| Friday, August 31, 2007 |
| Exploring and exposing the 'Modern Machine' [a book excerpt] |
Hola. I've been typing up a long (but sweet) book excerpt bit-by-bit for a long time - from even before this blog became the official SF blog. But today, as I was wondering what special post to put out to celebrate my return to switchfeeding (after a month of barely any computer access thanks to a combination of technical difficulties and change of residence), I decided to finish typing this up for you guys to read. It's also been a while since the last "song meanings" post (which you guys loved - thanks!), so this is the newest installment to that column - a thought-provoking excerpt from a very insightful book that I've been reading, that reminded me a lot of the lyrics in Switchfoot's "Circles" - and, to me, is an elaboration of the lines "don't believe that there's nothing that's true / don't believe in this modern machine!" The last paragraph of the excerpt sums it up well (and reminds me of when Jon said something similar while explaining "Lonely Nation"):
The peoples of the modern West (and the middle classes of non-western cultures) are better fed, better housed, better equipped with health care than those in any previous age in human history. But, paradoxically, they also seem to be the most fearful, the most divided, the most lonely, the most superstitious, and the most bored generation in human history. All the labour-saving devices of modern technology have only enhanced human stress, and modern life is characterized by a restless movement from place to place, from one 'experience' to another, in a frenetic whirl of purposeless activity.
That last sentence clearly paraphrases the idea of spinning in circles, of "another day, another sunrise, another factory call." Without further ado, HERE'S Vinoth Ramachandra (a Sri Lankan author) in an excerpt from his book "Gods That Fail" (you should totally buy the book if you like this excerpt - he's a brilliant man). thanks for reading,
-phil
PS: If you're new to this blog and would like to know why I'm here and more about our story (a couple of you had asked about this by email recently), please visit this post, where I've shared all the juicy details. Now on to the long-but-worthwhile book excerpt. (note: footnotes were excluded - 14 of them.) Looking forward to hearing your thoughts in the comment box as usual!
EXCERPT (from "Gods That Fail" by Vinoth Ramachandra):
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It has often been remarked that modern men and women have little sense of history. We are all prone to consider our own generation as somehow special, unmatched in the depth of its crises no less than in its achievements. So it comes as some surprise to be reminded that many of the themes that have dominated the second half of the twentieth century were first conceived in the European 'cultural crisis' of the 1890s. Amidst the declining glory of Hapsburg Vienna, for instance, there emerged the study of the subconscious and its role in the irrationalities of everyday life, the notion of nationhood as the basis for political identity, and a preoccupation with language and its effect on the 'construction' of reality . . . The decade also saw the rise of sociology as an organized scientific discipline with its inquiries into mass urban culture, rationalization and bureaucracy, suicide and anomie. Significant as recent global socio-economic changes are, especially in the past two decades, they should not be exaggerated. For, as even that guru of the new 'knowledge society', Daniel Bell, admitted in a footnote in his famous book, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, 'In terms of daily life of individuals, more change was experienced between 1850 and 1940- when railroad, steamships, telegraph, electricity, telephone, automobile, radio and airplanes were introduced- than in the period since when the future is supposed to be accelerating. In fact, other than television, there has not been one major innovation which affected the daily life of persons to the extent of the items enumerated.'
Those who subscribe to the more radical postmodernist creed also hold that long-held distinctions between reality and appearance, truth and falsehood, valid and invalid reasoning, ethical principle and social conviction, are relics of a now-discredited Platonic-Christian-Enlightenment (Kantian, Marxist, or whatever) heritage in the West. The argument sometimes starts off on the liberal premise that truth-claims have often gone along with a notion of privileged access by an elite who have used their intellectual authority and political power to impose their version of the truth on others. It ends with variations on the Nietzchean theme that 'truth' is nothing more than the product of a specific human discourse, with postmodern life the belated recognition and celebration of multiple and conflicting discourses.
Hence the American pragmatist Richard Rorty's cheery recommendation to his fellow philosophers that they join theologians in giving up their deluded notions of dealing with matters of ultimate truth, and rejoin the cultural 'conversation of mankind' on equal terms with sociologists, literary critics, novelists and others who never entertained such high-minded ambitions. We should substitute 'solidarity' for 'objectivity', a sense of shared consensus-based values and beliefs for the attempt to 'get things right' from a critical standpoint. Talk of 'truth' now becomes simply a rhetorical device, a label of convenience attached to those ideas which currently enjoy widespread approval. It can be re-defined for all practical purposes as 'good in the way of belief'.
