Category — Culture, Philosophy, & Religion

Thinking of the Kuhn discussion, I’d like to look at how a mythical culture understands an innovation of techné/craft; here treated as both a divinely revealed gift and the ground of human tragedy.

We start with the Titan Prometheus. In the Theogony, Hesiod depicts Prometheus as a sly trickster who angered Zeus by giving him the bones of an ox wrapped in glistening fat to eat. For unclear reasons, Zeus responded by vowing to keep the secret of fire from mankind, but Prometheus secreted away a ray of fire for man in a fennel stalk, a story that could reflect earlier man’s experience with fire sparked by lightning and carried by similar means. When he found out, Zeus punished Prometheus by having him bound to a pillar, where his liver was munched on by an eagle each day and regenerated each night, until he was finally freed by Heracles. Man, meanwhile, was punished with the creation of woman, according to the misogynist Hesiod, the source of all his troubles. Ever the Zeus propagandist, Hesiod uses the Prometheus story to show, “It is impossible to hoodwink Zeus, or to surpass him”. But, of course, Prometheus did hoodwink Zeus.

Living in a time of Athenian optimism (mid-400s BCE), Aeschylus, instead, depicts Zeus as a tyrant, recently enthroned by coup, paranoid about losing power, and planning to exterminate man. Some readers doubt the generally pious Aeschylus could have created this Zeus, but he isn’t much different from the bullying character elsewhere in mythology. Also, Aeschylus doesn’t really describe Prometheus’s gifts as pure windfalls. For example, his first gift, the ability to imagine a happy future, hides from men their wretched actuality. The other gifts: medicine, astrology, writing, metallurgy, and fire are also mixed blessings. Man’s imaginative creations somehow alienate him from his own condition, allowing him to deceive himself as to his mortal physical state. Prometheus is still a trickster. This is pilfered divine knowledge, hidden from men because, with it, they would be as gods, but not gods. The human condition is tragic precisely because we can imagine a future brighter than we are allowed by nature. [Read more →]

Matthew’s criticism of St. Patrick’s Day is well taken, and as someone who’s given to teasing my “Irish” friends about their debased heritage and Papist superstitions, I should be very enthusiastic about putting St. Paddy down.

But despite my bias, I’ve always felt pretty good about our crude assimilation of Irish culture. By now, Irish-American historical lore is well-established: generations of discrimination, “Dogs and Irishmen Keep Out,” Kennedy’s storied presidential campaign, and so on. But look: The Irish have made it! A group that was once thought of as completely alien is now firmly established within the American mainstream. You can take several lessons from this experience, but the one that seems most relevant is that the United States has been astonishingly successful at assimilating disparate ethnic groups. This strikes me as something worth celebrating.

Conservatives will sometimes ask why organizations like the NAACP are necessary when white ethnic groups have no comparable political representation. The answer to this is simple: Most white ethnics have made it! Their traditions have been thoroughly assimilated into American culture (a cynic might say they were thoroughly diluted in the process, but that’s another story). They no longer need organizations that grew out of political and cultural oppression.

I look forward to the day when the NAACP is universally viewed as a cultural curator or an outdated relic of past political struggles. Maybe we’ll have Black History Month parades and everyone will claim they’re secretly descended from Frederick Douglas or something. This assimilatory process – fueled by commercialism and crude cultural generalizations – will undoubtedly sap some of the vitality from African-American culture (just as St. Patrick’s Day is a far cry from anything authentically Irish). But the end result is still something worth celebrating.

St. Patrick’s Day is America’s favorite ethnic holiday. It is also the strangest. In a calendar crowded with Cinco de Mayo, Kwanzaa, and gay pride parades, St. Paddy’s is the one chance for the white, middle-class majority to dress garishly and get drunk while celebrating a history of suffering overcome.

No doubt, most St. Pat’s revelers have been motivated by nothing other than the desire to have a little fun. But it’s worth asking why this desire took the form it did. Many white Americans really are Irish, of course, but the reason so many white people of all ethnic backgrounds celebrate this one ethnic holiday rather than, say, Oktoberfest, goes deeper. It would be a little weird, not to say unseemly, for Americans of English or German descent to parade in the street celebrating their ethnic heritage. To do so would be like dancing in the end zone of colonial history. And so, because the Irish were actually the subjects of discrimination and oppression, Irishness has become the go-to white ethnicity.

