for - spiritual seeking in modernity - initiation - third stage - mind - John Churchill - meaning crisis - spiritual initiation - third stage - mind - John Churchill - initiation - third stage - mind - examples - sacred geometry - sacred mathematics - deeper meditation practices - John Churchill

for - spiritual seeking in modernity - initiation - fourth stage - interdependent origination- John Churchill - meaning crisis - spiritual initiation - fourth stage - interdependent origination - John Churchill - initiation - fourth stage - interdependent origination - John Churchill

for - spiritual seeking in modernity - initiation first stage body - John Churchill - meaning crisis - spiritual initiation - first stage - body - John Churchill - initiation - first stage - body - example - yoga and green juice - getting stuck here is possible - John Churchill - meaning crisis - spiritual initiation - first stage - body - John Churchill

for - spiritual seeking in modernity - initiation second stage - emotional body - John Churchill - meaning crisis - spiritual initiation - second stage - emotional body - John Churchill - initiation - second stage - emotional body - examples - psychotherapy - breath work - crystals - Ayahuasca - securely tantric practice - John Churchill

for - spiritual seeking - modernity - John Churchill

for - indigenous altruism - translating practices successfully to modernity

indigenous altruism - translating practices successfully to modernity - The mythology is harmful because - it doesn't make sense and therefore drives people away from seriously considering as a viable option

for - adjacency - the society of the spectacle - internet society of modernity - Deep Humanity - BEing journey - to discover the society of the spectacle

Being journey - to discover the society of the spectacle - Modernity, so steeped in social media and the internet is INDEED a new mode of living and perceiving the world - To discover the extend to which we have socially normalized a social pathology, we can introduce BEing journeys that help us explore how a life that is freed from the social norm feels like

for - quote - reviving the view of labour as a spiritual activity - to counter the meaning crisis of modernity - Benjamin Suriano - question - how do we find the eternal in labour? quote - reviving the view of labour as a spiritual activity - to counter the meaning crisis of modernity - Benjamin Suriano - (see below) - What is needed, - and what I attempt to think through within this dissertation, - is then a return to labor as a self-transcending activity. - This is nothing short of resurrecting a revolutionary sense of labor as itself an act of resurrection, - a fundamentally social and creative activity - whose final cause is to raise humanity into a new historical body - beyond any reduction to the merely mortal flesh prescribed by the present. - Thus, the laboring body qua labor - always already harbors all the seeds for its immortality, - for producing the perfection of life for itself, - which is the qualitative perfection of eternal life. - The task, then, - is not to eliminate its religious consciousness, - but to develop it from the true rationalization of labor - according to its own ratio of perfection, - i.e. to therein find its corresponding religious forms of thought - that illuminate and reinvest in its capacities - for the infinite and eternal."

Class 1, Why Does the Civil War and Reconstruction Have a Hold on American Historical Imagination? by David Blight for [[YaleCourses]]

for - book - Hospicing modernity - author - Vanessa Andreotti - Dean of education - U of Victoria

for - progress trap - modernity can't run away anywhere from its ruins

for - health - insulin resistance - metabolic syndrome

health - insulin resistance - metabolic syndrome - When your mitochondria doesn't work, it results in insulin resistance - Metabolic syndrome includes an enormous variety of the major diseases afflicting modernity - up to 75% of the diseases that affect modern humans and - up to 75% of today's health care costs - and includes - type 2 diabetes - hypertension - dyslipidemia - cardiovascular disease - cancer - dementia - fatty liver disease - pollycystic ovarian disease - (he didn't include strokes here but he mentions throughout his talk)

for - podcast - Great simplification - Hospicing Modernity - Vanessa Andreotti

Summary - metaphor of the house is used to compare modernity

for - key insight - why US geopolitics installed dictatorships - progress trap- US foreign policy that shaped modernity