Such recommendations have a less than benign aspect when we consider how easily public opinion can be manipulated and consensus-values engineered to serve some very illiberal forms of political behaviour. Those versions of the pragmatist-post-modernist creed which are suspicious of 'outwork' ideas such as truth, critique and ethical accountability, are simply unable to discriminate between a true consensus based on beliefs arrived at by open argument and debate, and a false consensus that rests solely on collective prejudice, mass-media distortion and the force majeure of propaganda. Like those fashionable slogans proclaiming the 'end of history' and the 'end of ideology' they end up serving to legitimatise the cynical interests of American realpolitik.
Thus Francis Fukuyama, a Rand corporation protege, became an overnight celebrity on the US lecture circuit in those heady years between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the Gulf War--by pronouncing, with splendid assurance, the 'end of history'. Since the whole world--or the world that really mattered--had now embraced free-market capitalism and liberal democracy, ideological conflict was now a thing of the past and history had effectively come to an end. Of course there would be those awkward 'trouble-spots' around the world which refused to accept the New World Order, and critical intellectuals everywhere who still indulged in Canute-like gestures to fend off the tidal waves of change, but these could be consigned to the scrapheap of history. In a later article on the Gulf War, Fukuyama wrote: 'A large part of the world will be populated by Iraqs and Ruratanias, and will continue to be subject to bloody struggles and revolutions. But, with the exception of the Gulf, few regions will have an impact--for good or ill--on the growing part of the world that is democratic and capitalist. And it is in this part of the world that we will ultimately have to make our home.'
Here is the classic pattern of ideological scape-goating: the projection of blame on to a racial or cultural Other (the 'Iraqs and Ruritanias' in the new geopolitical order), which enables 'us' (that civilized part of the world which 'we will ultimately have to make our home') to live with an easy conscience, convinced of our moral superiority despite all the evidence of western connivance and complicity in the 'bloody struggles and revolutions' in the non-western world. Barbarism always resides elsewhere. Fukuyama's 'end of history' sloganeering disguises the massive hypocrisy, political betrayals, economic blackmail and proxy violence that have so often attended western talk of defending democracy and exporting 'free world' values. Media coverage of the Gulf War, like the coverage of American domestic political campaigns, provided a depressing spectacle of public-opinion management far more ruthless than any existing in pre-modern societies. The first casualty in the build-up to, and prosecution of, the war was truth: the re-writing of regional history, the 'whitewashing' of Kuwait and Saudi Arabian despotism, bogus casualty-figures issued for public consumption, massive urban destruction concealed by talk of 'precision bombing' and 'surgical strikes' and so on . . . But how can such a critique emerge from intellectuals who can no longer distinguish between truth and what the majority have come to believe, and how can such a critique be sustained in a world mesmerized by cable TV?
For those of us unfortunate folk who happen to live among the 'Iraqs and Ruritanias' of the late twentieth-century world, the perspective is rather different. The political naivete of writers such as Rorty and Fukuyama raises searching questions about the 'postmodernist' paradigm. Is all such talk of 'truth' and 'reality' as being fictive and imaginative constructions, having no extra-linguistic reference (often advanced, paradoxically, as a genuine and liberating insight), simply a reflection of the pervasive influence of the electronic media today? In other words, has the cultural ascendancy of advertising agencies, public relations experts, opinion-poll samplers, and 'virtual reality' engineers, lent plausibility to such notions, a plausibility that is lacking in earlier phases of modernity and in those countries that have still to fall completely under the spell of the electronic high-priests? I am inclined to think so.
Writing fifty years ago of a famous CBS radio war bond sales-drive, the American sociologist Robert Merton observed shrewdly that these propagandists were 'technicians of sentiment' and warned that 'a society subjected ceaselessly to a flow of "effective" half-truths and the exploitation of mass anxieties may all the sooner lose that mutuality of confidence and reciprocal trust so essential to a stable social structure'. It is open to serious question whether any participant democracy can function for long on the basis of consensus-values derived via the mass media. Today's 'technicians of sentiment' have achieved a level of sophistication so great that, for the bored youngsters of the affluent world, MTV and Disneyland have become the paramount reality. Madonna, of course, is the great icon of postmodernism: a kaleidoscope of shifting images (the femme fatale, the vulnerable Monroe, the androgyne, the gangster moll, the arch-capitalist, et al.), a celebration of fragmentation and the loss of depth that, as we shall see, are the hall-marks of the late modern world.