St. Pat’s isn’t the only example of this cultural phenomenon. When Margaret Mitchell set out in Gone With the Wind to create a narrative of white suffering and triumph, she chose an Irish protagonist with green eyes and a green dress. Scarlett’s father, Gerald O’Hara, a proud Irishman who named his plantation ‘Tara’ after the ancient seat of the high kings of Ireland. This is a strikingly explicit ethnic background for a family meant to represent the overwhelmingly Protestant and Anglo Reconstruction- era South. But her unusual choice makes perfect sense. In order to tell a narrative of white suffering that would not seem laughable beside the injustices visited on enslaved blacks, Mitchell had to turn to the one group of whites that had been oppressed: the Irish. Thirty-million books, a Pulitzer Prize, and an iconic film later, a white southern lady had displaced Uncle Tom as the great American symbol of injustice suffered.

Being half Irish myself, I think there are many good reasons to celebrate St. Patty’s, not least Ireland’s impressive religious and literary heritage. But I think it is weird that one of the reasons the holiday exists is to give the privileged a chance to dress up in the drag of historical oppression.

One of the ways I differ from the typical gay-activist blogger (aside from being a shameless free-marketeer) is that I’m willing to give ex-gays at least some benefit of the doubt, in a few very limited ways. These seem related to our conversation below about falsifiability, so I thought now would be a good time to share them.

Being an openly gay man means asking people to credit my inner experience in a way that, in Popperian terms, is not falsifiable. I declare that I’ve always felt this way, that I’ve never sincerely been attracted to women, and that I really, genuinely find intimacy with my husband appealing rather than uninteresting or repulsive. That’s just how I am, I ask you to believe, and I ask for this belief on no evidence whatsoever. And guess what? Most of you believe me!

It seems only fair, then, that I should credit others’ affirmed internal experiences as well, even if I can’t falsify theirs, either. So I don’t imagine that I can convert heterosexuals. When they tell me that they can’t change, I accept it.

Likewise, I’m willing to credit ex-gays — those who say that they can change, and who say that they have changed. Ex-gays often fault gays for failing to do this, and I have to admit that they have a point. If we’re going to make truth claims based on introspection, we had better at least be consistent about it. [Read more →]

I recommend Br. Brafford’s post on non-foundationalism for the layman, but I find his treatment of Thomas Kuhn quite unfair:

I’m reading Thomas Kuhn’s controversial classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which Kuhn put forward, among other things, the suggestion that there not be any sense in which we can say that modern science puts us closer to the truth than Aristotelian and Ptolemaic science. Kuhn rejects the kind of foundationalist epistemology that claims we can have objective certainty about our knowledge. Since intellectuals were practically required to take a position on Kuhn in the several decades after he published, I’ve been flipping through the books on my shelf to see if I can make more sense out of discussions of Kuhn the second time through.

As one of the three members of the League born and raised in the greater Cincinnati area, it is incumbent upon (at least one of) us to defend a native son of our fair city and his very important (when correctly understood) philosophical insights.

Kuhn’s work is best analyzed in relation to the the theories of Karl Popper, then dominant in the field of philosophy of science.

The wiki on Kuhn is here helpful:

In this book, Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called “paradigm shifts” (although he did not coin the phrase), in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages. Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This is followed by “normal science“, when scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by “puzzle-solving”. Thus, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Popper’s refutability criterion. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science.

As stated, Kuhn revealed the limitations of Popperian falsification theory by showing the way in which science exists in a scientific worldview or cultural space.  This intrinsic worldview element to science, however, does not mean there are no better or worse theories than others, that none give us scientific objective insights.  It simply means there is no myth of the given but rather contextualized truth worlds–which generally build upon key insights of earlier worlds.

Because of the adherence to a scientific frame, various scientists observe and seek out evidence confirming the already existing overarching theories.  They form hypotheses influenced (if not directly deduced from) said dominant overarching theory (or paradigm cum worldview).  The data that emerges via such experiments and observations is data (under almost all circumstances) that makes sense within the dominant paradigm.