key insight - why US geopolitics installed dictatorships - This was the US's rationale to justify the geopolitical mess it created this century: - If you allow democracy in the age of Communism - people might vote for communism, then - kill all the rich people, then - take their stuff, then - redistribute it - You can get a majority support for that in an impoverished country and that was perceived as a threat - So the United States was suppressing Democratic movements around the world - because if an authoritarian if a communist can win an election fairly one time, - that's the end of free and fair elections - So for decades, the US foreign policy agenda was to install dictators to suppress the threat that democracy could produce communism. - But after "communism was defeated" - all these installed dictators around the world that are the direct result of the pathological US foreign policy posed a new, unexpected quagmire - The decades of US foreign policy had created an enormous progress trap that we are all living through now - The US now had to normalize relations with the new world of dictators it had helped created out of its own fears<br /> - A new US foreign policy rule emerged to deal with this fiasco - Stay in your own country - If you want to kill, imprison, brutalize or subjegate your own people, it is fine with the US government as long as it is done within your own state borders - As long as a nation state abuses their own people, the US will continue to: - buy your oil - trade with you - show up at the UN - even have an occasional State event for you - However, Russia broke that rule

from - Prometheus and modernity -https://hyp.is/HUI6WAUsEe-r97ezRaj6bg/bigthink.com/thinking/dan-carlin-on-humanitys-uncontrollable-prometheus-complex/

for - boredom - Deep Humanity - boredom - psychology - boredom - adjacency - boredom - insight - history - modernity

adjacency - between - boredom - insight - history - modernity - Adjacency statement - This is an insightful observation that - the affordances of a technologically sophisticated modernity - promotes boredom by providing a means to escape it, - rather than deal with it. - The notable decline of religiosity in the West also cuts off a traditional means of getting in touch with the wonder of existence - This could explain the tiffin popularity of meditation in the West as a non religious vehicle for centering in the here and now, - as boredom is a condition of avoiding the here and now

• Leisure was one precondition:
  • enough people had to be free of the demands of subsistence
  • to have time on their hands that required filling.
• Modern capitalism multiplied amusements and consumables,
• while undermining spiritual sources of meaning
• that had once been conferred more or less automatically.

• for: modernity - high energy density

• paraphrase

  • high density energy sources of a few thousand watts per square meter are required to operate high energy density infrastructure like transportation vehicles and large buildings that consume the same types of energy density

• for: stone age code, similar to - Ronald Wright - computer metaphor, evolutionary psychology - examples, evolutionary paradox of modernity, evolution - last mile link, major evolutionary transition - full spectrum in modern humans, example - MET - full spectrum embedded in modern humans

• comment

• insights

  • evolutionary paradox of modernity
    • modern humans , like all the living species we share the world with, are the last mile link of the evolution of life we've made it to the present, so all species of the present are, in an evolutionary sense, winners of their respective evolutionary game
    • this means that all our present behaviors contain the full spectrum of the evolutionary history of 4 billion years of life
    • the modern human embodies all major evolutionary transitions of the past
    • so our behavior, at all levels of our being is a complex and heterogenous mixture of evolutionary adaptations from different time periods of the 4 billion years that life has taken to evolve.
    • Some behaviors may have originated billions of years ago, and others hundred thousand years ago.

• Examples: humans embody full spectrum of METs in our evolutionary past

  • fight and flight response
    • early hominids on African Savannah hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago when hominids were predated upon by wild predators
  • cancer
    • normative intercell communication breaks down and reverts to individual cell behavior from billions of years ago
      • see Michael Levin's research on how to make metastatic cancer cells return to normative collective, cooperative behavior
  • children afraid to sleep in the dark
    • evolutionary adaptation against dangerous animals that might have hid in the dark - dangerous insiects, snakes, etc, which in the past may have resulted in human fatalities
  • obesity
    • hunter gatherer hominid attraction to rich sources of fruit. Eating as much of it as we can and maybe harvesting as much as we can and carrying that with us.
      • like squirrels storing away for the winter.

