Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged loneliness

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Javier E

How Silicon Valley breeds boredom, loneliness and vanity - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Well before smartphones, new inventions shaped our culture and our emotions, and changed how we feel about vanity, loneliness and boredom. Today, Silicon Valley is the latest to exploit these feelings in an effort to keep us harnessed to our screens.
  • For centuries, moralists preached that pride and vanity were deadly sins. Humans shouldn’t boast or think too much of themselves because they were fallible. Likewise, Americans were taught to regard their accomplishments as hollow and fleeting because life was short.
  • popular technologies of the 19th century challenged these mores and helped inculcate new ones.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • these technologies helped to alter attitudes about self-presentation and self-promotion. They trained Americans to focus on themselves, perfect their images and present themselves to others in words and pictures.
  • The spread of mass-produced mirrors in the late 19th century had a similar effect, enabling rich and poor alike to study their images, and try to perfect them.
  • After photography was introduced to the United States in 1839, it took off quickly, and Americans flocked to photographers’ studios.
  • technology companies promised consumers that if they purchased telephones, radios and phonographs, they need never feel lonesome again.
  • By the 1930s, editorialists were declaring that “Vanity is Sanity,” for well-adjusted individuals should care about their image and try to look their best. Lack of interest in one’s appearance signaled psychological problems
  • Whereas vanity had once been a sin, it now became a requirement for social success.
  • Our 19th-century forebears were resigned to the fact that they would sometimes be alone
  • Being lonely wasn’t pleasurable, but it wasn’t surprising or particularly worrisome, either. And like Henry David Thoreau, many even celebrated it, recasting it as solitude
  • Over the course of the 20th century, however, Americans gradually pathologized the experience of being alone
  • they increased the pressure on Americans to publicly celebrate their appearances and accomplishments.
  • In the 1940s, the word “loner” emerged as a pejorative description
  • the term solitude fell out of favor while the word loneliness came into wider use, reflecting a growing consensus that there was something wrong and even shameful about being alone
  • We are also obsessed with our phones because so many of us regard loneliness and boredom as pathologies with potentially negative consequences for our health
  • Before the mid-19th century Americans never experienced boredom, for the word didn't exist in English
  • , after the word boredom was coined, it spread, and during the late 19th century, it was increasingly used to describe the inner experience of empty moments
  • By the mid-20th century, psychologists were suggesting that boredom was a measurable problem and that individuals were entitled to diversion in daily life, a message which movie studios, radio producers, television tycoons and merchants eagerly took up
  • Americans soon began to regard it as a dangerous emotion that ought to be stamped out as quickly as possible.
  • the people who were pushing photography, telephones, radios, movies and other consumer goods did so by exploiting shifting mores around vanity, loneliness and boredom
  • they also exacerbated them, reinforcing the belief that people should present their best faces to the world and the conviction that they should always be in contact, and never be bored or unstimulated.
  • these ideas have become central to our daily lives. We harbor fewer reservations about vanity than our ancestors
  • We turn to our phones because we have become accustomed to celebrating ourselves, and to seek out the affirmation of others.
  • Radios and phonographs, likewise, came to fill the silences in American homes, creating a sense of companionship at all times.
  • these emotions are now considered feelings to be cured rather than endured.
  • we use our phones to seek out constant companionship and unending entertainment.
  • because we worry more about loneliness and boredom than our ancestors did, we’re more apt to turn to our phones since they promise to relieve these afflictions.
  • it’s important to remember that the vulnerabilities Silicon Valley exploits are far from inevitable and are instead a result of culture and history
  • The way our culture trains us to experience vanity, loneliness and boredom can be changed. We can shift our thinking to recognize the value of humility, of solitude and of empty moments
Javier E

Opinion | How Covid Changed America in 2020 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • It’s only now becoming clear how little we understood what the United States experienced during that unforgettable year and how deeply it shaped us
  • I’ve come to think of our current condition as a kind of long Covid, a social disease that intensified a range of chronic problems and instilled the belief that the institutions we’d been taught to rely on are unworthy of our trust
  • On a wide range of outcomes, including many that were less visible at the time, this country fared much worse during the Covid pandemic than comparable nations did. Distrust, division and disorganized leadership contributed to the scale of our negative health outcomes.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • As for our continuing distress, the standard explanation is a uniquely American loneliness. The surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, declared it an epidemic in its own right.
  • The truth, however, is there’s no good evidence that Americans are lonelier than ever
  • a major recent poll shows that older Americans are now significantly less lonely than they were three years ago; a recent peer-reviewed study reports that middle-aged Americans describe themselves as less lonely than they were 20 years ag
  • Loneliness is more pervasive among younger Americans, but there too, the rates have also plummeted since 2020
  • Logically, we should be feeling better. Why can’t we shake this thing?
  • loneliness was never the core problem. It was, rather, the sense among so many different people that they’d been left to navigate the crisis on their own. How do you balance all the competing demands of health, money, sanity?
  • The answer was always the same: Figure it out.
  • while other countries built trust and solidarity, America — both during and after 2020 — left millions to fend for themselves.
  • For millions of Americans, distrust feels like the most rational state.
  • The very different people I spoke with that year all had one thing in common: a feeling that in the wake of Covid, all the larger institutions they had been taught to trust had failed them. At the most precarious times in their lives, they found there was no system in place to help.
  • four years later, the situation is, if anything, worse.
  • Nursing homes across the country, where poor labor conditions were linked to higher Covid mortality levels, remain understaffed, leaving old, frail residents more vulnerable than they should be. Hunger and food insecurity remain wrenching emergencies.
  • Students haven’t fully returned to school. Congress passed the Child Poverty Reduction Act of 2021, one of the most effective antipoverty measures in decades. Then a year later, Congress ended it, pushing some five million young people back down into extreme financial need.
  • When everything was uncertain and everyone’s future was on the line, we walked right up to the precipice of a moral breakthrough, and then we turned back.
  • Look at the way we all accustomed ourselves to the term “essential worker,” an ostensible term of respect that instead condemned people to work in manifestly dangerous conditions. The adoption of that term made visible something we now cannot unsee: In the United States the people we rely on most to keep our world functioning are the people we treated as disposable.
  • we might call the bigger problem structural isolation: abandoned by employers, deprived of shared purpose, denied care. The combined effect sent a strong message that individual lives weren’t worth as much anymore.
  • People treated one another accordingly. We all remember the viral videos of people screaming at one another in supermarkets and on public transportation. Violent crime spiked. Even reckless driving surged — but it happened only in the United States.
  • The reasons for that American exceptionalism become only more urgent in an election year, when, as in a public health crisis, presidents can try to bring people together or try to turn them against one another.
Javier E

David Brooks on emerging from loneliness to find 'moral renewal' | PBS NewsHour - 0 views

  • we have slipped into some bad values. We're too individualistic, when we should be a little more communal. We're too cognitive, up in our head, and analytical, when we should be more emotional and relational. We steer our kids toward career success, and not toward moral joy.
  • But joy is when the self disappears, when you transcend yourself. There's a woman in the book who I interviewed in Ohio who the worst thing happened to her that could happen. She came home one Sunday, and her husband had killed their kids and himself.
  • I found people who realized the core truth, you can't solve your problems on the level of consciousness at which you created them. They went deeper into themselves. And they discovered a level of ability for care. And they lead marvelous lives.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • I was down in the valley. And I went through that period. And I discovered you can either be broken or you can be broken open. And some people get broken. They turn fearful in their bad moments, and they lash out. They turn hostile and violent and tribal. And they're full of resentments.
  • But some people get broken open. You just realize the depths of yourself, and you realize that only spiritual and emotional food is going to fill those depths. So, you think, I got to change my world view.
  • it's useful to make a distinction between happiness and joy.
  • We spend a lot of time thinking about happiness. And happiness is when you win your victory, when something goes well, you got a promotion. And happiness is an expansion of self.
  • And when you have bad values, you steer — you end up in a bad place
  • And now she leads a life of pure service, pure gift. She has a free pharmacy. She teaches at Ohio University. She helps women who've suffered violence. And she said: "I did it partly out of anger. I wanted to show, whatever that guy tried to do to me, he didn't do it. I was going to make a difference in the world."
  • I think it works for everybody.I have been with rich people and poor people, and everybody needs spiritual growth. Everybody has a soul. It gives us infinite value and dignity. And what the soul does is, it yearns for righteousness.
  • at bottom, the Trump moment is a spiritual and moral crisis. We just treat each other badly. We're not compassionate towards one another. We stereotype, rather than see the dignity of each human person.
  • it flows out of loneliness and disconnection. A lot of people who voted for him, their communities are falling apart. And they needed something new.
  • And then we're in a tribal warfare where we don't communicate with each other well, we don't see deeply into each other's souls, we don't befriend one another. And so we get this volleys of hatred.
  • to me, our problems are, we have political problems, we have economic problems, but we also have spiritual and moral problems. And we have become not great about talking about them, because it always seems like, oh, you're the problem. We don't live for relationship. And that's the change that has to happen.
  • I started something called — at the Aspen Institute called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. And I meet weavers wherever you go. And these are people who are weaving relationship. They are weaving community.
Javier E

