08w37:1 The past week's highlights Posted September 7th, 2008 by timothy. 0 Comments Goodreads | 2008 week 37 number 1 (The past week’s highlights) The Rise of the Mega Region | Florida, Gulde, Mellander http://goodreads.ca/shorty/florida/mega-regions/ Naomi Klein at the Department of Culture Town Hall http://departmentofculture.ca/video-naomi-klein-at-last-nights-town-hall/ Buffered and porous selves | Charles Taylor http://goodreads.ca/shorty/taylor/porous-selves/“Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an ‘enchanted’ world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less ‘enchanted’ world. We might think of this as our having ‘lost’ a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are ‘buffered’ selves. We have changed. Modern Westerners have a clear boundary between mind and world, even mind and body. Moral and other meanings are ‘in the mind.’ They cannot reside outside, and thus the boundary is firm. But formerly it was not so. Let us take a well-known example of influence inhering in an inanimate substance, as this was understood in earlier times. Consider melancholy: black bile was not the cause of melancholy, it embodied, it was melancholy. The emotional life was porous here; it didn’t simply exist in an inner, mental space. Our vulnerability to the evil, the inwardly destructive, extended to more than just spirits that are malevolent. It went beyond them to things that have no wills, but are nevertheless redolent with the evil meanings. See the contrast. A modern is feeling depressed, melancholy. He is told: it’s just your body chemistry, you’re hungry, or there is a hormone malfunction, or whatever. Straightway, he feels relieved. He can take a distance from this feeling, which is ipso facto declared not justified. Things don’t really have this meaning; it just feels this way, which is the result of a causal action utterly unrelated to the meanings of things.” The renouncers | Robert Bellah http://goodreads.ca/shorty/ssrc/renouncers/ “What has become clear to me in recent years is that the old dream of progress, which used to be assumed, is being replaced in popular culture by visions of disaster, ecological catastrophe in particular. If, as I believe, we human beings are at least to some extent in charge of our own evolution, we are in a highly demanding situation. Never before have calls for criticism of and alternatives to the existing order seemed so urgent. It is in this context that I want to consider whether the heritage of ‘the axial age’ – the period in antiquity that gave rise to such social critique through practices of renunciation—is a resource or a burden in our current human crisis.”
