Rad Insight for Twenty-eleven

[slimvintage]

Maybe we all knew this, but it took these guys to let us know we knew.
To me that's what being really and truly in sync with the zeitgeist is all about: recognizing existential trends. And it's especially great when someone recognizes one in such a creative way as Dreyfus and Kelly.

Pretty dry stuff for holiday posting on a porn forum, but if a couple of my fellow forumites, whooshers like me, get it, and nod and smile: great.

The article below, from the December 30 New York Times,
is by Op-Ed columnist David Brooks. It's called The Arena Culture​

Academic life encourages specialization and technical thinking, and, oddly, there are few fields in which this is more true than philosophy. The discipline that should be of interest to everybody is often the most impenetrable.

But occasionally brave philosophers do leap out of their professional lanes and illuminate things for the wider public. Hubert Dreyfus of Berkeley and Sean Dorrance Kelly of Harvard have just done this with their new book, “All Things Shining.” They take a smart, sweeping run through the history of Western philosophy. But their book is important for the way it illuminates life today and for the controversial advice it offers on how to live.

Dreyfus and Kelly start with Vico’s old idea that each age has its own lens through which people see the world. In the Middle Ages, for example, “people could not help but experience themselves as determined or created by God.” They assumed that God’s plans encompassed their lives the way we assume the laws of physics do.

For the past hundred years or so, we have lived in a secular age. That does not mean that people aren’t religious. It means there is no shared set of values we all absorb as preconscious assumptions. In our world, individuals have to find or create their own meaning.

This, Dreyfus and Kelly argue, has led to a pervasive sadness. Individuals are usually not capable of creating their own lives from the ground up. So modern life is marked by frequent feelings of indecision and anxiety. People often lack the foundations upon which to make the most important choices.

Dreyfus and Kelly suffer from the usual Cambridge/Berkeley parochialism. They assume that nobody believes in eternal truth anymore. They write as if all of America’s moral quandaries are best expressed by the novelist David Foster Wallace. But they are on to something important when they describe the way — far more than in past ages — sports has risen up to fill a spiritual void.

Spiritually unmoored, many people nonetheless experience intense elevation during the magical moments that sport often affords. Dreyfus and Kelly mention the mood that swept through the crowd at Yankee Stadium when Lou Gehrig delivered his “Luckiest Man Alive” speech, or the mood that swept through Wimbledon as Roger Federer completed one of his greatest matches.

The most real things in life, they write, well up and take us over. They call this experience “whooshing up.” We get whooshed up at a sports arena, at a political rally or even at magical moments while woodworking or walking through nature.

Dreyfus and Kelly say that we should have the courage not to look for some unitary, totalistic explanation for the universe. Instead, we should live perceptively at the surface, receptive to the moments of transcendent whooshes that we can feel in, say, a concert crowd, or while engaging in a meaningful activity, like making a perfect cup of coffee with a well-crafted pot and cup.

We should not expect these experiences to cohere into a single “meaning of life.” Transcendent experiences are plural and incompatible. We should instead cultivate a spirit of gratitude and wonder for the many excellent things the world supplies.

I’m not sure this way of living will ever prove satisfying to most readers. Most people have a powerful sense that there is a Supreme Being over us, attached to eternal truths. Though they try, Dreyfus and Kelly don’t give us a satisfying basis upon which to distinguish the whooshing some people felt at civil rights rallies from the whooshing others felt at Nazi rallies.

But Dreyfus and Kelly might help invert the way we see the world. We have official stories we tell about our culture: each individual is the captain of his own ship; we are all children of God. But in practice, willy-nilly, the way we actually live is at odds with the official story. Our most vibrant institutions are collective, not individual or religious. They are there to create that group whoosh: the sports stadium, the concert hall, the political rally, the theater, the museum and the gourmet restaurant. Even church is often more about the ecstatic whoosh than the theology.

The activities often dismissed as mere diversions are actually central. Real life is more about serial whooshes than coherent meaning.

We can either rebel against this superficial drift, or like Dreyfus and Kelly, go with the flow, acknowledging that the autonomous life is impossible, not seeking totalistic theologies, but instead becoming sensitive participants in the collective whooshings that life offers.

This clarifies the choices before us. This book is also a rejection of the excessive individualism of the past several decades, the emphasis on maximum spiritual freedom. In this, it’s a harbinger of future philosophies to come. Our culture is defined by arenas. Our self-conception just hasn’t caught up.

 

[Jayman01]

Slim, Thank you for sharring this information. I am still trying to digest all of it. I am working until 3pm today. So, I keep coming back to it spuratically between live calls. I should just print it rather than switch between screens but my printer in not hooked up to this computer. This is great information...

 

[JLipps4u]

Slim,
You are quite correct, it is rather dry stuff! It is quite interesting though, to me anyway. How well they capture the essence of what our cluturereally embraces. It is indeed, food for thought.

 

[Ms. Kianna]

That is a lot to think about. There is a huge amount of truth there though.

 

[lovelumps]

Whooshing, here...