Opinion | That Voice on the Phone May Just Be A.I. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • What I’ve learned is that interacting with A.I. voice agents will change how we interact with one another: who we trust, what we expect and what we need in our communications. A.I. voice agents are already infiltrating our world: calling us as telemarketers, taking our orders at fast-food drive-throughs, listening to our problems as A.I. therapists or — and this one really hits home, given my occupation — being employed as A.I. podcast hosts.
  • Voice agents have also been touted as a solution to the loneliness epidemic. But when I called a friend of mine and unleashed the A.I. version of me, he later offered the most succinct description of what the whole experience felt like: “It’s so lonely,” he lamented. That sense of loneliness — the base reality that, fundamentally, you are only talking to yourself — may be the most lasting result of all these A.I. conversations.
  • A.I. agents are already triggering an avalanche of synthetic conversation, as they are deployed as tireless, unflagging talkers, capable of endless invented chatter. As they improve, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish these A.I. voice agents from humans and, even when you can identify them, you will still be forced to talk to them.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • the more simulated human conversation I heard, the more it left me craving the real thing: in-person connections with the people I care about, with all the quirks of a meandering human discussion
  • the upside may be that it forces us to appreciate the subtleties of personal interactions that many of us have come to devalue.
  • I witnessed A.I. voice agents strike up conversations with one another, which raised a Zen-like question: If one A.I. voice agent tries to scam another, is anyone’s time being wasted?
  • As I provided my A.I. voice agent with more information about me and my life, it evolved into a more credible impersonator of me. Armed with my biography, it attended work meetings on my behalf (off-camera, of course), conducted interviews in my place and even attempted to negotiate business deals. My clone was better at arranging meetings than closing deals, though it handled an important legal conversation with aplomb.
  • Along the way, I discovered its singular talent: a knack for endless untruthful riffing that no human can match.
  • I’m talking about a bottomless capacity for mundane small talk, combined with the imperative to make things up just to keep the conversation going.
  • Even when my voice agent did a good job masquerading as me, I found that for the people on the other end of the line, having out-loud conversations with A.I. clones upended their sense of reality.
  • Companies are poised to unleash these A.I. voice agents into our world. We humans need to decide how we will adjust to a world flooded with near-human voices
  • we could try and reject this technology, carving out no-clone spaces and refusing to patronize the companies that offer a pseudo-human experience instead of a real one.
  • If there’s one thing we don’t need, it’s more loneliness, which seems to be the one thing these A.I. voices reliably supply. Their arrival offers a chance to rethink how we use our own voices and to seek out more of the human interactions that they can never replace.
Javier E

Japanese Culture: 4th Edition (Updated and Expanded) (Kindle version) (Studies of the W... - 0 views