• for: cultural destruction - Jawara - poachers, modernity - disruption of ecological cycle, example - ecosystem disruption

• comment

• example: ecosystem disruption
• example: human cultural ecosystem in balance
• the uncontrolled influence of the outside world always follows. Governments are too shortsighted to understand that this always happens and feel they can control the situation. They cannot. Greed breeds resourcefulness
  • In a matter of years, poachers have disrupted the Jawara's traditional diet, forcing them to overhunt deer and disrupt the entire ecological cycle that existed up until then.It's an example of how modernity ruthlessly and rapidly disrupts ecosystems. In this case, ecosystems where humans have integrated in a balanced way.

• for: perspective shift - modernity to "neo-indigenous"

• question

  • how do you transform fear of the perceived great loss of modernity to the gains of neo-indigenous civilization?
  • we would have to feature the many potential benefits of doing this
  • it can't be just a big loss, but the pros must outweigh the cons

• for: meme - escape velocity from modernity

• for: false dichotomy of sustaining modernity

• paraphrase

  • The pace of modernity can neither be sustained in a high carbon nor a low carbon green economy
  • No matter what the political party, they all subscribe to a view of sustaining the same or greater pace of modernity

• comment

  • libertarians want no constraints
  • but nature herself imposes limits
  • populations collapse if resources are overused
  • human populations who adopt a Libertarian approach eventually encounter a limit anyways

• for: Center for the Study of Existential Risk - excludes modernity

• Comment

  • Center for the Study of Existential Risk still assumes a modern framework to solve the polycrisis

• for: key insight - modernity framework is the major narrative, quote - modernity framework is the major narrative

• key insight: modernity framework is the major narrative

• quote: modernity framework is the major narrative
  • the official fantasy of the 20th century after the war but now also the 21st century is this that
    • of course they will all become like us
      • after the war we called it development
      • they were then third world countries would become first world
      • some second world countries as well
    • and the interesting thing is is that fundamentally that really hasn't changed
    • if you scratch under the paint of the UN's sustainable development goals what you find is they want to take the very best fruits of modernity and make them in a fair way distribute them more evenly across the planet so that everybody has the advantages of a modern life and
    • as Bill (Reese) suggested, that's a fantasy that isn't going to happen
    • there isn't enough planet for that to happen but
    • nevertheless this is the official fantasy that drives
      • the OECD and
      • the folks at Davos and
      • the UN and
      • most universities

• for: major cultural paradigms, modernity - leaving, cultural transition, cultural evolution, MET, Major Evolutionary Transition, kiey insight - 4 major cultural paradigms

• comment

• key insight: 4 major cultural paradigms

  • This matrix doesn't quite capture what Ruben is proposing because he later talks about neo-indigenous, which means taking elements of modernity but within an overall indigenous framework, so a hybrid
  • It would be worth exploring implications for an evolutionary framework of Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET)

• for: post-modernity - temporary perspective of modernity

How painfully true this may have been in 1899, it's now much worse in 2023!

Specialization of knowledge tends to fit the lifeways of the people who hold and maintain it. Changing lifeways means one must lose one or more domains and begin using or curating different domains of knowledge.

In a global world of specialization, humans who specialize are forced to rely more heavily on the experience and veracity of those around them who have also specialized. One may be able to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, but their knowledge of the state of the art in anthropology or economic policy may be therefore utterly undeveloped. As a result they will need to rely on the knowledge and help of others in maintaining those domains.

This knowledge specialization means that politicians will need to be more open about what they think and say, yet instead politicians seem to be some of the least knowledge about almost anything.

This is just the start of a somewhat well-formed thesis I've developed elsewhere, but not previously written out... more to come...

Beck (1992) - Risk Society - https://is.gd/7DM5Z7 - urn:x-pdf:248c53fa76a0e543ab0ee45ea694f2a5

This is very interesting to me because of the absence of the state and Catholic church, which led to the growth of prosperity gospel within the Brazilian lower classes. In other words, a clash between "pre-modern" and "post-modern". "Institutional deficit" is a key word coming from the available journal article Robbins (2009a). Martin (1998) is a book chapter that interested me a lot as well, and it is available at the library but not eletronically (maybe Libgen?).