Sometimes, however, data will emerge (via a more sophisticated technology perhaps or by sheer luck/accident, etc.) that will reveal new data which disconfirms the dominant scientific narrative.  Here is where Kuhn adds an element missing in Popper–in Popper such data intrinsically falsifies the current paradigm.  However Kuhn showed historically this was not necessarily the case and it required scientists to open creatively to new framework and thought.   To allow themselves to think thoughts (or be thought by thoughts you might say) not arising within the current frame.

Take the move to quantum physics, a (uh-oh there’s the word) paradigmatic example of a scientific revolution.   [Read more →]

{Note: I wasn’t planning to post this because it’s a bit rambling and digressive. But, I realized that it sort of fits with the discussion about war and morality.}

Let me start by showing my cards: for me, The Persians doesn’t really work as theatrical drama. It is the oldest extant play (472 BCE) and the only surviving classical play based in events real as opposed to mythological. It has been successfully updated several times and is still exceptional as a war play that generates great sympathy for the “enemy”.

So, why doesn’t The Persians work as theatre? [Read more →]

I’m reading Thomas Kuhn’s controversial classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which Kuhn put forward, among other things, the suggestion that there not be any sense in which we can say that modern science puts us closer to the truth than Aristotelian and Ptolemaic science. Kuhn rejects the kind of foundationalist epistemology that claims we can have objective certainty about our knowledge. Since intellectuals were practically required to take a position on Kuhn in the several decades after he published, I’ve been flipping through the books on my shelf to see if I can make more sense out of discussions of Kuhn the second time through.

List night I pulled down Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and found that its one reference to Kuhn was simply dripping with disdain:

So psychologists like Freud are in an impossible halfway house between science, which does not admit the existence of the phenomena he wishes to explain [i.e. consciousness], and the unconscious, which is outside the jurisdiction of science. It is a choice, so Nietzsche compellingly insists, between science and psychology. Psychology is by that very fact the winner, since science is the product of the psyche. Scientists themselves are gradually being affected by this choice. Perhaps science is only a product of our culture, which we know is no better than any other. Is science true? One sees a bit of decay around the edges of its good conscience, formerly so robust. Books like Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions are popular symptoms of this condition.

-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. 200.

Bloom is contemptuous of Kuhn and other thinkers that he takes to be relativists because he takes the desire for wisdom to be the starting point of philosophy, which is for him the only truly worthy way of life. Taking non-foundationalism as a starting point — a paradoxical position, perhaps — makes mush of the yearning for truth. If the transcendentals are out of reach, why strive? A large part of the rhetorical power of Closing comes from the series of insults in the early part of the book, which Bloom designed to evoke the passion he wants to see: You have no connection to literature! You have no heroes! Your taste in music disgusts me!

But the non-academic can make good use of non-foundational thinking without doing away with the hope for the Good, the True, the Beautiful. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my reading, it’s that a good grasp on the transcendentals is hard to come by. That is to say, real access to truth, if you can get it, is either the product of immense intellectual achievement or it’s a truly precious gift, a pearl of great price. For someone who doubts her access to truth and hasn’t formally joined an intellectual tradition, a non-foundational stance is actually good way to navigate our intellectual culture, where competing conceptions of the world offer radically different answers to the question of what the world’s really like. The non-foundational stance means that the searcher puts off the task of trying to find one way of talking that explains all the other ways of talking, and instead tries to understand different speakers in their own terms. If the searcher is reflective enough to be aware of her own tradition — and searchers should be reflective in this way — then she no longer has to consider those outsider her tradition to be fools, liars, or makers of drastic mistakes.

What’s the alternative? Bloom offers a ready-made intellectual history, into which the searcher is supposed to fit other thinkers until she has time to study them on her own. Bloom wants to convince us that any thinker we come across will fit somewhere in the frame, and that we can express their thoughts and expose their errors in the language that he offers. In my experience, non-scholars who take this approach set themselves up to terribly misunderstand thinkers that don’t fit easily in the frame. While a deep and careful study of a hard-to-understand thinker could conceivably yield a real understanding of what that thinker meant to say, the non-scholar probably doesn’t have the time for such a study, and ends up with a reduced image or a bad reading of, say, Sartre or Derrida.