  • It is fitting that Japan’s earliest remaining works, composed at a time when the country was so strongly under the civilizing influence of China, should be of a historical character. In the Confucian tradition, the writing of history has always been held in the highest esteem, since Confucianists believe that the lessons of the past provide the best guide for ethical rule in the present and future. In contrast to the Indians, who have always been absorbed with metaphysical and religious speculation and scarcely at all with history, the Chinese are among the world’s greatest record-keepers.
  • he wrote that it is precisely because life and nature are changeable and uncertain that things have the power to move us.
  • The turbulent centuries of the medieval age produced many new cultural pursuits that catered to the tastes of various classes of society, including warriors, merchants, and even peasants. Yet, coloring nearly all these pursuits was miyabi, reflected in a fundamental preference on the part of the Japanese for the elegant, the restrained, and the subtly suggestive.
  • ...65 more annotations...
  • “Nothing in the West can compare with the role which aesthetics has played in Japanese life and history since the Heian period”; and “the miyabi spirit of refined sensibility is still very much in evidence” in modern aesthetic criticism.9
  • there has run through history the idea that the Japanese are, in terms of their original nature (that is, their nature before the introduction from the outside of such systems of thought and religion as Confucianism and Buddhism), essentially an emotional people. And in stressing the emotional side of human nature, the Japanese have always assigned high value to sincerity (makoto) as the ethic of the emotions.
  • If the life of the emotions thus had an ethic in makoto, the evolution of mono no aware in the Heian period provided it also with an aesthetic.
  • Tsurayuki said, in effect, that people are emotional entities and will intuitively and spontaneously respond in song and verse when they perceive things and are moved. The most basic sense of mono no aware is the capacity to be moved by things, whether they are the beauties of nature or the feelings of people,
  • One of the finest artistic achievements of the middle and late Heian period was the evolution of a native style of essentially secular painting that reached its apex in the narrative picture scrolls of the twelfth century. The products of this style of painting are called “Yamato [that is, Japanese] pictures” to distinguish them from works categorized as “Chinese pictures.”
  • The Fujiwara epoch, in literature as well as the visual arts, was soft, approachable, and “feminine.” By contrast, the earlier Jōgan epoch had been forbidding, secretive (esoteric), and “masculine.”
  • Despite the apparent lust of the samurai for armed combat and martial renown, much romanticized in later centuries, the underlying tone of the medieval age in Japan was from the beginning somber, pessimistic, and despairing. In The Tale of Genji the mood shifted from satisfaction with the perfections of Heian courtier society to uncertainty about this life and a craving for salvation in the next.
  • Despite political woes and territorial losses, the Sung was a time of great advancement in Chinese civilization. Some scholars, impressed by the extensive growth in cities, commerce, maritime trade, and governmental bureaucratization in the late T’ang and Sung, have even asserted that this was the age when China entered its “early modern” phase. The Sung was also a brilliant period culturally.
  • the fortuitous combination of desire on the part of the Sung to increase its foreign trade with Japan and the vigorous initiative taken in maritime activity by the Taira greatly speeded the process of transmission.
  • The Sung period in China, on the other hand, was an exceptional age for scholarship, most notably perhaps in history and in the compilation of encyclopedias and catalogs of art works. This scholarly activity was greatly facilitated by the development of printing, invented by the Chinese several centuries earlier.
  • In addition to reviving interest in Japanese poetry, the use of kana also made possible the evolution of a native prose literature.
  • peasantry, who formed the nucleus of what came to be known as the True Sect of Pure Land Buddhism. Through the centuries, this sect has attracted one of the largest followings among the Japanese, and its founder, Shinran, has been canonized as one of his country’s most original religious thinkers.
  • True genre art, picturing all classes at work and play, did not appear in Japan until the sixteenth century. The oldest extant genre painting of the sixteenth century is a work, dating from about 1525, called “Views Inside and Outside Kyoto” (rakuchū-rakugai zu).
  • the aesthetic principles that were largely to dictate the tastes of the medieval era. We have just remarked the use of sabi. Another major term of the new medieval aesthetics was yūgen, which can be translated as “mystery and depth.” Let
  • One of the basic values in the Japanese aesthetic tradition—along with such things as perishability, naturalness, and simplicity—is suggestion. The Japanese have from earliest times shown a distinct preference for the subtleties of suggestion, intimation, and nuance, and have characteristically sought to achieve artistic effect by means of “resonances” (yojō).
  • Amidism was not established as a separate sect until the time of the evangelist Hōnen (1133–1212).
  • But even in Chōmei we can observe a tendency to transform what is supposed to be a mean hovel into something of beauty based on an aesthetic taste for “deprivation” (to be discussed later in this chapter) that evolved during medieval times.
  • Apart from the proponents of Pure Land Buddhism, the person who most forcefully propagated the idea of universal salvation through faith was Nichiren (1222–82).
  • Nichiren held that ultimate religious truth lay solely in the Lotus Sutra, the basic text of the Greater Vehicle of Buddhism in which Gautama had revealed that all beings possess the potentiality for buddhahood.
  • At the time of its founding in Japan by Saichō in the early ninth century, the Tendai sect had been based primarily on the Lotus Sutra; but, in the intervening centuries, Tendai had deviated from the Sutra’s teachings and had even spawned new sects, like those of Pure Land Buddhism, that encouraged practices entirely at variance with these teachings.
  • Declaring himself “the pillar of Japan, the eye of the nation, and the vessel of the country,”14 Nichiren seems even to have equated himself with Japan and its fate.
  • The kōan is especially favored by what the Japanese call the Rinzai sect of Zen, which is also known as the school of “sudden enlightenment” because of its belief that satori, if it is attained, will come to the individual in an instantaneous flash of insight or awareness. The other major sect of Zen, Sōtō, rejects this idea of sudden enlightenment and instead holds that satori is a gradual process to be attained primarily through seated meditation.
  • Fought largely in Kyoto and its environs, the Ōnin War dragged on for more than ten years, and after the last armies withdrew in 1477 the once lovely capital lay in ruins. There was no clear-cut victor in the Ōnin War. The daimyos had simply fought themselves into exhaustion,
  • Yoshimasa was perhaps even more noteworthy as a patron of the arts than his grandfather, Yoshimitsu. In any case, his name is just as inseparably linked with the flourishing of culture in the Higashiyama epoch (usually taken to mean approximately the last half of the fifteenth century) as Yoshimitsu’s is with that of Kitayama.
  • The tea room, as a variant of the shoin room, evolved primarily in the sixteenth century.
  • Shukō’s admonition about taking care to “harmonize Japanese and Chinese tastes” has traditionally been taken to mean that he stood, in the late fifteenth century, at a point of transition from the elegant and “aristocratic” kind of Higashiyama chanoyu just described, which featured imported Chinese articles, to a new, Japanese form of the ceremony that used native ceramics,
  • the new kind of tea ceremony originated by Shukō is called wabicha, or “tea based on wabi.” Developed primarily by Shukō’s successors during the sixteenth century, wabicha is a subject for the next chapter.
  • The Japanese, on the other hand, have never dealt with nature in their art in the universalistic sense of trying to discern any grand order or structure; much less have they tried to associate the ideal of order in human society with the harmonies of nature. Rather,
  • The Chinese Sung-style master may have admired a mountain, for example, for its enduring, fixed quality, but the typical Japanese artist (of the fifteenth century or any other age) has been more interested in a mountain for its changing aspects:
  • Zen culture of Muromachi Japan was essentially a secular culture. This seems to be strong evidence, in fact, of the degree to which medieval Zen had become secularized: its view of nature was pantheistic and its concern with man was largely psychological.
  • Nobunaga’s castle at Azuchi and Hideyoshi’s at Momoyama have given their names to the cultural epoch of the age of unification. The designation of this epoch as Azuchi-Momoyama (or, for the sake of convenience, simply Momoyama) is quite appropriate in view of the significance of castles—as represented by these two historically famous structures—in the general progress, cultural and otherwise, of these exciting years.
  • Along with architecture, painting was the art that most fully captured the vigorous and expansive spirit of the Momoyama epoch of domestic culture during the age of unification. It was a time when many styles of painting and groups of painters flourished. Of the latter, by far the best known and most successful were the Kanō,
  • Motonobu also made free use of the colorful Yamato style of native art that had evolved during the Heian period and had reached its pinnacle in the great narrative picture scrolls of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
  • what screen painting really called for was color, and it was this that the Kanō artists, drawing on the native Yamato tradition, added to their work with great gusto during the Momoyama epoch. The color that these artists particularly favored was gold, and compositions done in ink and rich pigments on gold-leaf backgrounds became the most characteristic works of Momoyama art.
  • there could hardly be a more striking contrast between the spirits of two ages than the one reflected in the transition from the subdued monochromatic art of Japan’s medieval era to the blazing use of color by Momoyama artists, who stood on the threshold of early modern times.
  • aware, which, as we saw in Chapter 3, connotes the capacity to be moved by things. In the period of the Shinkokinshū, when Saigyō lived, this sentiment was particularly linked with the aesthetic of sabi or “loneliness” (and, by association, sadness). The human condition was essentially one of loneliness;
  • During the sixteenth century the ceremony was further developed as wabicha, or tea (cha) based on the aesthetic of wabi. Haga Kōshirō defines wabi as comprising three kinds of beauty: a simple, unpretentious beauty; an imperfect, irregular beauty; and an austere, stark beauty.
  • The alternate attendance system also had important consequences in the cultural realm, contributing to the development for the first time of a truly national culture. Thus, for example, the daimyos and their followers from throughout the country who regularly visited Edo were the disseminators of what became a national dialect or “lingua franca” and, ultimately, the standard language of modern Japan.
  • They also fostered the spread of customs, rules of etiquette, standards of taste, fashions, and the like that gave to Japanese everywhere a common lifestyle.
  • “[Tokugawa-period] statesmen thought highly of agriculture, but not of agriculturalists.”6 The life of the average peasant was one of much toil and little joy. Organized into villages that were largely self-governing, the peasants were obliged to render a substantial portion of their farming yields—on average, perhaps 50 percent or more—to the samurai, who provided few services in return. The resentment of peasants toward samurai grew steadily throughout the Tokugawa period and was manifested in countless peasant rebellions
  • Although in the long run the seclusion policy undeniably limited the economic growth of Tokugawa Japan by its severe restrictions both on foreign trade and on the inflow of technology from overseas, it also ensured a lasting peace that made possible a great upsurge in the domestic economy, especially during the first century of shogunate rule.
  • Both samurai and peasants were dependent almost solely on income from agriculture and constantly suffered declines in real income as the result of endemic inflation; only the townsmen, who as commercialists could adjust to price fluctuations, were in a position to profit significantly from the economic growth of the age.
  • We should not be surprised, therefore, to find this class giving rise to a lively and exuberant culture that reached its finest flowering in the Genroku epoch at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. The mainstays of Genroku culture were the theatre, painting (chiefly in the form of the woodblock print), and prose fiction,
  • The Japanese had, of course, absorbed Confucian thinking from the earliest centuries of contact with China, but for more than a millennium Buddhism had drawn most of their intellectual attention. Not until the Tokugawa period did they come to study Confucianism with any great zeal.
  • One of the most conspicuous features of the transition from medieval to early modern times in Japan was the precipitous decline in the vigor of Buddhism and the rise of a secular spirit.
  • The military potential and much of the remaining landed wealth of the medieval Buddhist sects had been destroyed during the advance toward unification in the late sixteenth century. And although Buddhism remained very much part of the daily lives of the people, it not only ceased to hold appeal for many Japanese intellectuals but indeed even drew the outright scorn and enmity of some.
  • it was the Buddhist church—and especially the Zen sect—that paved the way for the upsurge in Confucian studies during Tokugawa times. Japanese Zen priests had from at least the fourteenth century on assiduously investigated the tenets of Sung Neo-Confucianism, and in ensuing centuries had produced a corpus of research upon which the Neo-Confucian scholarship of the Tokugawa period was ultimately built.
  • Yamaga Sokō is generally credited as the formulator of the code of bushidō, or the “way of the warrior.”4 Certainly he was a pioneer in analyzing the role of the samurai as a member of a true ruling elite and not simply as a rough, and frequently illiterate, participant in the endless civil struggles of the medieval age.
  • The fundamental purpose of Neo-Confucian practice is to calm one’s turbid ki to allow one’s nature (ri) to shine forth. The person who achieves this purpose becomes a sage, his ri seen as one with the universal principle, known as the “supreme ultimate” (taikyoku), that governs all things.
  • Neo-Confucianism proposed two main courses to clarify ri, one objective and the other subjective.7 The objective course was through the acquisition of knowledge by means of the “investigation of things,” a phrase taken by Chu Hsi from the Chinese classic The Great Learning (Ta hsüeh). At the heart of things to investigate was history,
  • Quite apart from any practical guidance to good rulership it may have provided, this Neo-Confucian stress on historical research proved to be a tremendous spur to scholarship and learning in general during the Tokugawa period;8 and, as we will see in the next chapter, it also facilitated the development of other, heterodox lines of intellectual inquiry.
  • the subjective course appeared to have been taken almost directly from Buddhism, and in particular Zen. It was the course of “preserving one’s heart by holding fast to seriousness,” which called for the clarification of ri by means remarkably similar to Zen meditation.
  • The calendrical era of Genro ku lasted from 1688 until 1703, but the Genroku cultural epoch is usually taken to mean the span of approximately a half-century from, say, 1675 until 1725. Setting the stage for this rise of a townsman-oriented culture was nearly a century of peace and steady commercial growth.
  • places of diversion and assignation, these quarters were the famous “floating worlds” (ukiyo) of Tokugawa fact and legend. Ukiyo, although used specifically from about this time to designate such demimondes, meant in the broadest sense the insubstantial and ever-changing existence in which man is enmeshed.
  • ukiyo15 always carried the connotation that life is fundamentally sad; but, in Genroku times, the term was more commonly taken to mean a world that was pleasurable precisely because it was constantly changing, exciting, and up-to-date.
  • the Tokugawa period was not at all like the humanism that emerged in the West from the Renaissance on. Whereas modern Western humanism became absorbed with people as individuals, with all their personal peculiarities, feelings, and ways, Japanese humanism of the Tokugawa period scarcely conceived of the existence of true individuals at all; rather, it focused on “the people” and regarded them as comprising essentially types, such as samurai, farmers, and courtesans.
  • there is little in the literature as a whole of that quality—character development—that is probably the single most important feature of the modern Western novel.
  • Although shogunate authorities and Tokugawa-period intellectuals in general had relatively little interest in the purely metaphysical side of Chu Hsi’s teachings, they found his philosophy to be enormously useful in justifying or ideologically legitimizing the feudal structure of state and society that had emerged in Japan by the seventeenth century.
  • With its radical advocacy of violent irrationality—to the point of psychosis—Hagakure has shocked many people. But during Japan’s militarist years of the 1930s and World War II, soldiers and others hailed it as something of a bible of samurai behavior, and the postwar nationalist writer Mishima Yukio was even inspired to write a book in praise of its values.
  • It is significant that many of the leading prose writers, poets, and critics of the most prominent journal of Japanese romanticism, Bungakukai (The Literary World, published from 1893 until 1898), were either converts to or strongly influenced by Protestant Christianity, the only creed in late Meiji Japan that gave primacy to the freedom and spiritual independence of the individual. The absolutism embodied in the Meiji Constitution demanded strict subordination of the interests of the individual to those of the state;
  • The feeling of frustration engendered by a society that placed such preponderant stress upon obedience to the group, especially in the form of filial piety toward one’s parents and loyalty to the state, no doubt accounts for much of the sense of alienation observable in the works of so many modern Japanese writers.
  • These writers have been absorbed to an unusual degree with the individual, the world of his personal psychology, and his essential loneliness. In line with this preoccupation, novelists have perennially turned to the diary-like, confessional tale—the so-called I-novel—as their preferred medium of expression.
  • In intellectual and emotional terms, the military came increasingly to be viewed as the highest repository of the traditional Japanese spirit that was the sole hope for unifying the nation to act in a time of dire emergency.
  • The enemy that had led the people astray was identified as those sociopolitical doctrines and ideologies that had been introduced to Japan from the West during the preceding half-century or so along with the material tools of modernization.
  • If there is a central theme to this book, it is that the Japanese, within the context of a history of abundant cultural borrowing from China in premodern times and the West in the modern age, have nevertheless retained a hard core of native social, ethical, and cultural values by means of which they have almost invariably molded and adapted foreign borrowing to suit their own tastes and purposes.
Javier E

