of divorce for people who marry later. Nevertheless, its more than fair to ask whether hedge strategies are ineffective for building commitment once one is in a relationship, and whether such approaches carry-on with inertia from singleness to the time when one is in a relationship. In other words, can the guy who spends years texting to hedge in the relational market quickly drop such habits when he enters into a committed relationship?

 

ADDENDUM- For the nerds among us, there might be a few questions that would be relevant to this debate from a sociological perspective:

  1. Does the availability of texting lead to increased a) hedging strategies/ behavior, and/or b) hedging mentality in relationships
  2. Do hedging strategies prior to relationships correspond with greater hedging mentality once in a relationship (e.g. does this mentality hold with inertia)?
  3. Does a hedging mentality negatively influence relationship development/ lead to destructive relationship outcomes (e.g. divorce)?
 

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