Moe excellently addresses how narrative and Elizabeth's ideas interferes (and mislabels) the possibilities of progressive and modern actions. Elizabeth ends her friendship with Charlotte (essentially) because of their difference of interpretation (of the "modern" action)

A weak aspect to this article is that Moe often makes unclear transitions in her argumentation. This is one of these cases.

Further, does this then mean that Austen has her own individual understanding of "modernity"? Then, perhaps, both Elizabeth and Charlotte are modern in their own respective ways.

Moe argues here that Elizabeth is the progressive one, yet it seemed to me earlier in the article that Charlotte's actions would be expressed as modern in their own way (at least that is what I gained from reading aspects of this article). Is Moe trying to prove both?

Something that I believe Moe should address is the question of whether "deviancy" is considered the same as "modernity"?

Yes, and this is where the reconsideration of "modernity" also comes into play. What is a "modern" marital decision? Who is allowed to make such judgements?

Wouldn't "moral deviancy," then, be considered "modern" in a sense?

Wow! This is a great excerpt. Here, Moe not only identifies Elizabeth's misjudging of what a "modern" woman chooses, but she again also points out Elizabeth's flaw in putting words/thoughts in other peoples' mouths/minds. Charlotte is (assumedly) content in her role, but it is Elizabeth projecting her own fears onto Charlotte's decision that makes her, in the end, a poor friend to Charlotte. This, again, further the nearly impossible question: who is the more modern woman?

Moe's comparison of Elizabeth and Charlotte strengthens her arguments about the institution of marriage within this time frame. Though both women have different expectations of what mate they will end up with, they are both inherently and consciously seeking marriage. But how does this play into the concept of modernity? Does that make them both un-modern? Or does the method of how they both were marriage make their distinct in their different levels of modernity?

Moe seems to contradict herself at times. Is Charlotte "modern"? Within the same paragraph, she seems to promote Charlotte choice, while also diminishing it. Or is Moe trying to argue that despite an optimistic, "modern" thought process, women's happiness and success are still in the hands of the men they marry? It is unclear.

I would argue that this is a "modern" determination of marriage for the period.

It's interesting that so many contemporary readers see Elizabeth's marriage as very conventional, when she is striving to fulfill this "future self." I would be interested in seeing Moe identifying the many critiques of Elizabeth's marriage as non-modern, and working through them to defend her argument.

Moe defines what Elizabeth considers a "self-respecting," modern woman to be. By clearly stating this, Moe clearly accentuates the points and support to her argument.

Moe purposely poses the two characters against each other to express their severe difference in behaving "modernly." Yet, this succinct sentence is a disservice to the full reasoning for Charlotte's choices. It is easy to judge Charlotte as a contemporary reader, but her decision--though not remarkable--it still not something we should completely bash.

Moe aptly presents her argument again, as she argues that Elizabeth's frustration with Charlotte, for example, has to do with her own issues managing her frustration with "social forms." Moe allows the reader to "fill in the blank" here, as the reader can use this piece of information to better understand Elizabeth's reaction to Charlotte--her frustration is in Charlotte's refusal to resist the social forms that inherently oppress women and impact the emotional aspect of marriage. By giving her reader room to make this judgement herself, Moe's argument consequently becomes more concrete.

Another conflict of modernity. Young thought versus older thought.

This is also interesting for a modern reader in the discussion of what makes a young man act "manly" or not, bringing up, again, a discrepancy in modernity, but now this difference is between Austen and her contemporary reader.

The different theses Moe presents to her reader are all an original take on reading Charlotte and Elizabeth's argument, and Charlotte's individual views, especially considering the extensive description of the typical reading of these characters which Moe provides us with.

This introduction, though at times distracted from the main point through inclusion of so many outside theories and readings of Elizabeth/Charlotte/Austen, definitely engages the reader, provides grounding for Moe's argument, and makes this subject appear significant in understanding the conflict of modern viewpoints in Pride and Prejudice, as well as to better understand Charlotte as a character and her decisions.