Slim,

This idea of riding the whooshes in life really resonates here. In my little corner of the universe, we (here, our immediate circle of friends) have eschewed organized religion as a way of making sense out of life. We find little comfort in the doctrine from our quite diverse religious backgrounds. Having to define our spirituality by labeling it one thing is impossible. Many of us have studied in college and post-grad different philosophies and traditions that largely make more sense to us, but don't mesh well with the Christian principals we've been taught, or better, they mesh perfectly, but leave a great question mark regarding formal worship and religious practice.

So, we've given up trying to find the right church. Instead, we rely on each other for comfort and counsel, ride the waves of grief and joy together, teach our children love, acceptance and compassion and demonstrate that daily so they understand and really start to live it, as well. Our collective whooshes are what bring us all together, give us the feeling of belonging, understanding and acceptance that we need to make sense of the world and to give our life purpose. We celebrate the individual whooshes with relish and sometimes we whoosh together for no good reason.

Interesting and thought provoking article. I think a little further research on this is in order. Thanks, Slim! Happy Whooshing, everyone!

 

[mikeyank]

......................................Spiritually unmoored, many people nonetheless experience intense elevation during the magical moments that sport often affords. Dreyfus and Kelly mention the mood that swept through the crowd at Yankee Stadium when Lou Gehrig delivered his “Luckiest Man Alive” speech, or the mood that swept through Wimbledon as Roger Federer completed one of his greatest matches.

The most real things in life, they write, well up and take us over. They call this experience “whooshing up.” We get whooshed up at a sports arena, at a political rally or even at magical moments while woodworking or walking through nature.

Dreyfus and Kelly say that we should have the courage not to look for some unitary, totalistic explanation for the universe. Instead, we should live perceptively at the surface, receptive to the moments of transcendent whooshes that we can feel in, say, a concert crowd, or while engaging in a meaningful activity, like making a perfect cup of coffee with a well-crafted pot and cup.


But Dreyfus and Kelly might help invert the way we see the world. We have official stories we tell about our culture: each individual is the captain of his own ship; we are all children of God. But in practice, willy-nilly, the way we actually live is at odds with the official story. Our most vibrant institutions are collective, not individual or religious. They are there to create that group whoosh: the sports stadium, the concert hall, the political rally, the theater, the museum and the gourmet restaurant. Even church is often more about the ecstatic whoosh than the theology.

The activities often dismissed as mere diversions are actually central. Real life is more about serial whooshes than coherent meaning.

I find this a fascinating take on "the meaning of life", and as a person who gets totally wrapped up in sporting events involving "my teams", I can certainly relate, as well as to those who get their "kicks" or "whooshs" from concerts, politics, theater, museums, fine dining, or even religion.

Religion can be used for negative purposes in society, but I know of many true believers who love God, more than anything else, and believe that he controls their lives, and they are at peace, and I admire them as well. And it is true that it is hard "to distinguish the whooshing some people felt at civil rights rallies from the whooshing others felt at Nazi rallies." That is a value judgement that our own morals will decide for us, but the "whoosh", I'm sure is equal to the individuals who attend both types of events.

I have jokingly told friends that some of my great moments in sports are like a "religious experience". From this perspective, I should take the word jokingly away. I can remember exactly where I was sitting in the arenas, or where I was watching or listening to a game on television or radio for certain key moments over the years in magic moments involving the Yankees, or Duke basketball or the football Giants. I can remember my exact emotions of those exhilarating moments. I have also semi-joked with friends that a game winning home run in game seven of the world series is better than sex.

Thank you Slim for sharing this most though provoking information.

And Happy New Year to all!!!!

 

[Jayman01]

I found this topic to be very enlightening and it pretty much resonates with some things that came out in a discussion I had with my best friend, who is a special education teacher, this past Christmas.

I guess I don’t believe that going with the ebb and flow is necessarily a bad thing. I don’t see it as a great thing either. LOL It provides a lot of safety because we are not perceived as unique or different. The Universal Laws of Attraction and Energy are impeded when we are not living life deliberately and with purpose. When we make a decision or choose a direction or goal we set into motion the Laws of Attraction and Energy. We also open the doors for our soul to learn and grow through our consequences that naturally follow with the making of a decision. Keep in mind that consequences and be both bad and good. By constantly going with the flow we are learning next to nothing and we our souls are not growing.

These days I think very few of our children are taught that it is OK to go against the standardized norms of life. This kind of mind set is now pretty much ingrained in our students any more. Many schools have been eliminating or drastically downsizing: art, individualized sports, theater, and music programs. These are the kind of programs that support individualized thoughts and autonomy. The loss of these programs is harmful to our youth. You see programs like art, music, and individualized sports open the doors for spiritual mediation and spiritual relaxation. These arenas are key to intrinsic spiritual insight as well as inner peace.