It is better, I think, for the non-scholar to adopt the non-foundational stance when exploring the landscape of contemporary inquiry. The layman doesn’t have to take the position that truth is always, necessarily, and forever out of reach: her non-foundational stance can and should be combined with a sincere hope that somewhere out there somebody’s getting it right.

Somewhat belatedly I’d like to link to this piece about slum urbanism: how environmentalists and other city-lovers can learn from the way slums are pieced together.  “Slum” here is used to mean an informal settlement within a city, usually in the developing world. Spending time in these slums is a revelation to any American, I think, partly for the expected reasons, namely that they’re squalid, dangerous on account of the ubiquitously shoddy construction and exposed electrical wire. Less expected is that the streets of these slums often seem full of life and happy, not only in comparison to American urban ghettos, but also compared to our wealthy suburbs. Often there are a multitude of small shops, neighbors pausing in their daily errands to gossip, and children playing. It’s worth thinking about what a tremendous indictment of our built environment that this fact represents. Unlike the slum-dwellers we are subject to laws ensuring our buildings are built safely, but also unlike them we’re subject to laws that make our neighborhoods isolating, ugly, environmentally disastrous and hostile to all forms of retail except the big box stores we’ve been talking about on the blog. As Austen Bramwell writes:

sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations.

My own experiences with slums contributed mightily to my conviction that the built environment is a major determinant of our politics, culture, and even our religion. I wrote a post some time ago about urban form and religion by a particular slum, and since almost no one was reading Plumb Lines back then, I’ll take the liberty of quoting it in full:

I recall walking through a slum once in India, girdled by a wide moat doubling as a sewer, where the buildings were built so close to one another that at times I had to turn sideways to fit between them. Occasionally I had to duck while turning to avoid the naked electrical wires strung overhead. No street ran in a straight line for more than twenty feet without careening off at a random, vertiginous angle.

After advancing through this maze for several minutes, I emerged into a courtyard built up to two stories on all sides, not more than 500 feet square, with a great blue god in the middle, twice the size of a human being. This was the only space in the slum where the watery sun could illuminate the pavement without passing through a trellis of clothes lines, power lines, and architectural promontories, and the only space wide enough to walk with comparable ease for more than a few paces. The effect was intoxicating and over-awing, long before the arrival of the inevitable and cliched am-I-the-first-Westerner-to-see-this moment.

This memory returned to me as I was reading Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, when he discusses the invention of the formal axis terminating in a church or some other monument. This is a familiar form in our age, since it was considered the exemplar of civic grandeur for several centuries in Europe (it is also a natural, if rarely employed form in a gridded city built of skyscrapers — the view up Park towards Grand Central in New York and the view down LaSalle towards the Board of Trade in Chicago being notable examples).

According to Mumford, the axis was the quintessential urban form of the Baroque city, first employed in the approach to Santa Croce in Florence and spreading from Florence like a disease to the rest of  Europe. His contempt for the form is obvious, and he laments in particular the “dreary” approaches opened up in front of the old cathedrals, which used to be approachable only by twists and turns, like the idol in the slum. Certainly, even if used in the service of the Church, the linear approach to Santa Croce testifies to the glory of Man, not G-d. Mystery has been conspicuously eradicated; every form is patent and legible. From the formal axis it’s a short step to van der Rohe.

There is much to be said for the beauty of straight lines, and for Baroque urbanism in general, but the slum-dwellers and the medieval Europeans understood religion better than the Florentines. A visitor to a medieval European town looking for its church would stumble suddenly into a small open space in the presence of a tremendous vertical element whose face was a mass of flowers, monsters and saints. Like my sudden stumbling onto Krishna,  this slow, difficult approach to the transcendent could be read as an allegory of Augustine’s approach to G-d: a slow, difficult inward movement until you come to the very center of yourself and find G-d pulling you up and outside.

