Category: Philosophy

Hannah Miller’s blog post, which I discussed in my previous post, also points to another way in which the urge to document our lives might be problematic, one that I actually was writing about over the weekend. To get to my point quickly, let me reference a great New Yorker cartoon. A woman is addressing the guests at what is evidently a fairly fancy party. She says, “The video of the first half of the party is now playing in the family room.” The apprehension to which this cartoon points, and that I see in Hannah’s post is this: the urge to document our lives, indeed the urge to reflect on our lives, can be a way to escape from living our lives. (I certainly see, though, why Hannah is writing about it at a family event. The urge to reflect is likely to come forward when one is hanging… Continue reading

My friend Hannah Miller has written a fascinating blog post that got me thinking in a little different way about some issues that I’ve been working on for a book I’m slowly finishing. Indeed, I had a two-fold reaction. This is the first. A second is in another post. Hannah starts by asking why we are so busy documenting our lives, implicitly pointing out how so much of what we do on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Picassa, among other sites, is devoted to putting down a record of what’s happened to us and what we care about. She ends by pointing out that geologists whose focus is on deep time—the changes in the planet that take place over eons–both recognize the extent to which our lives are a mere blip in time but also get a sense of connection to eternity. To see the wonderful way she gets from the… Continue reading

The initial reaction to Governor Mark Sanford’s admission of infidelity has been to see it as one more example of the sexual depravity of politicians or perhaps of ambitious, successful men in general. Sanford was initially portrayed as another man who gave into sexual desire because he could, that is because some combination of the opportunities presented to him by women infatuated with power on the one hand, and his self-absorption, on the other, lead him risk his career and his family in pursuit of sexual pleasure. But, it did not take long for at least some people to see that Sanford is different. He’s no Eliot Spitzer pursuing sex with an expensive call girl. He’s no Jack Kennedy, keeping a few women on his staff for the purpose of satisfying him whenever he got the urge. No one in pursuit of just sex takes up with a woman thousands… Continue reading

Tension between generations undoubtedly goes back to the time when extended families or tribes became part of larger communities, thereby giving young people the possibility of forming attachments and loyalties outside their own tribe. It got a new source of energy when companionate marriage arose to challenge the right of parents to marry off their children as they saw fit. It intensified again when adolescence and a distinctive youth culture was created in the early twentieth century. And it took its contemporary form in the fifties and sixties when rock and roll and the pill made sex (and drug and rock n roll) panics the preferred manner in which the older generated condemned the behavior of the younger generation. The latest sex panic article appeared in the op-ed pages of the New York Times yesterday. A piece by Charles M. Blow reports that dating appears to be dying among young… Continue reading