We’re used to thinking of privacy in terms of protected spaces, and often hear comments about how isolated individuals and families are in modern society. A guy opens his garage door remotely so his Lexus can slip into the garage, and the door is closed before he’s out of the car. In the last chapter of his study of schedules and calendars ( Hidden Rhythms ) Eviatar Zerubavel discusses public and private in temporal rather than in spatial terms. (more…) Read more
From Australia, reader Mike Bull responds to my earlier post: I recently heard a pastor from southern India speak, and it sounds like ‘enchantment’ is still as powerful as it ever was (although, despite his hair-raising stories, it seems the best Satan can do to the saints in India at the moment is intimidate). Perhaps the reason we don’t see it in the West is because with overt ‘magic’ Satan blows his ‘naturalistic’ cover. (more…) Read more
An eighteenth-century French missionary, Joseph-Francois Lafitau, wrote of the Iroquois: “The men who are so idle in their villages, regard their indolence as a sign of glory in order to make everyone understand that they are actually only born for the great things and particularly for war. For there they can put their courage to their hardest tests. War gives them many occasions to show to the greatest advantage all their exalted sentiments.” Elias, who quotes this passage, comments: (more…) Read more
Thoughts from what Jim Jordan calls the “deep weird”:In Revelation, the angelic elders give up their crowns at the outset, and at the end of the book the saints are enthroned for a thousand years. Revelation depicts a transition from angelic to human government. Angels, Scripture tells us, are somehow related to physical processes – winds and storms and so on. What if the transition from angelic to human government of creation didn’t happen all at once? What if it’s... Read more
Elias wryly comments that in urban societies the manufacture and use of clocks is similar to the use of masks in tribal cultures: “one knows they are made by people but they are experienced as if they represented an extra-human existence. Masks appear as embodiments of spirits. Clocks appear as embodiments of ‘time.’” Read more
Elias challenges the Cartesian method of doubt, arguing that Descartes scrums around to get beneath all he’s picked up and finds, at bottom, things he’s picked up: “he is supposed to penetrate in his meditation, all on his own, to a layer of his own intellect believed, in accordance with the unexamined dogma of the time, to be unlearned and independent of his own or anyone’s experience. In trying to do so he deploys an immense arsenal of learned knowledge,... Read more
Norbert Elias ( An Essay on Time ) writes that “for a long time . . . there were, even within one and the same state, traditional local diversities with regard to the beginning of a year, and thus to its end. As far as one can see, it was Charles IX, king of France, who, after some discussion, decided in 1563 to impose on French society a uniform date for the beginning of the year, setting it at 1... Read more
R. Fischer says, “The relativity of our reference point can be demonstrated by taking a moving picture of a plant at one frame a minute and then speeding it up to thirty frames a second. The plant will appear to behave like an animal, clearly perceiving stimuli and reacting to them. Why, then, do we call it unconscious? To organisms which react 1800 times as quickly as we react, we might appear to be unconscious. They would in fact be... Read more
Barbara Adam points out that the leading metaphors for nature in the seventeenth and eighteenth century were mechanical. Creation was a clock. By the nineteenth century, though, steam technology had taken over the European imagination, and metaphors of “letting off steam” and “safety valve” were applied to social and psychological realities, not least by Freud. Perhaps: No steam, no Freud. Read more
My review of Matthew Levering’s latest book is up at First Things : http://www.firstthings.com. Read more
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