Men's groups reject masculinity promoted by Trump, Josh Hawley - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • connection that U.S. men increasingly say is missing from their lives, leaving them lonely, disconnected and, often, angry. Earlier this year, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy declared the country to be in an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” National suicide rates have risen in recent decades, and men in 2021 died by suicide at a rate nearly four times higher than women, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
  • American men’s isolation stems in large part from a pervasive cultural belief, experts say: that men should be self-reliant and hide their emotions, especially from other men.
  • Today, a battle over the face of American masculinity is underway. Popular music, action movies and leaders like former president Donald Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), author of the recent book “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” push for a more aggressive model.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • “If a boy expresses too much emotion or too much need for connection, is too giddy, is too joyful, what we say to that boy is, ‘What are you, a sissy? What are you, a girl? What are you, gay?’” Greene said. “It’s your job to dominate those around you, or you will lose status, and that will increase the number of individuals above you who can dish out dominance to you. And what we find is that in that system, in that structure, men are constantly in competition with each other and constantly driven by this sense of anxiety.”
  • many boys are raised with what she called “the cowboy mentality — ‘I can do it myself, I don’t need others,’” often perpetuated by “the father wanting the son to man up and not be so soft. … The whole model of getting help is part of so-called femininity.”
  • As a result, she said, “Women end up being the therapist for their husband, and more are getting sick of it.”
  • some men are looking for alternatives, and some are finding them in fellowship organizations with names like EvryMan, the ManKind Project and the Journeymen, the group doing breathwork that night in D.C.
  • “We have all these groups that are just spontaneously coming into being, as men say, ‘I want a circle of men that I can call my brothers, I want a circle of men that I can express what’s going on for me emotionally, and I want a circle of men who will hold me accountable in positive ways,’”
  • The theme of the Journeymen’s gathering in April, their first in-person meeting in D.C. since the pandemic, was “heartbreak and grief.” As the sky turned cobalt, Williamson implored the men to sense their emotions and “let them flow freely,” to raise their voices and “release them into the darkness.”
  • “People here have gone through a lot in our lives, some in the last few months. As we move through the world as men, sometimes it can be hard to have a sense of that,” he said. “All that which has been unnamed and unfelt, it’s actually been felt, it just hasn’t been dealt with. We put up a stiff arm and won’t let the other guy into our lane of traffic, we don’t want to make eye contact because if we did, we’d have to let him into our lane and show up really differently in the world.”
  • As a man, he said, “you can sense that there are deeper things that are happening in men’s lives, but when you bring it up the subject is changed. If guys’ lives are a house, they only let you see the living room with the plastic on the furniture. And you’re like, ‘Hey, I’m hearing some baying in the basement.’ But we don’t talk about that.”
  • Going around the circle, they began to talk about what lurked in the basement. One had lost his sister a few months earlier. Many talked of fraught or violent relationships with their fathers — or of not having a father around.
  • The toll of American loneliness is steep. The condition can increase the risk of premature death to a degree comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and correlates with an increased risk of heart disease, stroke and dementia. “Humans are wired for social connection,” said Murthy, the surgeon general, “but we’ve become more isolated over time.”
  • “I saw guys suffering with their sense of identity, their sense of self-worth, their sense of belonging, their sense of their rights to their pain,” he said. “I’d see a guy who’d be drinking really heavily. … They’d come over and start talking about their relationship or lack of relationship. Next minute they’d sober up, they didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”
  • Cogan, now 47, had been working through his own personal difficulties: the end of a previous relationship; his at-times fraught relationship with his father; the bullying he had suffered as a child. Now, he said, he was often the only man his male friends were talking to. “My intuition is that I was modeling openness,” he said. “They saw me talk about my relationship, crying, going to therapy. They saw me as a safe harbor.”
  • For many men, he said, “The world isn’t safe. There’s no expectation that a guy in our culture can say, ‘I’m scared, I’ve got fear.’ There’s no expectation that a guy can ask for safety in our culture. A lot of the guys I know, they can’t even do this with their partner.”
  • in recent years, Way said, men have witnessed societal movements such as the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter, which also challenged old paradigms. “Then covid happens, and we hit the bottom of the barrel on connections,” she noted. “We can’t walk out of our homes. We woke up to see we are a mess, and we’re not having the connections we want, and we’re not actually happy.
Javier E

Life Is Worse for Older People Now - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • A major reason older people are still at risk is that vaccines can’t entirely compensate for their immune systems. A study recently published in the journal Vaccines showed that for vaccinated adults ages 60 and over, the risk of dying from COVID versus other natural causes jumped from 11 percent to 34 percent within a year of completing their primary shot series
  • A booster dose brings the risk back down, but other research shows that it wears off too. A booster is a basic precaution, but “not one that everyone is taking,”
  • Unlike younger people, most of whom fully recover from a bout with COVID, a return to baseline health is less guaranteed for older adults. In one study, 32 percent of adults over 65 were diagnosed with symptoms that lasted well beyond their COVID infection
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • For every COVID death, many more older people develop serious illness. Risk increases with age, and people older than 70 “have a substantially higher rate of hospitalizations” than those ages 60 to 69,
  • Where America has landed is hardly a new way of life but rather one that is simply more onerous. “One way to think about it is that this is a new risk that’s out there” alongside other natural causes of death, such as diabetes and heart failure,
  • The antiviral Paxlovid was supposed to help blunt the wave of old people falling sick and ending up in the hospital—and it can reduce severe disease by 50 to 90 percent. But unfortunately, it is not widely used; as of July, just a third of Americans 80 or older took Paxlovid.
  • The reality is that as long as the virus continues to be prevalent, older Americans will face these potential outcomes every time they leave their home. That doesn’t mean they will barricade themselves indoors, or that they even should. Still, “every decision that we make now is weighing that balance between risk and socialization,”
  • Persistent coughs, aches, and joint pain can linger long after serious illness, together with indirect impacts such as loss of muscle strength and flexibility, which can affect older people’s ability to be independent, Rivers said. Older COVID survivors may also have a higher risk of cognitive decline. In some cases, these ailments could be part of long COVID, which may be more prevalent in older people.
  • Before the pandemic, the association between loneliness and higher mortality rates, increased cardiovascular risks, and dementia among older adults was already well established. Increased isolation during COVID amplified this association.
  • Even older adults who have weathered the direct and indirect effects of the pandemic still face other challenges that COVID has exacerbated. Many have long relied on personal caregivers or the staff at nursing facilities. These workers, already scarce before the pandemic, are even more so now because many quit or were affected by COVID themselves
  • “Long-term care has been in a crisis situation for a long time, but it’s even worse now,” Muramatsu said, noting that many home care workers are older adults themselves
  • Older people won’t have one single approach to contending with this sad reality. “Everybody is trying to figure out what is the best way to function, to try to have some level of everyday life and activity, but also keep your risk of getting sick as low as possible,”
  • Again, many of these people did not have it great before the pandemic, even if the rest of the country wasn’t paying attention. “We often don’t provide the basic social support that older people need,” Kenneth Covinsky, a clinician-researcher at the UCSF Division of Geriatrics, said. Rather, ageism, the willful ignorance or indifference to the needs of older people, is baked into American life.
  • It is perhaps the main reason older adults were so badly affected by the pandemic in the first place, as illustrated by the delayed introduction of safety precautions in nursing homes and the blithe acceptance of COVID deaths among older adults. If Americans couldn’t bring themselves to care at any point over the past three years, will they ever?
Javier E

Opinion | Why Boys Today Struggle With Human Connection - The New York Times - 0 views

  • By the time he left Discord a year or so later, he’d had about 200 calls with different people, both men and women, who spoke of contemplating suicide.
  • But it was the boys who seemed the most desperately lonely and isolated. On the site, he said, he found “a lot more unhealthy men than unhealthy women.” He added: “With men, there is a huge thing about mental health and shame because you’re not supposed to be weak. You’re not supposed to be broken.” A male mental-health crisis was flying under the radar.
  • I have come to believe the conditions of modern boyhood amount to a perfect storm for loneliness
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • All the old deficiencies and blind spots of male socialization are still in circulation — the same mass failure to teach boys relational skills and emotional intelligence, the same rigid masculinity norms and social prohibitions that push them away from intimacy and emotionality.
  • in many ways this environment has apparently had the opposite effect — it has shut them down even further.
  • The micro-generation that was just hitting puberty as the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017 is now of college (and voting) age. They have lived their whole adolescence not just in the digital era, with a glorious array of virtual options to avoid the angst of real-world socializing, but also in the shadow of a wider cultural reckoning around toxic masculinity.
  • We have spent the past half-decade wrestling with ideas of gender and privilege, attempting to challenge the old stereotypes and power structures. These conversations should have been an opportunity to throw out the old pressures and norms of manhood, and to help boys and men be more emotionally open and engaged.
  • in screen-addicted, culture war-torn America, we have also added new ones.
  • For many progressives, weary from a pileup of male misconduct, the refusal to engage with men’s feelings has now become almost a point of principle
  • For every right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to “man up,” there’s a voice from the left telling him that to express his concerns is to take airtime away from a woman or someone more marginalized
  • In many cases, the same people who are urging boys and men to become more emotionally expressive are also taking a moral stand against hearing how they actually feel
  • For many boys, it can seem as though their emotions get dismissed by both sides. This political isolation has combined with existing masculine norms to push a worrying number of boys into a kind of resentful, semi-politicized reclusion.
  • Over a quarter of men under 30 say they have no close friends
  • Teenage boys now spend two hours less a week socializing than girls and they also spend about seven hours more per week than their female peers on screens.
  • my own research has fed my fears.
  • the same theme came up over and over for boys who on the face of it had little else in common. They were lonely.
  • almost all of them had the nagging sense that something important was missing in those friendships. They found it almost impossible to talk to their male peers about anything intimate or express vulnerability.
  • One teenager described his social circle, a group of boys who had been best friends since kindergarten, as a “very unsupportive support system.” Another revealed that he could recall only one emotionally open conversation with a male friend in his life, and that even his twin brother had not seen him cry in years
  • they felt unable to articulate this pain or seek help, because of a fear that, because they were boys, no one would listen.
  • As one 20-year-old put it, “If a man voices any concern, they get deflected with all of their so-called privileges.” He added: “They’d be like, ‘Whatever. Women have suffered more than you, so you have no right to complain.’”
  • Almost without exception, the boys I talked to craved closer, more emotionally open relationships, but had neither the skills nor the social permission to change the story.
  • Perhaps it’s not surprising that boys don’t know how to listen and engage with their friends’ emotions on any deeper level; after all, no one really engages with theirs.
  • in a sexist society, male opinions hold outsized value. But the world — including their own parents — has less time for their feelings.
  • One study from 2014 showed that parents were more likely to use emotional words when talking with their 4-year-old daughters than those speaking to their 4-year-old sons.
  • A more recent study comparing fathers of boys with fathers of girls found that fathers of boys were less attentively engaged with their boys, spent less time talking about their son’s sad feelings and instead were more likely to roughhouse with them. They even used subtly different vocabularies when talking with boys, with fewer feelings-centered words, and more competition and winning-focused language.
  • Spend any time in the manosphere, and it’s easy to start to hate men and boys. The extreme misogyny, the gleeful hate speech, the violent threats and thrum of menace make it hard to summon much sympathy for male concerns, and easy to forget the ways that patriarchy harms them, too.
  • in the grip of the culture wars, caring about boys has become subtly coded as a right-wing cause,
  • Men have had way more than their fair share of our concern already, the reasoning goes, and now it’s time for them to pipe down
  • But for boys, privilege and harm intertwine in complex ways — male socialization is a strangely destructive blend of indulgence and neglect. Under patriarchy, boys and men get everything, except the thing that’s most worth having: human connection.
  • The prescription for creating a generation of healthier, more socially and emotionally competent men is the same in the wider political discourse as it is in our own homes — to approach boys generously rather than punitively
  • We need to acknowledge boys’ feelings, to talk with our sons in the same way we do our daughters, to hear them and empathize rather than dismiss or minimize, and engage with them as fully emotional beings.
Javier E