Whatever else one thinks of how we live these days, it’s hard to not see it as temporary, historically anomalous, a peculiar blip in human experience. I’ve spent my whole life riding around in cars, never questioning whether the makings of tomorrow’s supper would be there waiting on the supermarket shelves, never doubting when I entered a room that the lights would go on at the flick of a switch, never worrying about my personal safety. And now hardly a moment goes by when I don’t feel tremors of massive change in these things, as though all life’s comforts and structural certainties rested on a groaning fault line. ~ James Howard Kunstler

Perhaps the most compelling argument I’ve read against Walmart is the very same argument that one hears against sprawl – namely, that it is the result of a vast network of government intervention and central planning.  The very nature of Walmart is one which requires a car culture, and as we all know, the car culture would not have been possible without enormous amounts of state subsidies, draconian zoning laws, and so forth.  In other words, without the highway projects, the protection of the auto industry, and the many zoning practices in place in modern America, Walmart would not exist – at least in its current form.  As it stands, given our car culture, given our sprawl, Walmart acts as a benefit to many consumers.

That is the stumbling block I come back to when I consider my own distaste for Walmart.  In a real free market economy, sans all the government regulations and subsidies, Walmart would not even be an issue.  The many more diverse and denser places in America would not wanted or needed a Walmart to come set up shop.  But given the world we have created for ourselves, what is the alternative?  Can we very well deny poor people one of the only places that they can afford to buy cheap goods at?  Or, more to the point, should we demonize what is quite obviously a symptom of the larger problem?

Taking a closer look at the problem, we turn once again to Austin Bramwell, who has penned a brief response to James Howard Kunstler’s take on John Stossel on the subject of sprawl.  He writes,

Stossel defends suburban sprawl and accuses its opponents — like Kunstler — of forcing lifestyle choices onto others “by limiting where they can build.” The fallacy of this view has been pointed out about 100 times. For the 101st time: sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations.  If Stossel wants to expand Americans’ lifestyle choices, he should attack the very thing he was defending, namely, suburban sprawl.

It’s odd that self-described libertarians such as Stossel are so slow to grasp that government planning makes sprawl ubiquitous. You would think that libertarians would instinctively grasp the deeply statist nature of suburban development.  First of all, with a depressingly few exceptions, virtually every town in America looks the same. That is, it has the same landscape of arterial roads, strip malls, and residential subdivisions, accessibly only by car. Surely, given America’s celebrated diversity, you would also see a diversity of places. As it turns out, all but a few people live the same suburban lifestyle.  Government, as libertarian assumptions would predict, is the culprit.

Second, the few places in America that have a distinctive character are also exceedingly expensive. John Stossel himself admits to living in an apartment and walking to work most days. Now, I don’t know where exactly Mr. Stossel lives, but it sounds as if he lives in Manhattan, where residential space costs over $1000 a square foot (that means a two-bedroom apartment where a family of four could fit costs at least $1.5 million).  If Mr. Stossel’s lifestyle, as he puts it, is less popular than the suburban lifestyle, then why does his cost so much more? He apparently never asks himself the question. Had he done so, he might have discovered that government artificially restricts the supply of Manhattan-like places but artificially increases the supply of sprawl. That’s the reason Americans “prefer” to live in the suburbs. They don’t have a choice.

At this point ‘choice’ becomes a very tricky thing indeed.  Now that we’ve been, essentially, pushed into the suburbs – where cars and big boxes are simply a matter of life – what should we do about it?  Should we choose somehow to limit the existence of these big boxes?  Would this help us in our addiction to vehicular transport?  Many of the restored walkable communities around the country are either prohibitively expensive or Disney-fied versions of the America that once was.  Those who benefit the most from Walmart and its big box counterparts in this sprawling world of ours are also the poorest among us.  Would they benefit, also, from some other world?  I think so – but getting there is fraught with danger.

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My contribution to our symposium on the Symposium, which unfortunately doesn’t answer Rufus’s questions. Or for that matter any questions at all.

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Update: I’ve been asked to link to some translations. Here is the Perseus Project Symposium English translation which includes the Greek linked at the right. There is also the Internet Classics Archive Benjamin Jowett translation. Angie Hobbs did a great podcast on erotic love in the Symposium. Here is the Gutenberg Project’s Jowett translation. Google Books also has a translation.

As planned, today (technically, tomorrow) I’d like to get a conversation going about Plato’s Symposium. What I’ve done is to write down some questions while reading the text. They certainly aren’t exhaustive or expert, but I think they’re a start. Also, I would definitely not take them as a questionnaire. Instead of trying to answer all of them, please feel free to post comments about whatever questions strike your interest, or pose questions of your own.

