There is this weird assumption on the part of the media that if a candidate can be hurt if their comments are misconstrued then it is the solemn duty of the media to misconstrue those remarks….For once, I’d like a pool report to tell the truth: “Candidate x got off the bus and addressed an enthusiastic crowd with the exact same platitudinous crap he said four hours earlier to another equally enthusiastic crowd. There was no sense to it whatsoever, but man, these people really ate it up. And his enemies will twist his words into slightly offensive shapes and make a big dumb boring hullaballoo about it until the nation finally stirs itself to end this thing with their votes.”
Attendance is not a direct index of anything vital to the church. Sometimes high attendance correlates to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on a blessed community’s faithful prayers and praises, but sometimes it’s a sign of cultural habit, sometimes of crass demagogic pandering, sometimes of fortuitous location or pleasant appearance. I’ve known congregations with pretty hollow high attendance figures, and deeply holy congregations where only a few hardy saints worshiped. And just as I wouldn’t want my detractors to gloat if I were responsible for a declining congregation, so I would hope not to snicker and jape at the stumbling of institutions where I’d be unwelcome.Numbers are not an unambiguous index of spiritual decline, nor of spiritual vitality. The discussion amounts mostly to spin-doctoring, cheerleading, rather than praying, serving, studying, or any other Christian responsibility. Instead of arguing about how reliable the numbers are, and about what they mean, I strongly advise everybody concerned to redouble their commitment to the seeking the well-being of their cities; to proclaiming the Word more soundly, persuasively, beautifully; to bearing humble, patient witness to the good news we profess; to costly service to hungry, wounded, outcast strangers and friends. If you spend hours polemicising against your enemies (who nonetheless don’t change their minds), what good have you done?
Does anything say so much about the times we live in as the fact that the word sharing has almost everything to do with personal information and almost nothing to do with personal wealth?Of course, some will answer that we live in times when information is wealth. Generally these are people who have good teeth and drive nice cars. When they sit down to eat, which they do regularly and well, you can bet they’re not eating information.
To say the same thing in slightly different words: You and I belong to a society in which the gap between the rich and the poor is widening even as our personal privacy shrinks. It is the contention of this book that these two phenomena are connected, and connected in a number of ways.
To state just one of those ways: We tend to think of our right to privacy as a value that came about with the historical growth of the middle class. If, as current indices of income suggest, the middle class is vanishing, then it should come as no surprise if the privacy of all but a few people is vanishing with it.
This book also contends that privacy is important and worthy of preservation. It is important and worthy of preservation for the simple reason that human beings are important and worthy of preservation. These may seem like rather obvious statements, though if they were that obvious or universally believed we would not be so easily resigned to losing our privacy and to watching so many of our fellow human beings fall further and further behind in health, in education, in political power, and in privacy.
That privacy is a good thing for human beings is not hard to establish. Were it not a good thing, the wealthier among us would not enjoy more of it than the less wealthy do. The best things in life may be free, but that seldom prevents those at the top of the food chain from appropriating a lion’s share of the best things. Air is free, but it tends to smell better in Malibu than in East L.A.
I have the legitimate authority to allocate those 160 minutes [per week] of my students’ and my time to the teaching of economics. Within those limits I can try to use my judgement to do what I think is best. I do not have the legitimate authority to allocate those 160 minutes to anything whatsoever, even if I do think it would be a good way for the students to spend their time. I cannot pick and choose between what I think are “good causes” and what I don’t. It’s not my call to make. It’s not my time I’m spending. The students’ time doesn’t belong to me. They signed up to learn economics, and that’s what they are going to get. Even my time doesn’t really belong to me during those 160 minutes. My time has a job to do.So I say “no” to: student politicians; people offering summer jobs; psychology professors wanting to do experiments; people who want to warn against gambling; groups who want to talk about violence against women; religious groups who want converts; and lots of others I have thankfully forgotten.
They are asking me for my class time, and my students’ time, which aren’t mine to give how I want. They are asking me to abuse my authority. They shouldn’t even ask.