THESIS part 4: differences based on modernities animate "competing conceptions of self, moral agency, and modes of affective living." This ties Moe's earlier points about agency into the discussion of narrative and modernity.

MAIN POINT/THESIS part 3: Charlotte is a different kind of character, applies to several forms of "modernities" and should be critically examined.

THESIS part 2: the development of "modern subjectivity." This can sometimes draw attention from disagreements between women in Austen novels. Charlotte challenges the "social practices that do not appear germane to liberation." She does not follow a romantic plot.

Moe questions the problem with viewing Elizabeth as the sole modern, feminist character.

Moe acknowledges Elizabeth as the "modern" character, though her modernity is still restrained by the necessity of her getting married.

Now we seem to be back on topic, concerning narrative and modernity, in reference to the marriage plot.

Important point. By evaluating Austen's patriarchal setting and consequential ability to write about women during this constrained period, Moe extrapolates upon Austen's achievements as a writer, further subverting Lewes' critique. Thus, she denounces the past reading of Austen to promote her own, modern and feminist, reading.

One of the main purposes of the article. Moe sets out to oppose, or at least challenge, previous readings of the novel (and is thus her placement within a scholarly discourse), to reconsider how actions of "characterological depth and interiority" are formed within the courtship plot, and how it is impacted by cultural modernity. She does this through a reading of Charlotte Lucas.

It is important to relate the concept of cultural modernity and Charlotte's choices to narrative, as that is the main point of the argument (though Moe's thesis is not clearly stated just yet). Also fascinating to label all the minor characters are developmental aspects to Elizabeth; this is quite dehumanizing, but is quite arguable. Austen, therefore, purposefully has Charlotte marry Collins as part of further promoting Elizabeth's vehement feelings about marriage.

Moe points out that many Austen critics do not view Charlotte's decisions regarding marriage as "modern," yet as a victim of the 18th century patriarchy, Charlotte's actions make a lot of sense.

Something Latour does in We Have Never Been Modern is highlight Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes as both scientists and social theorists, in spite of later, Modern divisions between the fields. He sees them differing in both fields on the same issue, related to the air pump and whether impartial observers or mathematical calculations as the verification of knowledge.

As was oft the dialogue during the time, the Soviet Union had claimed a victory for modernity of the Northern People following its firm establishment as a nation, beginning most prominently in the 1950’s. As indigenous communities, the Soviets had believed they had succeeded in transcending the communities across time and into the present: they had taking a primitive society and bypassed it through the developmental modes of production (slavery, feudalism, capitalism) to achieve the pinnacle of socialism. Thus, these communities were largely perceived to be drawn out of “timelessness and brought (them) into history” (227). This would serve to not be the case, as the resilience of the Nenet community would show.

An interesting discussion on the restructuring of the Siberian indigenous identity is found in chapter 13 of the following text:

Gayla Diment and Yuri Slezkine, Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

Organic

http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/insoumis/

This continues to remind me of the film Taxi Driver, where De Niro's characters calls for the rain to waste away and cleanse the city of its all it's vices and sins. He drives late into the night, disgusted with his environment and fueled with anger and rage. Moreover, the mountains which is the anthesis of the city is also affected by the absence of rain.

This is about modernity and how we inherit this world where the past remains and death residents in the slums of the streets. It's the grit and the grime, it's the hustle and bustle, it's the city life at its rawest form.

A taxi is a symbol of modernity, where one can get from point a to point b to point z and back. Eliot descibes this restlessness people feel when they are anxious and dying for some form of action or stimulus.

Been having issues with the ways this quote has been handled in various contexts, but it’s quite fitting here. One potential issue, though, is in the embedded assumption that the future is a solid. Goes so well with Modernization Theory that the focus on global inequalities can be skipped over.

The crucial formulation of Latour's argument—in tandem with the corollary, below, that "we have never been modern in the very simple sense that while we emancipated ourselves, each day we also more tightly entangled ourselves in the fabric of nature."

This quote from James by Latour is priceless, and deep: nature is but a name for excess. I need to track down the source.