The Loneliest Generation: Americans, More Than Ever, Are Aging Alone - WSJ - 0 views

  • About one in 11 Americans age 50 and older lacks a spouse, partner or living child, census figures and other research show. That amounts to about eight million people in the U.S. without close ki
  • The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, which has tracked American attitudes since 1972, asked respondents four years ago how often they lacked companionship, felt left out and felt isolated from others. Baby boomers said they experienced these feelings with greater frequency than any other generation, including the older “silent generation.”
  • More senior women than men are kinless because women’s life expectancies are nearly five years longer, at 81 years. Of Americans age 50 and over in 2016, 27% of women were widowed or never married, compared with 16% of men. Women are also less likely to cohabitate and date later in life, research shows
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In a review of 148 independent studies on loneliness, covering more than 300,000 participants, Julianne Holt-Lunstad of Brigham Young University and colleagues found that greater social connection was associated with a 50% lower risk of early death.
  • Research suggests that those who are isolated are at an increased risk of depression, cognitive decline and dementia, and that social relationships influence their blood pressure and immune functioning, as well as whether people take their medications.
  • the forces that take hold late in life often compound it. Retirement shrivels social networks formed through work. Hearing loss and worsening mobility impede talking face-to-face and participating in group activities.
  • The baby boomers prized individuality and generally had fewer children and ended marriages in greater numbers than previous generations. More than one in four boomers is divorced or never married, census figures show. About one in six lives alone
  • Along with financial issues including high debt and declining pensions, social factors such as loneliness are another reason boomers are experiencing more difficult retirement years than previous generations.
Javier E

In China and India, men outnumber women on a massive scale. The consequences are far-re... - 0 views

  • Nothing like this has happened in human history. A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.
  • Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations.
  • Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as wel
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,
  • Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex.
  • India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males
  • The imbalance creates a surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and, possibly, prostitution.
  • Village life and mental health. Among men, loneliness and depression are widespread. Villages are emptying out. Men are learning to cook and perform other chores long relegated to women.
  • Housing prices and savings rates. Bachelors are furiously building houses in China to attract wives, and prices are soaring. But otherwise they are not spending, and that in turn fuels China’s huge trade surplus
  • In India, there is the opposite effect: Because brides are scarce, families are under less pressure to save for expensive dowries
  • Human trafficking. Trafficking of brides is on the rise. Foreign women are being recruited and lured to China, effectively creating similar imbalances in China’s neighbors.
  • Public safety. With the increase in men has come a surge in sexual crime in India and concerns about a rise in other crimes in both countries. Harassment of schoolgirls in India has in some towns sparked an effort to push back — but at a cost of restricting them to more protected lives.
Javier E

Covid Prescription: Get the Vaccine, Wait a Month, Return to Normal - WSJ - 0 views

  • the CDC finally started telling vaccinated people that they can have normal interactions with other vaccinated people—but only in highly limited circumstances. Given the impressive effectiveness of the vaccine, that should have been immediately obvious by applying scientific inference and common sense.
  • Parts of the new guidelines are absurdly restrictive.
  • the CDC didn’t withdraw its advice to avoid air travel after vaccination. A year of prevaccine experience has demonstrated that airplanes aren’t a source of spread. A study conducted for the defense department found that commercial planes have HEPA filtration and airflow that exceed the standards of a hospital operating room.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • An unpublished study conducted by the Israeli Health Ministry and Pfizer showed that vaccination reduced transmission by 89% to 94% and almost totally prevented hospitalization and death, according to press reports. Immunity kicks in fully about four weeks after the first vaccine dose, and then you are essentially bulletproof.
  • On a positive note, the CDC did say that fully vaccinated people who are asymptomatic don’t need to be tested.
  • that obvious recommendation should have come two months ago, before wasting so many tests on people who have high levels of circulating antibodies from vaccination.
  • self-harm among kids increased as much as 300% last year in some parts of the country
  • The CDC highlights the vaccines’ stunning success but is ridiculously cautious about its implications. Public-health officials focus myopically on transmission risk while all but ignoring the broader health crisis stemming from isolation. The CDC acknowledges “potential” risks of isolation, but doesn’t go into details.
  • Separating family members was excessive and cruel, driven by narrow thinking that focused singularly on reducing viral transmission risk, heedless of the harm to the quality of human life.
  • As people yearn to be with their loved ones and rebuild communities, we shouldn’t repeat that mistake. We cannot exaggerate the public-health threat, as we did with hospital visitation rules, and keep crushing the human spirit with overly restrictive policies for vaccinated Americans.
  • Loneliness has become a public-health crisis. In pre-Covid times, it was estimated that 20% of American’s struggled with loneliness, a figure that has surely multiplied faster than research has been able to measure
  • n its guidance the CDC says the risks of infection in vaccinated people “cannot be completely eliminated.” True, we don’t have conclusive data that guarantees vaccination reduces risk to zero. We never will. We are operating in the realm of medical discretion based on the best available data, as practicing physicians have always done
  • I too will invoke “common sense” to answer the big question so many are asking: What am I allowed to do after I’ve been vaccinated? Once a month has passed after your first shot, go back to normal.
cartergramiak

Opinion | 'Because of You Guys, I'm Stuck in My Room' - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Residents and caregivers at senior living facilities write about life during the pandemic — and trying to stay safe while facing the challenges of long-term isolation.
  • A former special education teacher, she told me she found the isolation and loneliness of lockdown “so heartbreaking.”
  • My mom isn’t able to write or read after suffering from two strokes. In addition to early-stage dementia, she has expressive aphasia, which means she has difficulty talking. In early November, we received an email from her residential care facility saying that four staff members had tested positive. Mom tested negative. But soon after, she called telling me her next-door neighbor was sick with the virus. I started planning how I could remove my mom from the facility.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • She said she gets frustrated when she hears about young people flouting social distancing rules. “I think, ‘Because of you guys, I’m stuck in my room. I would like to put you in my room for a week and see how you like it.’”
  • We waited until 4 p.m. for another test result, also negative, and I got her soon after. She had two bags packed and was practically running out the door — away from the boredom, loneliness, scary and confusing events, unknown staff members with covered faces.
  • When Covid-19 hit, all family visits were halted. Dorothy was OK at first, already accustomed to the staff feeding her twice a day. But after a while, I think it hit her. Her family was gone. We could not tell her why or where they were. We could not reassure her, although we tried.Dorothy slowly went downhill, and in July, she died. She is the collateral damage, the many who decline simply from the isolation and loss of routine, but most important, from the loss of the people who love them. She was one of many here, and she deserves a voice.
  • My mother is fortunate that she is in an assisted-living facility that cares. It adheres to the guidelines. Unfortunately, the very rules that keep its residents physically protected do not support their emotional health. There are no easy answers.
Javier E

(1) Trump Supporters Are Responsible for Their Choices - 0 views

  • Divorce spiked in the 1970s and 1980s among all groups but the “funny thing” that happened was that social learning took place among the better-educated third of the population. So while divorce and single parenting continued to rise for those with less education, it plunged in the 1990s and after among the educated. Their failure, I would argue, was not so much experimenting with other lifestyles as failing to share what they had learned—that kids desperately need the stability of two parents. It’s not that elites were failing to practice what they preached; it was instead, as Charles Murray put it, their failure to preach what they practiced.
  • None of the organs of popular culture—entertainment, teen magazines, books, or movies, which are overwhelmingly produced by elites—stress the importance of marriage
  • That said, it isn’t fair to hold elites entirely responsible for the life decisions of the rest of society. Average people have agency too, and if you’ve fathered three kids out of wedlock and hardly make your child support payments, it’s no excuse to say elites made the rules.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The middle and lower classes in America are suffering disproportionately from fractured families. It looms behind the opioid crisis, the loneliness epidemic, low labor force participation rates for young men, and deaths of despair. It’s quite possible that feeling unattached and unnecessary—the kinds of feelings fatherless men often report—also fuels, at least in part, some political extremism.
Javier E