It wasn’t their opinions, left or right, right or wrong, that impressed American readers so much as what was acclaimed as their effortless erudition. Again, however much I enjoyed reading them, I never found their learning all that intimidating. Cockburn could deftly quote Marx and Wodehouse in the same sentence, but that didn’t make him a scholar, and while Hitchens was a marvelous literary critic, he was no historian.If that sounds grudging, remember the saying that it takes one to spot one. All those Englishmen listed above had been to Oxford, where I went myself, come to think of it. What was true there was also true at Cambridge, where Simon Gray enjoyed brilliant academic success, in a way that that very funny playwright and diarist later explained: “I wrote all my papers with a fraudulent fluency that could only have taken in those who were bound by their own educations to honour a fluent fraud.” Anyone who has been through the same pedagogical process will have an inkling what he meant.
A teenager wearing disconcerting, plastic earlobe-stretchers wanders through the food court, carrying a half-empty bottle of purple Vitamin Water and looking dazed. On his black t-shirt, beneath the words “THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER” (a rock band), is a picture of a caped man slashing a woman’s throat. The kid, who doesn’t want his name used, is on a break from his job at a clothing store, he says. He seems both reluctant to talk and helpless not to as he goes on to tell us that he has two friends who were wounded at Century 16, one in the leg, one in the chest. He quickly assures us they’re doing “fine” now. “I was going to the premiere, but I’m glad I didn’t,” he continues. “I was going to go with my friend, but, like, she sprained her ankle as she was getting ready, so we had to cancel. I don’t know, I wouldn’t say I’m depressed, but it just feels so weird that, like, if that hadn’t happened to her, I could have been dead.” We ask him about the red-and-gray tattoo on his upper arm and learn that it’s the symbol of something called the “Umbrella Corporation” from the video game Resident Evil.What about those violent video games? Does he think they’re partly to blame for any of the recent bloodiness? “He just seemed like someone who was bullied,” the kid says of Holmes, admitting to feeling bad for the suspect. His tone is growing philosophical. “We have the power to correct things like this; we just need to become more caring people,” he says, which sounds like a sentiment from the “Mean Stinks” ad that’s playing on a screen about 20 feet away.
So who’s the person on his shirt, we ask?
“Jack the Ripper,” he says.
Space colonies. That’s the latest thing you hear, from the heralds of the future. President Gingrich is going to set up a state on the moon. The Dutch company Mars One intends to establish a settlement on the Red Planet by 2023. We’re heading towards a “multi-planetary civilization,” says Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX. Our future lies in the stars, we’re even told.As a species of megalomania, this is hard to top. As an image of technological salvation, it is more plausible than the one where we upload our brains onto our computers, surviving forever in a paradise of circuitry. But not a lot more plausible. The resources required to maintain a colony in space would be, well, astronomical. People would have to be kept alive, indefinitely, in incredibly inhospitable conditions. There may be planets with earthlike conditions, but the nearest ones we know about, as of now, are 20 light years away. That means that a round trip at 10 percent the speed of light, an inconceivable rate (it is several hundred times faster than anything we’ve yet achieved), would take 400 years.
But never mind the logistics. If we live long enough as a species, we might overcome them, or at least some of them: energy from fusion (which always seems to be about 50 years away) and so forth. Think about what life in a space colony would be like: a hermetically sealed, climate-controlled little nothing of a place. Refrigerated air, synthetic materials, and no exit. It would be like living in an airport. An airport in Antarctica. Forever. When I hear someone talking about space colonies, I think, that’s a person who has never studied the humanities. That’s a person who has never stopped to think about what it feels like to go through an average day—what life is about, what makes it worth living, what makes it endurable. A person blessed with a technological imagination and the absence of any other kind.
Consider the technique of positive visualization, a staple not only of Robbins-style seminars but also of corporate team-building retreats and business best sellers. According to research by the psychologist Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues, visualizing a successful outcome, under certain conditions, can make people less likely to achieve it. She rendered her experimental participants dehydrated, then asked some of them to picture a refreshing glass of water. The water-visualizers experienced a marked decline in energy levels, compared with those participants who engaged in negative or neutral fantasies. Imagining their goal seemed to deprive the water-visualizers of their get-up-and-go, as if they’d already achieved their objective.Or take affirmations, those cheery slogans intended to lift the user’s mood by repeating them: “I am a lovable person!” “My life is filled with joy!” Psychologists at the University of Waterloo concluded that such statements make people with low self-esteem feel worse — not least because telling yourself you’re lovable is liable to provoke the grouchy internal counterargument that, really, you’re not.