Having rejected both a biblical theology of creation and humanist talk of a 'universal human nature', writers such as Rorty are hard pressed to find a moral framework within which we can locate a sense of place and of human 'solidarity'. Rorty can only fall back on a pragmatist appeal to nationalist sentiment as a basis for policy. Thus he remarks on 'the attitude of contemporary American liberals to the unending hopelessness and misery of the lives of the young blacks in American cities. Do we say that these people must be helped because they are our fellow human beings? We may, but it is much more persuasive, morally as well as politically, to describe them as our fellow Americans--to insist that it is outrageous that an American can live without hope.' Whether such appeals are persuasive to the inhabitants of Fukuyama's 'Iraqs and Ruritanias'--who are now being wooed into the benefits of liberal democracy and respect for 'human rights'--is open to serious doubt. It is paradoxical that just as talk of 'truth' has historically been used to consolidate power by dividing people into 'us' and 'them' (a point stressed repeatedly by postmodernist critics of modernity), here even the language of 'solidarity' serves only to cement narrow sectarian interests...
1.2 Modernity as Paradox
The renowned Czech philosopher, novelist and statesman Vaclav Havel has identified the most distinctive feature of modern life as a 'loss of co-ordinates'. He writes, 'I believe that with the loss of God, man has lost a kind of absolute and universal system of co-ordinates, to which he could always relate everything, chiefly himself. His world and his personality gradually began to break up into separate, incoherent fragments corresponding to different, relative, co-ordinates...'
Havel was reflecting on the inherent weaknesses of modern western societies, the very model his newly independent country was being persuaded to follow. He saw the consumerist culture of the West to be as oppressive to the human spirit as the repression Eastern Europe had suffered for most of the present century. The recent history of Eastern Europe, he believes, holds up to the West a convex mirror, giving a grotesquely magnified image of the West's own inherent tendencies. Modernity had let loose forces that bred conformity, a herd culture, either in the overt form of totalitarian regimes or the covert homogenizing pressures of consumerism. The banal freedoms of choice, represented by the ubiquitous Coca-Cola ads, shopping malls and MacDonald's fast-food chains (which have become the universal symbol of modernity), conceal a loss of human freedoms at deeper, more profound levels. For every achievement of modernity, there is also a demonic underside. Liberal capitalism and Marxism were actually twin aspects of the same phenomenon, generated by the loss of coordinates in the modern world. They followed the 'irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power - the power of ideologies, systems, bureaucracy, artificial languages and political slogans'.
Havel's mathematical imagery is instructive. Co-ordinates express the way things are related to each other. They provide a point of reference, a scale by which entities may be measured and seen in their true proportions, a map which helps us find our bearings and our way around reality. The belief in God had been the traditional unifying focus for such a system of co-ordinates in western culture. So, in one important perspective, the modern condition is characterized by a displacement of God from that focal position. It is not the case that God has been explicitly expunged from modern consciousness (though this was vigorously attempted, for instance, by the French version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and also by the latter's Marxist successors in the twentieth); but rather that God has been pushed to the fringes of consciousness, and his function taken over by surrogate deities (e.g. Nature, Posterity, The State, The Market, and so on).
The historical origins of modern secular culture are still a matter of scholarly debate, and I do not propose to venture into this complex terrain. What has become increasingly clear, however, is that the popular self-image of modernity, namely as representing a radical break with a Christian worldview and the emancipation of human reason from the oppressive grip of ecclesiastical interests, lacks historical plausibility. There seems to have been more intellectual freedom in the late medieval period in Europe than in the heydey of the French Enlightenment, more participatory citizenship in the medieval 'free cities' of Europe and the 'holy commonwealths' of Puritan New England than in many of today's so-called 'advanced democracies'. The roots of modernity itself were nourished by Christian theology as much as by the pre-Christian philosophies of Greece and Rome. Max Weber's famous thesis that Puritan rationality and piety furnished the character-formation necessary for the rise of a capitalist economy is now recognized to have been greatly exaggerated, but it has served to draw our attention to the unique intellectual climate in which modernity emerged. This is seen especially in the rise of experimental natural science which remains the most prominent and influential aspect of modern society. Not only were Christian values embodied in scientific practice, but the enterprise of science itself was founded on a specific understanding of God, human beings and the world which sprang from Reformation theology.