What Hannah Arendt's Work Tells Us About Ukraine - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The toxic nationalism and open racism of Nazi Germany, only recently defeated; the Soviet Union’s ongoing, cynical attacks on liberal values and what it called “bourgeois democracy”; the division of the world into warring camps; the large influx of refugees; the rise of new forms of broadcast media capable of pumping out disinformation and propaganda on a mass scale; the emergence of an uninterested, apathetic majority, easily placated with simple bromides and outright lies; and above all the phenomenon of totalitarianism, which she described as an “entirely new form of government”—all of these things led Arendt to believe that a darker era was about to begin.
  • Once again, we are living in a world that Arendt would recognize, a world in which it seems “as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives”
  • In the totalitarian world, trust has dissolved. The masses “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • because Arendt feared for the future, much of The Origins of Totalitarianism was in fact focused on an excavation of the past.
  • the principle that led her down this path remains important: To grapple with a broad social trend, look at its history, try to find its origins, try to understand what happened when it last appeared, in another country or another century
  • To explain Nazi anti-Semitism, Arendt reached back not only to the history of the Jews in Germany but also to the history of European racism and imperialism, and to the evolution of the notion of the “rights of man”—which we now more commonly speak of as “human rights.” To have such rights, she observed, you must not only live in a state that can guarantee them; you must also qualify as one of that state’s citizens.
  • the questions Arendt asks remain absolutely relevant today. She was fascinated by the passivity of so many people in the face of dictatorship, by the widespread willingness, even eagerness, to believe lies and propaganda
  • it offers us a kind of dual methodology, two different ways of thinking about the phenomenon of autocracy.
  • To explain this phenomenon, Arendt zeroes in on human psychology, especially the intersection between terror and loneliness. By destroying civic institutions, whether sports clubs or small businesses, totalitarian regimes kept people away from one another and prevented them from sharing creative or productive projects.
  • when each person felt himself isolated from the rest, resistance became impossible. Politics in the broadest sense became impossible too: “Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other … Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.”
  • it is impossible not to wonder whether the nature of modern work and information, the shift from “real life” to virtual life and the domination of public debate by algorithms that increase emotion, anger, and division, hasn’t created some of the same results
  • In a world where everyone is supposedly “connected,” loneliness and isolation once again are smothering activism, optimism, and the desire to participate in public life.
  • he 20th-century totalitarian model has not been banished; it can be brought back, at any place and at any time.
  • The Origins of Totalitarianism does not contain a set of policy prescriptions, or directions on how to fix things. Instead it offers proposals, experiments, different ways to think about the lure of autocracy and the seductive appeal of its proponents as we grapple with them in our own time
Javier E

Opinion | The Senator Warning Democrats of a Crisis Unfolding Beneath Their Noses - The... - 0 views

  • “The challenges America faces aren’t really logistical,” he told the crowd. “They are metaphysical. And the sooner we understand the unspooling of identity and meaning that is happening in America today, the sooner we can come up with practical policies to address this crisis.”
  • The subject of the speech was what Mr. Murphy called the imminent “fall of American neoliberalism.
  • America’s leaders — from both parties — have long been guided by what’s often called the neoliberal consensus: the idea that “barrier-free international markets, rapidly advancing communications technology and automation, decreased regulation and empowered citizen-consumers would be the keys to prosperity, happiness and strong democracy,” as Mr. Murphy put it. More simply, it’s a shared assumption that what’s good for markets is good for society.
  • ...54 more annotations...
  • This assumption shapes our politics so deeply that it’s almost invisible. But the idea that modern life is a story of constant economic and technological progress steadily making the world a better place has stopped lining up with how Americans feel.
  • no statistics really capture the feeling, shared by growing numbers of Americans, that the world is just getting worse.
  • It’s a “metaphysical” problem, as Mr. Murphy put it. And he began to think that the economic metrics used by economists and presidents to capture the state of the nation were masking a vast “spiritual crisis.”
  • he was homing in on a problem that Democrats have yet to figure out how to address. Donald Trump and the movement around him have tapped into a sense of deep alienation and national malaise. Democrats often have trouble even acknowledging those feelings are real.
  • Mr. Murphy has been warning for years that by failing to offer a clear vision of the future, Democrats risk losing to a “postdemocracy” Republican Party that might rig the electoral system “in order to make sure Democrats never win again.”
  • he is far from the only Democrat raising these concerns. Just a few days before the convention, Mr. Murphy’s good friend Ben Rhodes, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, told me that in the age of Mr. Trump, Democrats have found themselves in a “trap”: How can they present themselves as the party of fundamental change when they spent the past eight years arguing that America’s institutions need to be shored up against the urgent threat of Trumpism?
  • “Can you reform that system so much that it ceases to be that and starts to be something else?” Mr. Rhodes asked me. “Or does it have to be blown up?
  • Many on the center-left worry that, absent a liberal vision for how this reform may work, Americans will opt to blow things up.
  • He has worked with Republicans like Mr. Vance, who share much of his criticism of our current order, and he has pushed for Democrats to listen to, learn from and try to win over social conservatives with a “pro-family, pro-community program of economic nationalism.
  • It has all rapidly built him into a singular figure in the party, someone who is being whispered about as a future presidential candidate.
  • “The postwar neoliberal economic project is nearing its end, and the survival of American democracy relies on how we respond.”
  • “What I discovered, much to my chagrin,” he told me when we met last fall in his Senate office, “was that the right — some really irresponsible corners of the right — were having a conversation about the spiritual state of America that was in ways much more relevant than conversations that were happening on the left.”
  • I had written the piece because I was interested in critiques like those from New Right-ish thinkers like the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, who had been arguing that the story we often tell ourselves — of a society constantly getting better through an inexorable process of economic growth and technological advancement — was too simple and benefited the powerful corporations and political elites that profit most from the status quo.
  • This story, they say, suggested that there was no possible alternative to the world where technological gadgets had colonized our brains and every aspect of our existence seemed to be reduced to a set of decisions determined by corporations in a market system. We were, after all, supposed to be richer and better off than any humans who lived before us. Why would anyone complain?
  • He was worried that the New Right was offering two things mainstream Democrats were not: a politics that spoke directly to feelings of alienation from America as we know it today and a political vision of what a rupture with that system might look like.
  • I recommended David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent best seller, “The Dawn of Everything,” which critiques the story of progress from the left, and Mr. Deneen’s book “Why Liberalism Failed.”
  • he began to engage with a small but increasingly influential political ecosystem of heterodox thinkers who write for magazines like the journal Compact or receive funding from networks like the Hewlett Foundation’s economy and society initiative, which advances a view that neoliberalism “has outlived its usefulness.
  • Julius Krein, the founder of the quarterly American Affairs, which publishes the work of many figures on the New Righ
  • the labor theorist Oren Cass, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, who soured on pro-business policies and who has been the key figure in pushing Republicans toward a conservative vision of worker power.
  • Mr. Murphy emailed me a piece he’d just written for The Atlantic, titled “The Wreckage of Neoliberalism.” He said it was going to be the start of a public push to advance his new line of thinking. He argued that Democrats, facing the possibility of a “postdemocracy” Republican Party seizing the levers of state after the 2024 election, risked political extinction if they waved away the deep sense of malaise and resentment that brought Mr. Trump to power the first time
  • a program of “a pro-family platform of economic nationalism salted with a bit of healthy tech skepticism” and offered it as a salve for a deeper crisis of meaning and belief in our national project.
  • “Talking openly about spiritualism is true to the best traditions of the left,” Mr. Murphy told me. “So there’s no reason why this conversation about the emotional state of America and the good life has to be a conversation that only the right has. Some of the left’s most inspiring leaders have talked in these terms. But I guess I’ve come to the conclusion that you first have to diagnose why people are feeling so shitty and to really understand what you need to do next.”
  • he started a Substack. He began to post slightly searching thoughts on his journey and often drew bafflement or outrage from liberals who knew him best as a gun control advocate
  • “The Reason to Care About the Plight of Men,” a piece he later told me his teenage son had warned him might be too edgy for prime time.
  • He also published a piece he titled “What We Can Learn From Rich Men North of Richmond,” about the Oliver Anthony hit, arguing that the song resonated with more than just conservatives and that the left was making a mistake if it ignored the vein of alienation from and anger with the “new world” that Mr. Anthony sang about.
  • Mr. Murphy’s program of “pro-family, pro-community economic nationalism” is less one of social welfare than an attempt to give regular people agency in the face of the supersized corporations he believes wield far too much influence today
  • He calls for sectorwide collective bargaining of the kind that exists in some European countries, an expansion of antimonopoly efforts and something like a reimagining of our political value system: “We’re going to have to upset this cult of efficiency,” he told me recently, “establishing a clear preference for local ownership, local industry.”
  • Last fall, after working on the issue with Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, a Republican, Mr. Murphy introduced the National Strategy for Social Connection Act, a bill to fight the epidemic of loneliness that he believes has been driven by the pervasive communications technology and malignant commercialization of American life.
  • It’s hard to believe that even Mr. Murphy thinks that a metaphysical crisis can be meaningfully addressed with a few million dollars for research or directives to federal agencies to address loneliness.
  • serve a calculated purpose: to push our politics toward a national discussion of the “emotional state of America” and to show that highly placed people in both parties are coming to believe that this presents a state of real crisis.
  • he has tried to work with Republicans on immigration. He was the lead Democratic negotiator on the bipartisan immigration bill that came very close to passage in February
  • Without much fanfare, the Biden administration has already embraced many of the policies Mr. Murphy is calling for: industrial policy, tariffs, a campaign against corporate monopolies
  • His vision of economic nationalism can look very similar to the one offered by “America First” Republicans, but the specifics reveal very different priorities; Mr. Murphy supports far higher levels of immigration and paid family leave over the child tax credits increasingly favored by conservatives
  • they have a common goal: to remake the incentive structure of our economy. “The core issue is that our economy became one based on extracting rents,” Mr. Krein told me, “rather than building things.” It rewards those who invent clever ways to squeeze money out of government and regular people
  • This is the simple explanation for why so many jobs feel soulless and so many Americans feel harried and troubled amid the vast material wealth our country produces.
  • “That’s what people are really complaining about when they talk about neoliberalism,” Mr. Krein said. “But that’s tough to fit on a bumper sticker.”
  • “Great leaders tell stories that fit within the cultural and religious contexts of nations,” the Bay Area representative Ro Khanna told me. He helped write the CHIPS and Science Act, but he thought that the Demo
  • crats had failed to explain what they wanted it to achieve
  • “Politics is not just about policy,” he said. “It’s about the vision of a nation. It’s about signaling that we’re heading somewhere.”
  • Republicans are beginning to coalesce around a vision for the future. It begins with plans to fire thousands of civil servants in an attempt to unmake the so-called administrative state, which they believe promotes liberal values and has enveloped America in bureaucracy. They seek to pull back from the internationalist foreign policy and free-trade policies that have guided both parties for decades. They hope to increase America’s birthrate and cut immigration and may pursue steps like reducing the value of the dollar, which they argue would help American-produced goods compete in an international marketplace
  • the people there represented a decent cross-section of American political views, from people keeping the Sanders-style left-wing populist faith to centrist civil servants to more or less avowed reactionaries.
  • I attended a dinner hosted by Sohrab Ahmari, a co-founder of Compact,
  • All the attendees seemed to take for granted that the neoliberal era was nearing its endpoint — a fact notable only because it reflected a consensus that has still barely filtered into our mainstream political conversations.
  • The problem, for any Democrat, is to find a way to turn this understanding into winning politics
  • Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s onetime chief White House strategist, late last year, he was very clear that he didn’t think Mr. Murphy’s vision went far enough. Mr. Bannon has frequently praised Mr. Khanna — jocularly accusing him of stealing “our” ideas in his proposals to rebuild America’s manufacturing capacity. But Mr. Bannon was savagely and profanely dismissive of Mr. Murphy
  • “He has a very tough road ahead, and here’s why,” Mr. Bannon said. “There’s no audience for what he’s saying on the Democratic side. Democratic voters like the system.”
  • Mr. Bannon called Mr. Murphy a “neoliberal neocon,” a double epithet Mr
  • Unlike many on both the right and left, he has shown little desire to unmake the complex military and financial systems that critics on both sides often describe as the American Empire.
  • The trouble is that orienting the American economy back toward producing things and building a strong middle class may mean reassessing those old ideas and asking tough questions about whether we can afford to maintain our military might or continue financing the federal government with deb
  • These are now common talking points on the right, and at a time when Mr. Trump and his allies hint at ideas like withdrawing from NATO and curtailing the independence of the Federal Reserve, even a critic of the globalized economic order like Mr. Murphy can end up looking like a milquetoast defender of the status quo.
  • I asked Mr. Murphy if I was right that his aim really was to unmake the neoliberal system as we knew it. “You are,” he said. He anticipated my next question, about whether it would ever be possible to translate this kind of big-picture conversation to mainstream politics. I mentioned
  • As if anticipating the Harris/Trump race, he described an electoral landscape where Democratic candidates who won a majority of the popular vote might still lose the presidency if they couldn’t win states in the Upper Midwest. “I think that our coalition is bound to lose if we don’t find a way to reach out to some element of the folks who have been hoodwinked by Donald Trump. We don’t have to win over 25 percent of his voters
  • “But I do believe,” he said, “that we have to tell a story about what makes America different. To make people proud of being American. And make them believe that that identity is more important than their individual political identity.”
  • “We have to build a uniquely American economy,” he said. “We have to convince people that there is a uniquely American identity while understanding that there are still important moments where you have to engage the rest of the world. That’s not a bumper sticker.” He paused. “That’s what makes this project really hard.”
Javier E