More over, students are encouraged to see and research things from a scientific and mathematical perspective with analysis of facts, figures, and statistics and what can be proven. I do believe that these programs are necessary. However, they tend to minimize individual thought processes and deter the creative expression of imagination to some degree. It is sad that schools are basically being forced to teach kids to follow what is perceived to be the natural order of things that have been established. Schools do not teach anything about morals and or ethics that may be dogmatic in nature; they do teach and encourage the general populous to follow instruction with little encouragement to challenge the foundations of why or why not the rules are there. As my friend told me, the schools realize that very few if any students will go on to greatness in their lifetime. So, they teach the students to be law abiding citizens and the skills and mind sets that they will need to be functional productive members of a successful and supportive workforce.

I believe that we must have a balance in the four fold natures of man physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to maintain a healthy life and a good state of homeostasis. Setting and achieving goals and objectives provides a sense of purpose but without imagination and freedom of expression we are trapped by our own inhibitions and we diminish the quality of our life. Variety is the spice of life.

The other thing I see more in my community is the rejection of any one specific religious dogma. I do believe this could be a good thing to a certain extent. Many people are so worried about what others perceive of them when confronted with their religion being: Christian, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Wicca, or whatever religion that they have just resorted to saying that they are spiritual. Many of the people I know just go to church for the sense of belonging but they do not aspire to the beliefs of that religion and often practice what they have come to believe or understand intrinsically.

Personally, much like the transcendentalists, I believe that we are all born with the innate sense of right and wrong. We need to be in touch with our spiritual nature and learn to trust our inner guidance. One of the best things that I learned when I discovered Reiki and its awesome healing power is that it works for every practitioner regardless of their religion. The fact that Reiki works regardless of religious belief was unique itself to me because the word Rei- translates as God or spirit and Ki-translated in to universal life-force energy. At first I struggled with my Nazarene upbringing. As I witnessed the many miracles that transpired using Reiki I began to realize that God was universal and everyone’s perception of God and the dogma they aspire to is greatly impacted by their life’s experiences. I also began to realize at that point that we are all spiritual beings experiencing a human condition and that religion and the dogma of that religion are all part of that spiritual experience. We are all Gods children born perfect whole and complete just the way that we are. The greatest gift that we can give ourselves is the celebration of our uniqueness and the freedom to embrace that gift that we are and share it with the world. Live well, love much, and teach others…

Nameste, thank you all for letting me share my thoughts.

 

[slimvintage]

Thanks everyone for responding to this rather ornery concept; I actually expected 50 people to have a look at it, but no one to comment.

I haven't read the book yet, only the article, but find it interesting that the collective sensation of elation, whooshing up, that we experience at various types of mass gatherings, can also be totally individual. The op-ed journalist adds to the venues where a whoosh can rise up and grab you, places like your basement workroom where you have your carpentry outfit set up, or an autumn walk in the woods when the leaves are at optimum glorious tackiness. Those aren't arena moments, they are private communions with your own surge and spill of emotion, maybe even your own tear ducts.

I think Bach had one when he first got a handle on the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, when the piece had matured just to the point that he could hear how fucking perfect it was going to be. Or Porsche, when he had the first Volkswagen prototype sitting on four wheels in front of him. For a creative person the "knowing" is a very special sort of whooshing up, and a very private one. But if you've ever been rendered speechless by a flawless sunset or responded sentimentally to the brim-over point in a great movie, then you've had the same experience without having had to do the creating yourself. I'm such a wobbly sucker for beauty that this happens to me all the time. When I was teaching I'd get it when a student crossed over from where he was assimilating data and struggling with concepts, to the point at which he started giving something back that was specifically intuitive and genuinely his, and that was triggering his own Porsche-Bach whoosh-joy.

I think an evangelist must get this when he brings a soul to salvation, a mutual whooshing up for two; or thousands, complicit in the saving of a sinner in the arena of a megachurch. Or voters, who "know" that for once they've put a great president in the Oval Office, and whoosh up together when the final tally's announced.

But I do a lot of my whooshing on my own. What are your W moments composed of?

 

[joninliverton]

Far too deep for a thick Brit so I'll just say Happy New Year everyone x

 

[ctbigbear]

So the guys watching football while they sit on their couch with their beer and pizza, farting and scratching themselves are having a religious experience? Ok, seems like an excuse to stay home from church and watch the game. Yes, some of the points here are correct, but to say they are "bucking the trend" and writing about philosophy for the average Joe isn't so true. Today we want simple quick answers to everything, and they are very much following the trend. The fact is people think about philosophical issues all the time, they just don't use the word.

 

[slimvintage]

The fact is people think about philosophical issues all the time, they just don't use the word.

And it takes people like the two authors of this book to make that leap. They're like good consultants, whose job is to tell you what you already knew but didn't know you knew.

I think the fact that both of them are university philosophy professors isn't really germane to the theory they've concocted. Their philosophical bent probably helped them think outside the box, but the theory could have been hit upon by a bright sociologist or a trend analyst just as well.

It's undeniable that there's a lot of original thought here, but it's in line, in my opinion, with the current trend for people to have alternate families to their genetic ones, being closer in every way to co-workers, members of the same gym, school friends or team members, all the non-kinship collectives where these euphoric moments the authors call whooshing up occur.