Furthermore, the political philosopher Charles Taylor has recently highlighted what he calls the 'affirmation of ordinary life' which was given new and unprecedented significance at the beginning of the modern era. This, Taylor believes, has also become 'one of the most powerful ideas of modern civilization'. By the 'affirmation of ordinary life' he refers to the biblical notion, re-discovered in the Reformation, that the everyday life of human production and reproduction, of work and the family, is the main locus of the good life and carries an inherent dignity and worth. Taylor points out: 'According to traditional, Aristotelian ethics, this has merely infrastructural influence. "Life" was important as the necessary background and support to "the good life" of contemplation and one's action as a citizen. With the Reformation, we find that a modern, Christian-inspired sense that ordinary life was on the contrary the very centre of the good life. The crucial issue was how it was led, whether worshipfully and in the fear of God or not. But the life of the God-fearing was lived out in marriage and their calling. The previous "higher" forms of life were dethroned, as it were. And along with this went frequently an attack, covert or overt, on the elites which had made these forms their province.' What Taylor asserts here with regard to Aristotelian ethics is also valid for the monastic religious traditions of Asian societies.
However, there is another aspect to modernity that eventually submerged whatever Christian paths may have led to it. The indirect and unforeseen political consequences of the Reformation, reaching a climax in the bitter Wars of Religion in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, provided the momentum which propelled the European states towards a social and political order that was based on 'natural religion' rather than on any particular confessional creed. In his massive work The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, Henning Graf Reventlow has explored the widespread influence of ancient Greek, and especially Stoic, sources on the thinkers of the early modern period, and the way in which the Bible, while still an undisputed authority in political and ethical argument, came increasingly to be read within the framework of an alien rationalist temper. The God of the Bible became the abstract, a historical deity of philosophical theism.
The God who is displaced from the co-ordinating centre of human thought and life doesn't simply disappear. God may cease to be the transcendent Other, standing over and above the human world, but he resurfaces in the guise of the human Self. Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is typically taken as the founder of the modern concept of knowledge: knowledge which takes mathematical certainty as its ideal, independent of the authority of the past, grounded in the individual human subject. A straight line could be drawn in the history of ideas from this approach to Feuerbach's (1804-1872) position, deeply influential in the Marxist tradition, that all the attributes of a transcendent God refer, in reality, to the collective human consciousness. Theology has now been translated into anthropology.
The straight line extends naturally and inexorably to what is today referred to as the 'End of Enlightenment' or, 'high modernity' in Giddens' less dramatic terminology: a temper of mind that is dismissive of central Enlightenment notions such as objectivity, truth, critique, right reason and 'progress'. Even the reality of a unified human subject is now denied. In the early phases of modernity, the threatening experience of 'all that is solid melts into air' was countered by locating order and meaning in the autonomous human self (thinking, willing and judging); but now, that semi-divine self has splintered and dissolved into numerous 'subject positions' each thrown up by some context-specific human discourse. The human self is simply the point of interaction of myriad social and cultural forces. To use a famous metaphor of the French writer Michel Foucault, it is inscribed in sand on the ocean's edge, soon to be erased by the incoming tide.
Here it seems that postmodernism is simply modernism come home to roost. A movement that sought to guard the objectivity of truth from theological 'interference' has ended up doubting the very concept of truth. A movement that gloried in reason and exalted it above divine revelation has come to spurn the rational in every area of life. A movement that began with the divinization of the self has culminated in the loss of that very self.
These are but some of the many paradoxes of modernity. An age that began with a vigorous defence of human individuality spawned, in the regions of the world most influenced by modernity, either totalitarian states more all-embracing than any in antiquity or an equally oppressive consumerist conformity. The belief in human progress through the conquest of nature unleashed forces that now threaten the human species itself with extinction. The installation of Man as the Creator of all meaning and value, in an attempt to throw off the dead weight of the past and 'begin all over again', has as its outcome the denial of any meaning to the world and any significance to humankind. Modern life-styles promise freedom but lead to slavishly followed 'fads' and to new and powerful addictions. Modern relationships place a high premium on intimacy and authenticity, but are prone to fears of manipulation and one-upmanship. The marginalization of religion has itself bred numerous new religious movements, so that some of the most secularized states of the world are experiencing a nourishing of 'religious' interest. On modern college campuses in the West, works on astrology, mysticism and shamanism are evidently more popular than the works of Hume or Locke.
