I have a bad cold this evening, so while I was lying on my back staring at the ceiling I wondered what other people think about. I often think about Lazarus, but that's just me. Other people? That's a question for Google. Here's one post I found.
By Rich Markey
There's an article in today's San Francisco Chronicle predicting that the sun and earth and all the other planets will be hurled into deep space until we collide with a neighboring galaxy. Not soon - but soon enough to make me wonder why people think this is important.
It also leads me to wonder what else people believe is important, so, I made a list of what I believe some well known Americans consider most important. The object: to achieve some clarity through comparison of what I confess are entirely my perceptions.
For Dennis Prager the most important issue is Goodness.
More: http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.
8 comments:
I'm obsessed with national security and my country's survival. I worry a lot about personal safety too, lock doors constantly, think about what I would do if someone starting shooting at people while I'm in Walmart or notice building exits in case of other emergencies like fire. Spiritual/mythical figures that dominate my mind is the Buddha. I doodle flowers and doves, since grade school.
whisky & wimmen
We're going to think about things available to us in the world, but how we think about them is different for us that it is for people of different times and cultures, I think. A Christian, a Stoic, and a Muslim will all look at the same act of life as different in content as well as meaning. Perhaps our brains are even different from those of other times, looking at the idea of withdrawn children, for example, whose brains do not have the capacity for emotions that other, untraumatized children have. What do we make of children raised as Muslims, for example, who are not merely brain-washed but who are physically abused: what development do they lack that our own children have? Are Muslim physically capable of the range of emotion our children have? Do other cultures destroy the capacity for empathy in their children to the point that children grow up to be jihadis and cannot be much of anything else?
We're fortunate to have such a range of emotions available to us, I think; but we have to wonder if we deal with a world of others who are not human in the same sense that we are, different from each other as we are. We are not all the same, and the world cannot be as one. How do we deal with those who are not "us"? I don't know anything about brain development, but I do see that some people are different from place to place. It's partly breeding, class, environment, diet, and so on. So, when we come to America, are we then related to our ancestors? Is the past a foreign country?
If Islam or another collectivist ideology were to take hold of our Modernity, will our off-spring be related to us? Will their brains be so different from ours that were we to meet them we wouldn't even recognise them as our own? Siblings vary wildly, and we sometimes favour those more like ourselves. We have friends, nations, and civilizations we favour. We mostly pursue our own interests and the hidden hand helps us all by it. Only insane people are over-focused, but I think about freedom quite a lot, more than I should, perhaps. I wonder if a free person should free the unfree. If slave cultures deform the brains of slaves, what good is freedom to them? Is freedom a good thing? All of us are individuals and no one can say what's good for us all. No one can know. Freedom can allow us to choose for ourselves our own paths, right or wrong; but that freedom is a collective endeavour, something we must all agree to work for. Maybe freedom is a bad thing, like Muslims and Leftist argue, and we should embrace slavery. Maybe our brains are changed radically from the brains of people outside our Modernity, and maybe we're bad because of it. We have to look at it and choose a position, and then we have to defend it. I think about war.
I think about money, and women doing very nasty things to me, for me, and with me.
Oh, I also think about philosophy, the Bible, and where particular ideas will lead us, if they are applied over time.
Oh yes, and how could I forget? I think about the Lakers.
I used to think about the Celtics back in the 1980s, but since then I've learned I don't have the strength of character to become truly attached to any Boston sports team.
Especially the Sox.
I think about destroying the evil towering "I" once and for all, watching the ground split open, and seeing its minions flee in abject terror.
I think about space opening up to a newly liberated humankind, strong nanotech, extreme life extension, DNA regeneration and feeling my body grow youthful once again.
I also spend a LOT of time thinking of how to help my children grow strong enough to excel at and endure the coming unavoidable war.
And I think about all my friends (you) who love freedom and reason as well as all those who have died to give it to us.
And I think about the day I stood beside you, with your little Israeli flag on your cap, watching with some amusement as our enemy rejected your kind offer to help carry all those heavy boxes of papers.
Dag,
I love this discussion. Nature vs. nuture, pretty much? Genetics vs. culture?
I can tell you that I moved here to Appalachia a couple of years ago where my father's family has lived for over 300 years in search of my roots. I've met cousins that I had only heard about, and man are we similar in temperament! That Welsh man who gives us all the same paternal dna is strong in all of us.
And yet, yes, I see the difference of culture in us too. My father was in the Army, married a Latin American, and much to my dismay, cause my identity was/is American, I ended up growing up in a "foreign" culture. Being in my formative years, I absorbed the emotionalism of that culture and find that my cousins and aunts and uncles find me a little too ebullient at times:) I have to consciously restrain myself around them, and yet there are mannerisms that we have, physical mannerisms, that startle me, that have to be pure genetics. Hillbillies, real hillbillies, are emotionally economic. It is easy to interpret their behavior as rude, if you don't know this culture. But if you look back on even my father's generation, they lived isolated lives with little social interaction.
Anonymous: I see the wisdom in Buddhism, and yet I feel the tension between East and West in me. I want to embrace the I as that which makes the West so, well, rugged and thirsty. And yet, "I" also know I am the prism of all my personal suffering.
Willie Nelson, a devotee of eastern philosophy, was asked in a recent interview what he would do different: he said "shut up." :)
I saw a young fellow walking down the street, his tee-shirt read: "Doxy." It might refer to a rock band for all I know, but I liked the idea of it as is. No kind of doxy, just doxy itself. In that we are very fortunate. Or not. "Free thinker" used to refer to atheist, a bad thing then that required a pleasant euphemism. Now it's ordinary and almost required in polite society to be an atheist, a "free" thinker. But thinking freely brings to my mind the difference between a river with its strict banks and course, and one overwhelmed and "free," which I envision as a swamp. Hegel puts it as, "Freedom is responsibility."
My original point, such as it was, was to wonder about the freedom we have to think about whatever comes to mind, this being a world of so much to think about, our freedom being nearly unbounded and our infinity of objects expanding at light speed. This freedom makes us a different species of Man, I think. We're becoming something far different from others. I call it the bifurcation of Humanness. Individuals on one side and communitarians on the other. It can't go on like this much longer without a synthesis or a complete break between the two. I think that's the struggle we face with Islam/Leftism. I sit and wonder. It's an America of the mind. It keeps us from Islam and Leftism.
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