One is the Loneliest Number - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In a world where children are born later and less frequently, and where the two trends intertwine, the life cycle inevitably gets lonelier. Your grandparents are less likely to be involved with your upbringing when you’re young, you’re less likely to have multiple siblings (or even a single brother or sister) to be your companions in childhood and your constants in adulthood, your own children are less likely to have aunts and uncles and cousins and your parents are more likely to pass away (or decline into senescence) before you’re fully established as a grown-up in your own right.
  • There are economic costs to this atomization, just as Shulevitz suggests: Weaker support networks when people are young and struggling, fewer kids to share the burden of an aging relative, and so on. But the emotional costs seem larger — not just the impact of a parent’s early passing, but the non-impact of the relationships you never get to form, because your grandparents are too old and your siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles don’t exist at all.
  • If families do not guarantee happiness, the relationships they create and cultivate nonetheless tend to be richer, more primal, and more permanent than purely voluntary forms of human community.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Families are the most natural link between the generations, the most natural place to turn for solidarity, intimacy and care, the communities where the mystic chords of memory are easiest to strike and most likely to vibrate, resonate, and echo
  • it is not that with bigger families life is necessarily happier, but instead that it is richer, denser. What happiness we have will be more widely and immediately shared, as with our sorrow.” And likewise with what is lost when families shrink and intergenerational bonds attenuate. The cost should be counted, not in daily pleasures sacrificed or swiped away, but in the deep wells of human experience that a post-familial culture may fill in and cover up.
  • This is why the moral aspect of the case for, well, familialism — the hackles-raising argument I’ve been making that a society that isn’t replacing itself isn’t fulfilling a basic intergenerational obligation— cannot just be set aside in favor of less charged and more technocratic arguments about economic self-interest and social cohesion and public health and the sustainability of public pensions and so forth
  • it is still possible to imagine a world of declining birthrates and more attenuated relationships being more comfortable, in strictly material terms, than the present or the past. Matt Yglesias has been making roughly this case, for instance, painting a portrait of a future where the surplus from technology and automation under-writes leisure pursuits (mostly virtual, I would expect) and social-service support for the many singletons left underemployed and unemployable, and everyone else finds work in the booming, ever-expanding elder-caregiver industry.
  • Measured in terms of G.D.P. per capita and life expectancy, that future doesn’t sound so bad. It’s only when you factor in the loss of various rich and fundamental human goods that you realize that it might actually be barren and depressing and yes, decadent — a lanscape, in Goethe’s evocative phrase, in which humanity has “won” in some sense, triumphing provisionally over the challenges of scarcity and illness, but in the process has turned society “into one huge hospital where everyone is everybody else’s humane nurse.”
Javier E

After Trump, conservatives should stop longing for the past - and learn a little humili... - 0 views

