Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

Cruise Control on Warp Factor 9

Something that’s fascinated me a lot in my explorations lately is the idea of a theology of technology. There’s been great stuff written about this subject… sort of Lewis‘ idea that we shouldn’t necessarily do something just because we can do it. As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m far too much of a gadget lover to have an easy time with the idea of giving up my toys. With those toys, however, I think comes a certain illusion…a mistaken perception of how the world beyond our living room walls actually functions…if we use the web that our toys access as primary social contact instead of a tool to augment real social contact.

I listened to a discussion last week about another interesting topic: a theology of food. The panel discussed how America, unlike most other cultures around our world, has little to no connection to its food source. Food thus becomes utilitarian for us, one more thing that we consume with no respect. Similar to the way we consume art as mere entertainment instead of engaging with a medium, we eat because we’re hungry, with no appreciation for quality or new ideas, consuming processed garbage and forgetting what a carefully prepared meal tastes like.

It occurs to me that the two actually go together. One of the panelists in the discussion on food mentioned that he and his wife have a garden at their home. My family has always raised a portion of their own food, and still do. I’m really the first urban dweller in my family, the first to not do this. Karen and I are very accustomed to being able to run across the street to the grocery store and pick up what we need when we need it. Waiting is a foreign concept. I am friends with a local coffee shop owner who used to custom roast my coffee to order. I had to stop having him do so, and begin buying what he had already roasted and placed on his shelf, because I could not remember to order my coffee two days out. I ran out in the morning, and needed more by that afternoon. I have way too much happening in life to plan my coffee ordering.

The panelist who plants a garden said that doing so is a spiritual experience, because it accustoms you to waiting on something…to not having control over when something you’ve planted is ready to eat, but instead having to wait for it to come into its season of harvest. This creates a greater appreciation for the food once it is ready, leading one to eat and appreciate it instead of consuming it like a tool for life. In short, you respect that for which you’ve had to wait.

I can think of few aspects of my life that technology doesn’t permit me to conquer and to make happen on my schedule. I watch movies and television on my own schedule, not when they air. I will have two packages of books arriving this week that I have ordered online. I am listening to electronica music on my iPod as I type this. I imagine that all of us have flown to a part of the world that might have been completely inaccessible to us a century ago. In almost every area of life, I see this as progress, as our mastery over our environment. Yet, I wonder what we fail to appreciate because we have everything happening at our own schedule? I wonder what we have mastered that perhaps we shouldn’t have? I wonder how our domination of our world is causing that world to be cheapened in our own perspectives?

I’m not an organic person. I’m an urban-dweller who does absolutely everything possible online and am the person to whom most of my friends turn for “tech support.” I don’t like hiking, and I’m allergic to grass. I don’t advocate purging ourselves of our technological advances.

I just sometimes wish we could balance our advances with a bit more efficacy to the rest of life.

Photo Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewchoy/

…May Appear Closer Than They Are…

Remember the old Meatloaf song? It was always one of my favorites. This weekend, Karen and I talked about the physiological difference between men and women in regards to depth perception. Apparently, women have poorer depth perception than men as a rule. She compared it to the rearview mirror of a car…that objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.

I thought immediately of the Meatloaf song. Likely because I’ve been thinking a lot about memories.

The first time I recall it happening was soon after I began grad school. I had returned to my parents’ home to celebrate Christmas. The memories were so intrusive at times I thought that I could see myself running through the rooms as a child. I heard conversations that I had had with my parents as a child. The memories were so real I could almost reach out and touch them.

Normally that would have been a really cool experience. Christmas, after all, tends to bring back those sorts of recollections for many people. Since then, however, it has happened over and over, basically every time I visit my end of the family. For the long weekend this weekend, Karen and I traveled to visit my parents. For various engagements and things we needed to do, I drove the surface streets of the town in which I grew up this weekend. Sometimes, I don’t realize that I have that many strong memories connected with that place. Certain streets, certain restaurants, certain buildings bring back such powerful remembrances of events that occurred, and the people with whom they occurred, that they must border on flashbacks. Even moreso does this occur around my parents’ home. As I wandered their property this weekend, my mother showing me all of her “curb appeal” projects, I sometimes had to stop to wander away and remember what that part of the lawn used to look like, and what I pretended it was in my imaginary super-hero worlds: sometimes in the summer, sometimes covered with snow.

I wonder why I’m having such strong returns to childhood and high school days? When Karen and I were first married, the strong memories were of college years. Of late, the recollections are more all-inclusive, hitting every formative period of my history. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not hallucinating. No, really, I’m not. I just think that, at some point, my blinders have fallen off and I have come to appreciate the importance of personal histories.

