Finally Reading: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff 📚

I’ve put this off because a) I’m sure I already agree with it, b) I’m sure I already hate everything it’s about as much as anyone can hate such things, and c) I stubbornly refused to order it and for the last 5 years I felt like maybe I was politely shaming bookstores across the country who didn’t stock it on their shelves.

I’m reading it now because a) last month I finally found a bookstore in Brunswick who had it (the owner simply said, “It’s terrifying”), b) I’m inspired by the fun fact that the author lives not far from us (or so the bookstore owner tells me), and c) I’ve fallen behind on the anti-smart phone project this year and need a little extra motivation.

It’s also an increasingly important and unavoidable question: How as parents are we going to handle the incredible stupidity of this invasive and life-destroying rectangle?

And so, without further excuse or ado…

Currently Reading: The Present Age by Soren Kierkegaard 📚

Inspired by Matthew Crawford’s recent bit on AI and wedding speeches

What does it mean to outsource a wedding speech to AI? In a very real sense, says Crawford, it means to not show up to the wedding.

And this is, of course, what AI means for most of the things we so happily and thoughtlessly apply it to: It means to not show up for the life you were made to live.

It’s tempting to label the excerpts from Kierkegaard that Crawford uses as nothing short of prescient, but they are probably more accurately described as deeply insightful but oh-so-human.

As Walter Kaufmann puts it, in what is probably the most interesting preface ever written:

Read for the flavour, chew the phrases, enjoy the humour, feel the offence when you are attacked, don’t ignore the author’s blunders, but don’t fail to look for your own shortcomings as well: then the book will make you a better man than you were before. But if you should find it too strenuous to read for the joy and pain of an encounter with a human being who, exasperated with himself, his age, and you, does not—let’s face it—like you, then leave the book alone and do not look for marvellous anticipations!

I shall do my best.

Finished reading: Democracy and Solidarity by James Davison Hunter 📚

Really, very, and quite disappointing. Without question or surprise, Hunter’s description is spot-on and his diagnosis illuminating. But while he kinda-sorta points in a few hopeful directions — namely, hope itself, but also forgiveness, the practice of distinguishing between the morality of citizens and systems, a de-emphasis on the primacy of voting as a marker of citizenship — he says very little about them. In the final chapter, Hunter does say he is hopeful and that he believes “the times are full of real opportunity if one has eyes to see them.” True enough, I think hope. But he follows this immediately by admitting, “Sadly, my eyesight is not very good.”

😒

And that’s about 8 pages from the end of the book.

Among the many reasons for the gloom, I’m sure that the status of our media and social media is high on the list. The healthy, dynamic public square, however elusive it has always been, is a noble and necessary aim. But our current modes of communication and self-education preclude, it seems, even the desire for a public square.

Regardless, in a sense, of America’s particular history, a central prognosis is stated rather bluntly and abruptly in Chapter 11, “The Great Unraveling.” Hunter refers to the “nebulous” status of “truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, real and unreal,” and admits that “the problem will remain entrenched for as long as [our current] media environment exists.” And, aside from the generic need to convince nearly the entire population to “stop snorting and smoking that shit” — i.e. get off social media and turn off the television — who has a solution for that?

Sadly, no one does. (Though some are doing a lot of work in that direction.)

Don’t get me wrong. A clear diagnosis and a sober view of history are worth their weight in democratic gold. As for prescription, Hunter’s previous guidance for “affirmation and antithesis” is as relevant and urgent as ever. And to his credit, he is still nothing if not truthful about the situation. As Makoto Fujimura put it, “hope can be hope only if it admits that which is darkest while urging toward the light.”

I plan to carry the baton of hope as best as I can and to continue pointing in as many good directions as I can find. (Jürgen Moltmann is not a bad place to start 🙂)

But, man, if this book didn’t feel like a really bad handoff…

📚Happy New Book in the Mail Day! Celebrate accordingly — by putting it on the shelf behind all the other books you’ll read “very soon.”

I purchase books in such a way that I can walk up to my own bookshelf and say, “Ooo, I should read that!” 📚

Finished reading: The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andríc 📚

A fascinating tale of the long life of a bridge and the centuries of lives and change that surround it.

But the bridge still stood, the same as it had always been, with the eternal youth of a perfect conception, one of the great and good works of man, which do not know what it means to change and grow old and which, or so it seemed, do not share the fate of the transient things of this world.

(I’ll get around to putting up a few more quotes from the book, but this one is a doozy.)

Happy New Book in the Mail Day! Celebrate accordingly. 📚

Finished reading: Upstream by Mary Oliver 📚

“I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed, to wayward minds and unawakened hearts.”

I am sure I’ve said this before, but I have never once picked up Mary Oliver for even the quickest of reads and not felt that I’d been given some profound gift — articulated in and through a holy lightness, and often with quiet and wry humor. Nothing in nature is too small or too wild or too brute to be disclosed to her or by her in this way.

As Oliver puts it, toward the end of her essay “Swoon,” all of which has been spent observing the activities of a spider, there comes a moment when

the news culminates and, slowly or bluntly, the moral appears. It is music to be played with the lightest of fingers. All the questions that the spider’s curious life made me ask, I know I can find answered in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and more! I have seen it with my own eyes!
But a spider? Even that?
Even that.

Finished reading: Iron John by Robert Bly 📚

What a very, very weird book. And weirdly rich. Some thoughts and quotes here.

Currently Reading: The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram 📚

Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth—our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.