  • He explains the illusory appeal of nostalgia-driven politics in the United States, the kind that Trump stokes in coarse, simplistic terms.
  • he offers a path forward for the American right after this campaign, whether it is adjusting to life in Trump’s America or coping again with another electoral setback.
  • Levin wants a humbler, more local conservatism, one less concerned with tearing down Washington or promoting hyper-individualism than with creating space for America’s “mediating institutions” of family and community to blossom
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • This vision involves “a mix of dependence on others and obligations to them,” Levin writes, “and so a connection with specific people with whom you share some meaningful portion of the actual experience of life.”
  • Levin understands the allure of nostalgia; indeed, he believes that almost all contemporary politics is based on it
  • These competing nostalgias, though more sophisticated than Trump’s, are no less misguided, and lead to bad politics and policy.
  • Sure, there is plenty to long for, Levin says. In the early decades of the post-World War II era, the United States enjoyed “relative cultural cohesion, low economic inequality, high confidence in national institutions, and widespread optimism about the nation’s prospects” (especially if you were white and male). But that was a unique pivot point in U.S. history, a time when the country was straddling two opposing forces that would define the American century: consolidation and diffusion.
  • The first half of the 20th century, Levin contends, was an age of consolidation, with a peerless industrial economy, a strong centralized government and a relatively uniform cultural identity shaped by a powerful mass media.
  • In the century’s second half, by contrast, the U.S. economy became more diversified and deregulated, while cultural conformity broke down in favor of individualism and the politics of personal identity.
  • for a fleeting moment at midcentury, it enjoyed the best of both. “The social, political, and economic forms of American life at midcentury made possible a degree of prosperity and cohesion that in turn enabled many Americans to flourish,”
  • “Democrats talk about public policy as though it were always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state will answer our every concern,”
  • Republicans talk as though it were always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution is the cure for what ails us.”
  • This stale — and stalemated — debate leaves people discouraged with politicians who don’t seem engaged with their current struggles. “In the absence of relief from their own resulting frustration, a growing number of voters opt for leaders who simply embody or articulate that frustration,”
  • the nostalgia of the traditional political class is also pernicious and “blinding,” Levin argues, because it keeps us from grappling with the real problems assaulting us in the age of diffusion
  • “In liberating many individuals from oppressive social constraints, we have also estranged many from their families and unmoored them from their communities, work, and faith,”
  • “Rather than decrying the collapse of moral order, we must draw people’s eyes and hearts to the alternative.” Their incessant focus on religious liberty, for example, while important, may be counterproductive, “a fundamentally plaintive and inward-looking minority asking to protect what it has and in essence to be left alone,”
  • In unleashing markets to meet the needs and wants of consumers, we have freed them also to treat workers as dispensable and interchangeable.
  • In pursuing meritocracy, we have magnified inequality.”
  • The result is a bifurcated America, torn between wealth and poverty, order and disorder. “Increasingly, society consists of individuals and a national state, while the mediating institutions — family, community, church, unions, and others — fade and falter.”
  • he worries that the price of this new freedom has been high. “We have set loose a scourge of loneliness and isolation that we are still afraid to acknowledge as the distinct social dysfunction of our age of individualism, just as crushing conformity was the characteristic scourge of an era of cohesion and national unity,”
  • The answer to all this is the pursuit of what Levin describes as a “modernized politics of subsidiarity — that is, of putting power, authority and significance as close to the level of interpersonal community as reasonably possible.”
  • He is most concerned with the thicket of institutions in the middle — families, schools, religious organizations, all the things usually lumped together as civil society.
  • “we should see it as an effort to open up the space between them — the space where a free society can genuinely thrive.” Our objective should be to “channel power and resources to the mediating institutions of society and allow for bottom-up problem solving that takes a variety of specialized, adapted forms.”
  • It is a very Tocquevillian vision, with a dash of Catholic social teaching thrown in. No doubt, to yearn for the renewal of these traditional institutions is its own kind of nostalgia.
  • So how do we go about strengthening families, religious organizations, schools and all those mediating institutions?
  • He calls for a “mobility agenda,” with economic growth spurred by tax and regulatory reform
  • a more competitive and low-cost health-care system, lower budget deficits — all part of a standard conservative recipe.
  • He proposes education reform that includes more professional certificates, apprenticeships “and other ways of gaining the skills for well-paid employment that do not require a college degree.”
  • Levin’s intention here is less to offer detailed proposals than to shift the locus of policymaking itself — and to infuse it with greater humility. “There is not much that public policy can do,” he admits, “to create communities that do a better job of encouraging constructive behavior: it could, however, do less harm, and it could leave room for such communities to form, and protect the space in which they take root and grow.”
  • “In loosening the reins of cultural conformity and national identity we have weakened the roots of mutual trust.
  • Instead, social and religious conservatives should “assert themselves by offering living models of their alternative to the moral culture of our hyper-individualist age.”
  • In other words, less hectoring and lecturing, less trying to remake the culture at large, and more strengthening one’s “near-at-hand community,” Levin writes. He calls this approach “subcultural traditionalism
  • he sees it in “civic groups that channel their energies into making neighborhoods safe and attractive, or into helping the poor, or protecting the vulnerable, or assimilating immigrants, or helping fight addiction
  • in schools that build character and inculcate the values parents think are most important; in religious congregations that mold themselves into living communities of like-minded families, and that turn their faiths into works to improve the lives of others;
  • in the work of teachers and students who are committed to liberal learning and engagement with the deepest questions.”
  • Such a localized focus, Levin maintains, is not “an alternative to fighting for the soul of the larger society, but a most effective means of doing so.”
  • I suspect the fulfillment of Levin’s vision would require a party and a movement that grasp the exhaustion of their current approach. A November defeat, especially a landslide, might accomplish that
Javier E

L'Hôte: all by yourself - 0 views

  • "I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity." freddie7 AT gmail DOT com My brother is a tailor and dressmaker. Check him out. Blog Archive ▼  2011 (81) ▼  April (6) seriousness and honesty are only conditionally vir... all by yourself straight fire failing students drop classes reason for optimism today in unfortunate yet amazing errors, Freddie e... ►  March (30) winning is fast, humanitarianism is slow we don't have a worker shortage quote for the day "you see an old woman...." amen sympathy for the juice box set first principles an open letter to Juan Cole on Libya they should have done a miniseries about Benjamin ... next big thing anniversary note the more things change ad hominems left-wing non-interventionism sorry about comments system how perfect is your knowledge? here they come France and the UK Libya gentrification involves more than the gentry the profession that wants to destroy itself they're bringing back all the classics marijuana legalization is a human rights issue Bobby Sands was an MP damn you, DVD clearance fees links and such a man from somewhere today in insanity the incredible naivete of the incredibly savvy ►  February (33) marked bodies What does it mean for a movie to be experimental a... subversion and containment IOZ on Reason's absurdity Reihan and progressivism/neoliberalism/leftism California good people are everywhere what I want submitted without comment welcome to lottery ticket America another perfect opportunity what's before us by the way the Atlantic and the working class ►  January (12) archivedate collaps
  • Paradoxically, what I find more and more is that the Internet is a place for people to affirm and support each other. It's as if the understanding of the fundamental weakness of these electronic proxies to represent human connection causes people to push for it more and more. And this could be beautiful. But it can also be dangerous. Because of the depth of the loneliness, I blame no one for how they interact and connect with others online. I just worry. I worry about the urge towards conformity. I worry about Twitter. I worry that all of those retweets and all of those "right on"s contribute to a kind of coarse postmodernism, where what the truth becomes what is most agreed on. I worry that dissent is confused with a lack of etiquette. And I particularly worry about the echo chamber effect, and the way that small groups of people who are just like each other can come to think of themselves as representing the opinions of everyone. On the Internet, we all make the world in our own image.
  • The pressure, online, will always be to tack towards the crowd, and people will look endlessly towards their peers-- not intending to undermine the individual voice, but getting there, often, anyway. Don't get judgmental about it, but keep saying your piece. In the tenor of the single voice, you can find strength, and if you keep saying what you think is true, in spite of it all, you will find what is incorruptible in yourself.
Javier E

The University of Oklahoma Video, and the Problem Fraternities Can't Fix Themselves - N... - 0 views

  • I study race and the Greek-letter system on North American campuses. I have interviewed hundreds of members of historically white fraternities and sororities, at big state universities and smaller liberal arts colleges, on the East Coast and in the South. My research indicates that nonwhite students who successfully pledge those groups — roughly 3 to 4 percent of fraternity or sorority members — live a harsh existence of loneliness and isolation.
  • Without attention to the internal power dynamics and racism inside these organizations, we place an inordinate burden on the few students of color in them to carry our torch of idealism while we ignore the banal hostility they face.
  • Nearly all the nonwhite members told me of their white fraternity and sorority brothers’ and sisters’ expectation that they conform to demeaning racial stereotypes. If they failed, they were seen as not fully belonging; if they succeeded, they were understood to be “too” black, Latino or Asian to fit in. This, known as the paradox of participation, governed their acceptance. But to outsiders, the color line was broken.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • All of the examples chosen that represent racial slights or overt racism only raise the specter of how these frat members are raised, what they truly believe, and how organizations that permit such behavior and encourage the newbies to go along with it perpetuate racism in all its forms. As such, the question "what should we do about fraternities" isn't any different from the same question with the terms "KKK", "Neo-Nazis", or "anti semetics" substituted in for "fraternities".
  • The fraternities are a reflection of college life and life in America.There is more polarization on campuses, with students not mixing, exchanging ideas and engaging one another. Instead, they are congregating with other students just like them, and this is occurring across the race and color spectrum. Several college professors blame the Greek system for seeming to foster this division, but I believe it is more of a reflection of what is going on in America, as society is similarly divided and not engaging with anyone who is not alike.Is it risk aversion, need for affirmation, security? Unknown, but while I'm not a fan of the Greek system/life, I do not believe it is the crux of the problem.
  • I will take advantage of the vacuum to explain why my fraternity brought out the worst in its members. The fundamental problem is that most college-age men lack the judgment and life-experience to live together in a self-governing group. Inevitably, the most aggressive, extroverted risk takers will come to dominate the organization. Their best teenage thinking is what gives birth to the worst ideas and greatest excesses of the insular frat life. What else contributes to fraternities' bad reputations? The college administrations, which long ago renounced their in-loco-parentis responsibilities. There was a time when fraternities had seasoned adult house fathers who could keep the guys in line. No more.
  • "Powerful alumni." That's all that really needs to be said. As we've reduced public funding for higher education, universities are more and more dependent on the deep pockets of alumni who are going to place a phone call to any campus administrator who tries to seriously address all the "fun." Drinking, sexual assault, racism. Fraternities are good at breeding loyalty, loyalty to their chapters, loyalty to their campuses. Few universities can afford to toy with that. Note this Atlantic Monthly article, "The Dark Power of Fraternities." http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/02/the-dark-power-of-fr...
  • As a student, it seemed to me that the purpose of fraternities was to reaffirm that education didn't really matter -- a big poke in the eye at anyone who believed that they could advance by excelling academically. What really mattered was how much you could drink and debase yourself in tribute to the bastions of current privilege and wealth
  • for the quality of life in the house, it certainly was not apparent to me. When I came to them with proof positive that a "brother" had stolen a check payable to me, forged my signature and cashed it, they did nothing to sanction him.The dominant group in my fraternity had no apparent thirst for knowledge, just an unquenchable thirst for daily alcohol-fueled parties that lasted into the wee hours with loud music and drugs. We outsiders subsidized their party life and all we got in return was the privilege of living in their zoo.
  • Why do some Greek-letter organizations seem to bring out the worst in people? Historically white fraternal groups can be key mechanisms in the intergenerational transmission of white wealth, power and status. The stakes for belonging are high, and the culture must legitimate its own existence, forcing out those who fail to conform.
1 - 20 of 54 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page