The peoples of the modern West (and the middle classes of non-western cultures) are better fed, better housed, better equipped with health care than those in any previous age in human history. But, paradoxically, they also seem to be the most fearful, the most divided, the most lonely, the most superstitious, and the most bored generation in human history. All the labour-saving devices of modern technology have only enhanced human stress, and modern life is characterized by a restless movement from place to place, from one 'experience' to another, in a frenetic whirl of purposeless activity.
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Labels: song meanings |
posted by phil @ 4:04 AM  
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| 24 Comments: |
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those with terribly short attention spans (or lack of time) should read at least the second half (marked "1.2 Modernity as Paradox"). it's where the "circles" parallel starts to become more apparent anyway...
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First of all - nice to have you back phil. :)
Thanks for typing that up too, it's a pretty long excerpt there, and despite my really wanting to read it all right now, I should go to bed (wouldn't want to be tired when at a SF concert). I read the first bit though and it looks really interesting and thought-provoking.
I've been thinking about various things a lot lately too, so opening up switchfeed to find something like this is a nice surprise.
P.S. Did it always say "A Philemon Thomas Production" down the bottom?
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thanks nat - it's nice to be back. :)
and no, I added "A Philemon Thomas production" recently at the bottom of switchfeed.com because I'd applied for a program in publishing, and this blog is kind of like my portfolio plus "work experience". so I added that just to prove (to the admissions people when they check the site) that this blog's story which I shared in my cover letter is true.
it's why I changed my name on here from "phil" to my real name a while ago, but then lately I haven't been posting much and at one point my name was barely even on the front page so I decided to put it at the bottom of the blog... I must admit I got the idea from the guy who started facebook haha- for the longest time, it said at the bottom of every facebook page "a mark zuckerberg production". guess I'll take it down once we put together a "credits" page profiling the people involved with this blog...been wanting to do that for a while.
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...oh and have fun at the SF show!
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Welcome back Phil, it's nice to have you back! I always love when you write the definition of a song! It gives me an idea of what other people think and believe what the song means!
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Later today I will be payed 9 dollars an hour to read this....at the slow point in the day. Now however this is simple too much good reading to waste trying to read it between the busyness. So later I shall return...and enjoy myself!
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dude that excerpt was delicious. he is a geeeeenius.
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Well now, that's some food for thought! I can't say I understood all of it, so I won't pretend to, but what I like most is the last paragraph.
Also the paragraph that begins with "Such recommendations have a less than benign aspect when we consider how easily public opinion can be manipulated..." pushes "don't believe in this modern machine!" from circles for me.
I appreciate the fact that this took you a while to type up, so thanks for that and thanks for posting. :)
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Nice to have you back Phil. Your Switchfoot crew took great care of the site while you were gone.
Look forward to reading your newest post when time allows.
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Hi guys, im from Córdoba Argentina, and i´d like to say that this particular video opened up my mind, i do drugs and i´m really sry about that, u really help me out with this, and u know what´s the problem about this, that im a christian person, i have a ministery in my church, i´ve got a band, it calls factorpositivo wich means positive factor, how ironic is that ? ... thx again u guys really rock, ur sound is amazing, god bless u
i won´t look back ... no more drugs! i don´t need to smoke to expand my mind, thx drew ...
Matt - Cba. Argentina
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Mmmm. Sri Lankan people are cool. ;]
I'm going to have to read all that when I have some free time.
Thanks for everything Phil!
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yep i think its wrong that people in western culture are so relaxed, they take everything they have and all the comforts for granted! why should they be the ones to complain or be bored, even the people in africa or south america dont have anything and yet most of them try to live their lives to the full even though they have nothing to do it with! plz think about where ur lives are going people! woohoo! im going to see switchfoot in sydney tonight!
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thanks guys!
@emily- yeah...it's hard to keep up with his intensity and vocabulary at times, but it's totally worth trying to press through that anyway and read/understand it, it's really eye opening stuff...like he does in that paragraph you mentioned, i love how he clinically rips on fukuyama and the shallowness of some other "modern" ideas/ideologists that have been widely embraced. he comments on everything from buddhism to the (sadly) corporate image of contemporary christianity, with a fine understanding of church history and just history in general. his pleasantly surprising take on the creation story was memorable, where he used the narrative itself to prove how the genesis story is figurative. and he exposes all these idols (of the intellect) and pseudo-gods of the modern world brilliantly. completely recommended reading.
@natasha- I mentioned he was Sri Lankan just so you could rejoice at that. =D and yeah you should read this when you get time.