The theme of the Symposium is éros, which can be defined as desire or longing, often of a passionate nature. Socrates, of course, has a very different definition. Any students of classical Greek are hereby invited to offer additional definitions.

As the framing story sets the stage, we hear about Aristodemus, a student who is in love with Socrates. A lot of students fall in love with Socrates. A repeating theme here and in other dialogues is the (homo) erotic aspect of the search for truth. Should we understand philosophical education as, in some sense, basically erotic?

The conversation turns to a recent symposium. The symposium was a sort of ritualized drinking party. Often conversation at a symposium would focus on a chosen topic. Here, the question is how best to celebrate the god of love. [Read more →]

I think this Amanda Marcotte piece is pretty interesting.  She touches on the idea of work and community and how the modern workplace has, until very recently, served to cut us off entirely from our loved ones during the day.  This, she asserts, was not always the case.  People used to come into more contact with their loved ones during the day in the past and this served to create a more organic, more humane work place.  She riffs off a TED talk by Stefana Broadbent (below) which talks about how modern communication technology has actually allowed people to regain some of this ability to communicate with loved ones during the work day.

What Broadbent recorded was that the explosion in communications technologies are instead restoring a little bit of what was simply part of life 150 years ago—constant contact with your intimates during your work day.  If you’re over 30, you’ve probably marveled at how much the work day has changed because of this, and as Broadbent notes, it’s extremely different from the era when even personal phone calls were not part of life at work.  (And still aren’t in many blue collar jobs.) It used to be that once you were in the office, the outside world simply didn’t exist.  Huge news events could happen and you wouldn’t find out, and you were mostly ignorant about what your friends and relatives were up to during the day.  Now, between text messaging, cell phones, IM, and social networking, we spend huge portions of our days keeping lines of communication with our intimates open.

But of course, since the isolation was the product of culture, we can’t expect culture not to strike back.  Broadbent notes how people who work in many low status occupations, like bus drivers and factor workers, are facing increasingly punitive monitoring to make sure they don’t check in with family and friends during the day.  Broadbent treats this like a human rights violation, and I’m inclined to agree. If people are getting their work done, monitoring them to make sure they don’t use their downtime to talk to people they love is only going on in order to debase them and suggest that their personal lives don’t count.  I’ll go a step further and argue that the monitoring is valuing debasement and control of working class people over actual economic concerns like profit and saving money.  It uses resources to monitor workers, after all.  But more than that, I’m skeptical of the idea that unhappy people are better workers.  People who can’t communicate with loved ones often spend a lot of their mental energies worrying about those loved ones, in my experience.  Communication that you can control doesn’t offer nearly the distraction that your colleagues can offer by barging in and demanding your attention whenever they want, too.

This makes sense to me.  Then again, the average high school student in America spends five and a half hours a day in front of a screen, and there is little doubt in my mind that this sort of always-online-or-watching-tv culture is bad for society in the long run.  Nor is our increased sedentary lifestyle exactly beneficial to our societal health or temperament. 

That being said, I think the benefits of technology should not be overlooked either, and if new avenues of communication are allowing friends and loved ones to keep in touch more, that’s undeniably a very good thing.

I’ve always thought a more likely reason for our atomization was our car culture.  The ability for families to spread out over such long distances, and the need to drive to get anywhere at all have led to people living further and further apart from one another.  My mom had seven siblings other than herself, and each one lives in a different city now, with their own families.  Only one stayed in her home town.  This was unheard of a generation previously.  Now it is the status quo.  My family has chosen a different path, and has decided to stay in our home town where our families live so that our children will have deeper and stronger ties to their community than we did growing up. 

In any case, I think it is the physical distance we have placed between ourselves and our neighbors, families, and friends that has contributed most to our atomization, and which has led directly to the more psychological and spiritual distances we see forming – as our children are raised either in single-parent homes or without any real connections to their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and communities in general.  In some sense, then, the communication technologies we have developed allow us to compensate for this distance.  Rather than blaming social networking or other communications technology for our increased atomization, perhaps we should view them as a subconscious attempt to remedy something we, as a culture, barely understand about ourselves – as an attempt to bridge the distances between one another.

Watch the TED talk after the leap.

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