Monday, January 17, 2011

Notes From A Fragmentary World

The last week or so has been pretty busy. I’ve contemplating writing a couple of times, but never managed to find a relatively uninterrupted window. Since I didn’t seem to have time to write a longer essay, I thought I would write a series of short fragments, focusing on the variety of things going on, internal and external.

The Tucson Shootings

This has dominated the news cycle as all political sides rush to take advantage of it, a process that only seems to feed my general sense of contemptus mundi.* After contemplating the events that unfolded my observation is largely apolitical. The whole incident illustrates the difficulty of dealing with the mentally ill in modern society. The difficulty of finding the proper points to intervene, the level of intervention, and the challenge posed by dealing with individuals who may not yet have committed an act of violence, but are believed to be at risk for committing an act of violence. How do you intervene? When do you intervene? At what point do you decide to intervene? Who makes the decision? What are the rights of the mentally ill individual absent a prior act of violence? There are no easy answers, just as there are no easy answers to what happened in Tucson.

The Struggle To Find Balance In A Technological World

I was observing this week the difficulty in finding balance in our world as technology rapidly advances. We often find ourselves with access to a tremendous amount of data and sometimes the decision to embrace the data occurs in a vacuum, lacking a careful ethical and moral evaluation of the consequences, real and potential, of the subsequent data interpretation. There seems to have arisen a sense of “argument by volume”, where the overwhelming volume or amount of data serves as a substitute argument, without ever actually being analyzed and interpreted. Who is the Gatekeeper? Who holds the responsibility for interpreting the data? Is it an individual responsibility or a collective responsibility?

The Ongoing Search For Simplicity

My quest for simplicity continues, as I spent part of last week purging some more “stuff” and put together some processes to purge yet more stuff – some of it to be disposed of, some of it to be reorganized into a more compact method of retention. I had two boxes of technical drawing supplies – paper, pencils, instruments – that I used to use in the days before the rise of computers. I’d held onto them because…well, because. It was largely a perception of value, but since I hadn’t used them in years, it was obvious that whatever value they had was not a functional value – so out they went. There will be more stuff to follow.

As I read through a variety of articles, I did come across one that solved a problem I had. I have several boxes of old documents and papers. These documents are of no value in and of themselves, however, I would like to retain the data they contained. One of the articles I read on reducing incidental home paperwork was to simply get in the habit of “scan and discard” anything where the information on the document matters, but the document of itself doesn’t (i.e. bills, receipts, records, correspondence, etc.). I like that idea and picked up a basic flatbed scanner to implement it.

In terms of the overall quest for simplicity, I am often struck how one step toward the simple leads to another step toward the simple, which leads to another step…until ultimately we find the heart of simplicity.

*Contemptus Mundi

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, here is one very good working definition of it.

Contemptus mundi, therefore, is simply the recognition that the world—the human world, in all its vanity and in all the fraud hidden behind the man-made veil of science and technology—is really nothing more than our futile attempt to hide from God by stifling our desire for the good and the holy.

http://www.chastitysf.com/q_cm.htm

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