@factorpositivo- thanks for sharing that with us. glad the video from the previous post inspired you!
@lori- thanks! yeah, vicky, gellie and arpit did a great job... I forgot to say a word about that. I don't know what I'd do w/o these guys.
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i think i'll have to read that since Jon wrote a song kinda about it!;)
great updates.....im gonna go check out that book now..lol!
~lydz
p.s. wecome back phill!!!
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This is exactly what Pope John Paul the Great said in one of his encyclicals when he says, "Life is not a series of sensations to be experice, but rather a work to be accomplished." Thank You for putting this blog up, and thank you switchfoot for daring us to live more than the modern machine.
God Bless
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@Phil- Mhmmm :) You make me proud.
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Sorry...that truly was a "test" comment not a request for a test on what you uploaded.
Anyway, I am both short on time AND attention (ATDD)so I'll have to find a really quiet spot with no distractions and a few spare moments to read through the post, but I'm looking forward to it.
In the meantime, I thought of the song Circles the other day when I had a conversation with an Israeli Jewish man. His perspective on Jesus was interesting. He said that Jesus was probably the best public speaker ever. He felt that Jesus had the advantage of the right social, economic, and political atmosphere to advance his message but that he was no Rabbi and definitely not the Messiah. And he was only a part of history. He said the same thing happened in post WW I Germany with Hitler and in Russia with the rise of Stalin and communism. He said, "You know, History just repeats itself"
He was right about one thing, history does have a way of repeating itself, and a very wise King said the same thing centuries ago when he stated "There is nothing new under the sun"
"Circles" is such an ecclesiastical song...all of life is circular unless there is an interruption to the pattern. We get stuck in our brokenness, we repeat the same mistakes, we don't move forward.
Modern technology is just another manifestation of the circles we tend to walk in every day. It enables our brokeness to continue no more or less than any other trend in history, but it does nothing to alleviate the problem of a fractured world.
Jesus came to break the circular pattern. He presented the radical revolution, the interruption, the tangent to free us from the repetitive pattern of our brokeness. And in spite of what "discoveries" or solutions modern day sociologists lay claim to, their answers are also "a chasing after the wind" and are doomed to be repeated years from now
I don't know if this blog is the place to state my opinion on all of this, but it seemed to fit the topic. Forgive me if I've overstepped the boundaries.
Thanks for the intelligent post. I love food for thought!
(and there are some concert photos from Valdosta I'm dying for you to see!!)
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yet another amazing post! I gotta set aside a time to really read it.
Oh, and Phil, I sent you an email. Hope you got it. If not I'll send another one...
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Hey Phil.
It is great to have you back and with another insightful post. I want to thank you for posting the "Switchfoot Fan Club" Facebook link in the left column of your blog. I've been keeping the group up-to-date and thanks to some multimedia improvements in Facebook, the group has some newly added features and the number of members keeps growing.
Thanks again for your support and it’s great to have you back.
Take care-
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Hey there! Great to see what's happening at Switchfeed and that there's a dedicated team of wonderful people bringing us the latest from our favourite band. I'm writing from New Zealand, and noticed that the gig in Auckland was supposed to be in NX. Please could you change this, becuase we love Switchfoot so much in NZ we don't want them to go to anywhere else, especially somewhere that is a typo! Cheers.
And next time, they should really come to Wellington. (If you see them, please tell them!) It'd mean sooo much to us down here and even if it's for one night, me and my Switchfoot loving pals down here in the Capital would loveLoveLOVE to see them, and to let them see our beautifully windy Capital. Thanks so much!
God Bless
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go to switchfeed twice so you can vote for MUTEMATH's "Typical" in the fuse box at the top, too!
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Phil-
Sounds interesting, but not something I can delve into right now.
Do you think the Genesis creation story was figurative like he suggests? Or does it just interest you?
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I replied on the boards. :)
Yeah, this author is a bit difficult to read, especially if you're not used to philosophy. :)
Thanks for posting it though! Phil, I have a few book recommendations for you if you'll have them. I recommend them to everyone really, but I particularly think you (and probably Jon too) will enjoy them.
Also, I'd be interested in hearing that bit about Genesis. Not so much in his prove of it's figurativeness, but rather what that figurativeness means for us.
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those with terribly short attention spans (or lack of time) should read at least the second half (marked "1.2 Modernity as Paradox"). it's where the "circles" parallel starts to become more apparent anyway...