Ironically, until the last five years, I have never been that interested in personal histories. I have always been more focused on the present and future. The past happened. I was aware of its details, and knew what had preceded the present accurately. I just didn’t see the point in dwelling on it. I think, in fact, that this was my family mindset, due to various geneological reasons I won’t go into here. The past is past. Now is more important.

Since being married, I’ve discovered that being wholly present in the now is dependent upon an appreciation for the then. Knowing that I have a branch of the family that is all my own now is very important in that regard, I think. Providentially, this was the time that I needed to gain that appreciation the most, and it is the time that I have. There’s a reason for that. I just don’t buy into coincidence.

I see myself in the stories of my family’s past. I see my wife in the stories of her family’s past. Those pasts have converged, and it is now our family. There is a foundation for the present. Its not always the strongest, but its there, and it is what we stand on.

As for the future? I’ll just say that I’ve learned to not plan life that carefully.

Photo Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/agude/

Just Some Encouragement

Do you ever look back and wish you could do something over? The decision to date that person in high school, perhaps? That thing you blurted out because you were way too tired that irreperably damaged a friendship? Perhaps it’s something bigger, like your major in college, or the career path you feel locked into now. At the end of the day, despite a veiled claim by an ex-girlfriend, I think that everyone regrets something.

Initially, I’d say that I regret the story arc more than individual plot points. That is, I wish I had held a fundamentally different perception of my compass heading. The reason for this is that I was constantly moving from one box of a compartmentalized life to another for years, working from the starting point that I had to choose one and stay with it if I ever wanted to be anything when I grew up. Thus, I just tasted everything on the buffet, thinking that doing so was part of a decision to choose my permanent entree. This mindset began toward the end of my college career, when I was pressured by well-meaning loved ones to exit stage left from the production of trying different things and decide on something that would earn a living. Thus, the compartmentalization began.

Only shortly before I began grad school did I experience my first inkling that life is more holistic than that. I think that wrestling through that was a huge part of my graduate studies, one that informed my research, and for which I am so much better off now. You might even call me more enlightened. In any case, I feel as though I’m emerging from the other end, and recognizing that a holistic worldview leads to an interdisciplinary academic pursuit. And I can’t even describe the freedom that comes when you stop trying to decide which one of your million interests you want to nail yourself down to pursue, and realize that they are all just different ways in which to see the others, different ways to overlap and illumine each other.

I know, I know, I’ve written about this (too) exhaustively here, but I’m a firm believer. So go pick up those extra interests you’ve always wanted to devote more time to, recognize that a job is just a job and maybe, just maybe, careers are illusions. In fact, try something new, just for the fun of it. Don’t even lock yourself into one type of pursuit (science or art, right-brained or left-brained). Exercise the muscles on the other side. You may discover yourself to be like me, and completely mathematically clueless. Or, you might discover that you’re the next Renaissance man or woman.

Give something a try! And I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Spinning the Story…or Not…

War is a horrible thing. I fall into the school of thought that nobody wins a war, but somebody loses. However, war does happen, and when it does, we need to learn from events that occur. Thus the discipline of history becomes indispensable to any culture. Here’s the thing with history, though: in order to be truly useful, it must be taught completely and present the whole truth.

Now, before I write more, I’ll offer the disclaimer up front that I’m no historian, and I don’t claim to be. I know only as much as anyone who recognizes the importance of knowing the events that brought us to where we are. For in-depth questions, I ask my friends who study history. Some things, however, are glaringly obvious.

Recently, the National D-Day Memorial, located in Bedford, Virginia, installed a bust of Joseph Stalin, because he is associated with Operation Overlord. And, wow, did everyone get really pissed off. Protesters lined up, and one person quoted said something about how horrible it was to have Stalin in their back yard, or something like that. The general consensus: how dare a national memorial recognize and honor a Soviet dictator who was responsible for the deaths of millions? After all, Stalin was initially an ally of Nazi Germany, and only decided to enter the war on the side of the Allies after Hitler violated their non-aggression pact. And, as those who protest the statue are quick to point out, no Soviet troops were involved in Operation Overlord. Thus, no bust of Stalin has any business in a national memorial commemorating the lives lost in that offensive.

