This age. Bizarre. Part of the bizarreness rests in how much we actually know about it. We swim in a deepening sea of information. How to cope? We compartmentalize. So, though, do those providing us the information, and therein lies another problem, which is a question of integration. Recently at…
“Name a person, living or dead, from the country India.”
If asked in the western world, the most common answer would be obvious: “Ghandi”. It is another matter that his name is “Gandhi”, and not “Ghandi”, to which he is commonly referred in the west, but nevertheless, this individual seems to have wielded such influence that India almost seems to be known as “the land of Ghandi” in the west. In India, he is also a well-known figure, often hailed as the “father of the nation.” It is unlikely that any individual living in India would not know of him. But whether most people from India know much beyond the name (for instance, that he was involved in India’s freedom struggle) is a matter of debate. His brand of non-violence was unknown to most Indians until recently.
A few months ago, a Hindi movie titled “Lage Raho Munnabhai” (Carry on Munnabhai) was released in India. It went on to become India’s biggest box office success in a long time. It tells the story of a gangster, named ‘Munnabhai’, who accidentally stumbles upon the work of Gandhi. Inspired by the writings, he begins practicing Gandhi’s tenets of non-violence and turns his life around.
When I first heard of the film’s plot, I winced. “Bollywood”, India’s equivalent of “Hollywood”, is obsessed with violence. Surely, a Bollywood film about Gandhi, I imagined, would butcher his philosophy. Worse yet, the film is a sequel to a mediocre movie. When I heard people saying that …
We’re right in the middle of massively expensive Christmas displays. No, not just the light displays. I’m referring to the numerous expenditures of time, energy and money that, because they are expensive, serve as reliable messages to others that we are interested in bonding with them . . . or not. Christmas is as good a time as any to let the truth hang out.
These displays take many forms. To whom do we send Christmas cards (and from whom do we receive them?)? To whose parties will we be invited? Who are those select people with whom we will end up exchaning gifts? It doesn’t matter if we don’t really enjoy cards, parties and gifts. It doesn’t really matter whether we believe in virgin birth. It doesn’t matter whether there were three kings or whether there was an especially bright star. As with oh-so-many things, Christmas is really about relationships. At bottom, Christmas is about rubbing elbows and bonding, no matter what the conventional wisdom.
The conventional wisdom says that Christmas is about a particular set of alleged historical truths. We need to keep in mind, though, that there are many cultures that give no credibility to the Jesus story who engage in similar gatherings and similar gift exchanges based on their own lore, much of if as unlikely as the story of a virgin giving birth to a God. They have their own gift exchanges and parties and songs and decorations framed by lore that makes no …
Americans work a lot. According to this chart, we work 400 hours more per year than workers in many European countries. In fact, we work the equivalent of 10 workweeks per year more. What would you say if your boss walked into your office and asked you whether you would like to have an additional 10 weeks of vacation per year?
According to Juliet Schor, author of the overworked American (1991), American productivity has more than doubled since 1948. We could thus produce our 1948 standard of living in less than half the time that it took in 1948. The average worker could now be taking off every other year with pay. We do not use any of this increase in productivity to reduce our hours, however. Instead, we have continued to work harder and harder (many of us work two jobs) in order to have or maintain higher material standard of living.
Schor raises this question: “what if satisfaction depends, not on absolute levels of consumption, but on one’s level relative to others?” She suggests that our “consumerist treadmill” and hour-long our jobs have combined to form in “insidious cycle of work and spend.”
We often work hard only after commuting long distances. And we have to pay for those expensive cars and the fuel goes in them. The net result is another decrease in leisure time. According to Schor, between 1960 and 1986, the time parents actually had available to do with children fell at least 10 hours …
Silence implies acquiescence.
We live in a culture that is rife with moral controversy, but public education is largely silent with regard to many of these controversies.
In a Free Inquiry article titled “Wanted: Moral Education for Secular Children” (December 2006), Paul Kurtz asks why we aren’t doing a better job of stepping into the moral void to give our children a secular moral education: “Secularists, humanists, and naturalists face a pivotal and deeply practical challenge: how to develop educational curricula and institutions that can provide moral guidelines for our children.”
Kurtz crowns pop culture as a prime contributor to the problem:
“banal and demeaning values often permeate the mass media: popular television, movies, music, radio, the Internet, and literature read by children. These values can herald violence, greed, vindictiveness, and immorality.”
Teaching children to be moral without reference to religion is easier said than done, of course. Secular versions of morality conflict with many authoritarian versions of morality:
…[The authoritarian tradition] holds that “deference to authority” is essential and stresses moral commandments that children simply need to accept and obey. The primary emphasis is on obedience to ancient creeds and codes. Second is the liberal tradition, which encourages young people to be responsible and to think for themselves. This approach stresses personal autonomy and freedom of thought. It is part of a new morality that has become influential since the Enlightenment: an effort to improve the lives of individuals in the current world.
Unfortunately, it is often difficult to