This is one of the most fundamental differences between an individualist and a personalist perspective. Human dignity, the unconditional requirement that we attend with reverence to one another, rests firmly on that conviction that the other is already related to something that is not me. Without that conviction, we are in serious ethical trouble. That is why some people, like Robert Spaemann, insist that there is a connection between the notion of human dignity and the notion of the sacred - not only the specific ways in which this or that religion talks about the sacred, but in the sense that there is in the other something utterly demanding of my reverence, something which I cannot simply master or own or treat as an object like other objects. For the Christian, and for most religious believers, that is firmly rooted in the notion that the other, the human other, is already related - and so outside of my power and my control.I think we can push this further and say that when we claim the right to be respected - when we claim our “human rights,” in fact - we are not just asserting that somewhere in us there is something making imperative demands. We are trying to affirm a proper place in relation with others. We are trying to affirm that we are embedded in relationship. I am and have value because I am seen by and engaged with love - ideally, the love we experience humanly and socially, but beyond and behind that always and unconditionally the love of God. And the service of others’ rights or dignity is simply the search to echo this permanent attitude of love, attention, respect, which the creator gives to what is made.
The Web's Elusive Promise of a DIY Career in the Arts - Alan Jacobs - The Atlantic
The Web’s Elusive Promise of a DIY Career in the Arts - Alan Jacobs - The Atlantic
In which I coin an initialism.
I find myself lately pretty continually dismayed by the frequency with which I have to acknowledge that I’ve lost my good habits. I’ve gotten out of the habit of writing every morning; I’ve gotten out of the habit of leaving work on time in order to make it to my yoga class. I’ve gotten out of the habit of eating well. I’ve gotten out of the habit of making slow but steady progress on a big project. And then there are the less than great habits that I’ve gotten myself in of late (which I won’t delve into here).Part of the problem, I’m realizing this morning, is that the habits that I want to cultivate aren’t mobile friendly. They require a life in which one reliably wakes up at the same time, in the same place, pretty much every day, or at least for consistently long enough periods that changes can be managed and settled down into new routines.
But the life I’ve chosen isn’t at all consistent. It has periods of consistency that fool me into believing that I have established some good habits that can sustain me through whatever little disruptions I encounter. This, I am realizing today, is a fundamental miscalculation. My life is mobile at heart; if I go three weeks without traveling, it begins to feel a bit like a staycation, a long, luxurious lie-in at home. Every time I leave, every time things get somehow disrupted, I lose my hold on all of my good habits, and I have a miserably hard time picking them back up again.
What I need to develop is a set of habits that are as mobile as I am, habits that are disruption-tolerant. Can there be such a thing?
I suspect — I can only guess — that Price’s environment is one in which the narrow-minded anti-intellectualism of Christianity is just part of the epistemic furniture, one of those things that Everyone Knows, in precisely the same way that the white people I grew up among simply knew that Negroes were shiftless and lazy. I find two things especially noteworthy about these things that Everyone Knows: first, they tend to be really nasty-minded; and second, they tend to be equally tidy-minded — that is, they make the world a neat, simple place in which there are ever so many people one needn’t take seriously, or treat with anything other than immediately reflexive contempt, because one knows in advance of any particular encounter exactly what they’re like.
So sad that this isn’t actually a movie.
Boris Pasternak, My sister-life, with etchings by Yuri Kuper
As the authors were offering their final points at the end of the Q&A, [Steven] Johnson hit on a metaphor that, for once, everyone could agree on: the city.The city, like the internet, is noisy, distracting, overwhelming, and potentially isolating. But people choose the city for its stimulus and connection, says Johnson, “and for me technology is like that: I know the cost, but I choose it.”
[Sherry] Turkle jotted down the metaphor on her notepad before responding:
“The best artists learned to find solitude in the middle of the metropolitan space,” she said. And “we need to learn to find solitude in the technological space.”
With the iPhone, Apple is building products at a level of quality that may be unprecedented in the history of mass manufacturing. But the only way to know what that means for you, a user of the phone, is to pick it up and feel it, because objectively it does not sound like a big deal. If I tell you the greatest thing about the iPhone 5 is how it “feels,” you’ll accuse me of being a superficial aesthete who cares more for form than function. You don’t care how a phone was built or how it looks; you just want it to work. But I think that argument misses something important about what it means for a phone to “work well”: When you’re holding a device all the time, how it feels affects its functionality. Or, as Steve Jobs might say, how it feels is how it works.