There’s a couple of glaring issues, here. First off, the placement of a bust of a historical figure in a national memorial isn’t necessarily meant to honor that person, and immediately claiming that it does any such thing is a leap in logic. In fact, I don’t think you can really get there from here. The foundation operating the D-Day Memorial placed a plaque with the bust identifying Stalin as a “genocidal dictator” and all-around not-so-pleasant person. Secondly, even as dramatically as history is generally distorted when taught in the U.S., I don’t think anyone really has a positive impression of Stalin…at least not anyone who has spent any time in a history textbook. The D-Day Memorial Foundation has stated that they are merely marking Stalin’s involvement in the war. Stalin was involved in D-Day in the planning stages, and was in fact instrumental, along with Roosevelt and Churchill, in formulating the concept of Operation Overlord. Historians have debated why he did this, and his motivations in the war in general. As far as this particular bust is concerned, however, no one is using it to attempt to argue that Stalin joined the Allies with noble intentions. The purpose of the bust is simply to say that he did join the Allies on this occasion. That’s an objective fact. That’s history.

To omit Stalin from the story of D-Day, the sacrifices involved in it’s implementation, and the horrific loss of life that occurred that day, would be to tell a partial history because of a moral value judgment. Good history, however, is like good journalism: give the facts. Leave the value judgements to the ethicists and theologians, and tell the events exactly, as best we can, the way they occurred.

Those who are protesting the bust of Stalin should step back and realize that the purpose of the statue is not to honor a homicidal dictator, but to point out objectively that he played a role in the planning stages of D-Day. Doing so does not, as the petition in this blog claims, enter the realm of “misinformation” or “distortion.” In fact, omitting Stalin from a narrative of D-Day would be engaging in misinformation and distortion. Nor does the bust’s placement dishonor the soldiers who served in that operation, or in that war. To honor those who lived through it, perhaps we should focus on getting the story as accurate as we can. This is an attempt at a complete telling of a historical event.

That happens infrequently in the U.S., and perhaps around the world in general.

I’m disturbed that such a vocal opposition is raised because someone is attempting to do so.

Influx

There are moments when I don’t believe that “ADHD” exists.

Truly, I don’t. I tend to suspect that it is either a label we’ve created to excuse certain behaviors, to provide an excuse to “treat” normal behaviors that we prefer to not deal with, or (at my conspiracy theorist best) an invention of pharmaceutical manufacturers so that they have a lucrative method of treatment to market. All of these make sense to me depending on the timing: “It’s not your fault, you have a disorder” makes us more comfortable, “Tired of dealing with your child? Perhaps he has a disorder” excuses poor parenting, and “Difficulty dealing with your hyper-intense lifestyle? We have a pill for that!” makes unscrupulous people very wealthy. The times when I acknowledge the possibility of its existence, however, I recognize that it’s a demon of our own design. We’re attempting to discover ways to slay the dragon that we just might have created for ourselves.

Walk with me, if you’re not unduly disturbed, into my odd fascination with the profession of law enforcement. Mostly, I’m fascinated with the field because of their cool vehicles and toys. Decades ago (and less than that, I believe, in European countries…perhaps still in other parts of the globe), a single spinning blue bubble atop a vehicle in our rearview grabbed our attention, alerting us that we needed to stop to let an emergency responder by, or perhaps answer for our disregard of the white sign warning of “55” (all too often the latter in my post-college days). Today, emergency vehicles utilize million-candlepower LED lights that flare with so much warning power that they can be seen for blocks.

Why do emergency responders require so much more illuminating efforts to gain our attention? One of my theories is that there is so much more ambient noise. Driving down a local street a few days ago, I passed two garish digital displays, one on either side of the street, grabbing the attention of motorists and directing it to the businesses using them, along with displaying the weather and various other information. Of course, this must be identified and digested by your brain along with the podcast you’re listening to, the text message you have just received (of course you wouldn’t do that behind the wheel!), and the directions that the sexy British voice on your GPS is giving you about your upcoming turn (or is that just me?) As our over-stimulation increases, the amount of stimuli required to acquire our attention from the rest of the landscape increases proportionately. The more urban the area, the “louder” the landscape.

As I have consciously attempted to balance my affinity for technology with space for quiet and contemplation during grad school and beyond, this article in the New York Times certainly leapt out from the landscape. I have actually begun to notice my ability to initially focus on a novel without my attention drifting to be on the decline. Eventually, I become drawn into the story, but my initial focus is more easily interrupted.

Will this be similar to the hearing loss I’ve experienced from too many concerts? I mean, that I’ve lost attention span, and can only work with what I have left, as the Times article claims? That’s disturbing to me. What to do? I intentionally avoid “push” services for email and tweets and so forth: I want to know the information when I want to know it, but I don’t want it to come to me.

Have we lapsed into the role of serving our technology instead of the technology serving us? Perhaps we’ve received one too many treatments? If we have, what alternatives do we have to minimize the damage? Let me know: in what ways do you streamline the information?

Or should we just take a pill for that?

Photo Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/webhostingreview/