Sam Han | Eportfolio

Yup. Basically.

The whole scientifically-prove-Biblical-events thread in religion and science is interesting.

It was almost a century ago that Max Weber, the father of sociology, looked at the tide of history surging past him and declared the spirit of his time was no spirit at all.  Disenchantment, for Weber, would be the hallmark of a new secular age dominating the new century.  Religion would disappear and be replaced by a rationalism which, in Weber’s eyes, would present its own problems.  It would be a colder world, an “iron cage” in which people were enslaved to bureaucratic systems of efficiency, calculation and control.

“Culture’s every step forward seems condemned to lead to an ever more devastating senselessness.”

Sound familiar?  While there is much to Weber’s description that still rings true, something happened on the way to our fully secular, fully disenchanted world.  We never got there.

 

The rise of dangerous religious fundamentalisms of all stripes shows clearly that the post-modern world we inhabit today is anything but secular.  But the need for a connection with what can only be called the spiritual dimensions of life also remained.  It took new forms as diverse as interest in yoga and Buddhism to attempts to build more traditional religious communities that could be harmonized with a scientific world.

On a more intimate level the disenchantment that was also to be our fate never made it to its full tyranny.  Just as the human world as a whole was growing colder and more machine-like, individuals kept finding ways to create vitality and wonder, like grass growing up from cracks in the pavement.  While the march of “progress” had its share of ways to disenchant human experience, our ability to re-enchant the world in a scientific culture is only beginning to become clear to us today.  It’s is taking forms, including science itself, that would have taken Weber by surprise.

Last week I was lucky to participate in symposium entitled “Awakening to Wonder: Re-enchantment in a Post-Secular Age.”  The symposium was held at Concordia College, a Lutheran liberal arts school in Moorhead, Minnesota.  The speakers made for strange bedfellows. There was Michael Saler a professor of History at University of California, Ronald Thiemann, a former Dean of the Harvard Divinity School and Lutheran Minister, Mary Evelyn Tucker, a scholar of Eastern Religions at the Yale School of Forestry and Judith Valentie a PBS journalist and award-winning poet.  Some of us where atheists and some, obviously, were not.  What we all had in common was a conviction that the world we inhabit today is anything but dis-enchanted and that new and radical forms of re-enchantment have emerged through science, technology and spiritual endeavor.

For my part I argued from my book, The Constant Fire, that science is an explicit means by which we encounter a very human sense of life’s sacred dimension.  Michael Saler looked at the ways “virtual worlds” enchant us through fictions which draw together communities of fan-participants (e.g. everything from Sherlock Holmes to the Lord of the Rings).  Ronald Thiemann looked at the roots of daily encounters with enchantment within the history of protestant traditions.  Mary Evelyn Tucker focused on the ways in which the natural world inspires enchantment and drives the imperatives to preserve it.

While our ontologies did not always overlap there was a broadminded sense that to be human meant to encounter the world’s richness in ways that always create and enhance meaning. And meaning, that most human of concerns, was the key.  So often in conversations between those inclined towards a spiritual focus and those of a scientific nature polarizations are swift pull the discussion into absolutes.  But this conference, with its focus on the experience of enchantment, revealed gateways to discussion that led in entirely new directions that were entirely relevant to this singular moment in history.

The conference ended with poet Judith Valente weaving it all together during a final panel discussion.  She focused on the students and their own sense of enchantment and the future.  That is where my own sense of wonder was engaged.  These kids were impassioned.  Some where atheists, somewhere devout in their faith.  But all were looking for ways to talk to each other and not past each other.  Most importantly they were aware of the challenges their futures hold and hungry for ways to keep their own sense of wonder and vitality alive.

At a time when the adults running the country seem so intent on backing us all into respective corners, their engagement and openness was an enchantment all its own.

Great, except Weber is not necessarily “the father of sociology.” He did not even form a proper “department” of sociology and resigned from his post prior to the publication of his most famous work in the US, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

A better argument can be made for Emile Durkheim as the father of sociology but you know…”fathers” of all kinds are meant to be slayed.

From a heroin bust earlier this year

Trying to think of somewhere romantic and pun-filled to take your sweetie tonight to celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day? You might want to stay away from Valentine Avenue in the Bronx. The Bedford Park road has become central to the burgeoning heroin trade; according to the News, there have been relentless stabbings, gunfire, street robberies and gang activity over the summer there. One veteran narcotics investigator said the neighborhood was as bad as Washington Heights in the ’80s: “It’s been that way for quite some time. There’s a saturation effect. After a while, people on the block will ignore it rather than jeopardize their safety by complaining.”

In July, police busted the notorious La Perla Organization, who ran a $40,000 a day heroin enterprise on Valentine between E. 194th to E. 196th. It’s gotten so bad that when the nations Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske visited, he had six bodyguards accompany him on a tour of the area.

I grew up on Valentine Ave in the Bronx, on the corner of E. 199th Street to be exact, across from the African American Lutheran Church, which is three-four blocks away from where this La Perla reportedly does its business. I didn’t know H was back in the streets like that. Not good.

An incredible book.

Pretty much sums it up.

I’ve been keeping a not-so-close watch on the situation of the Roma and I think it is one of the major examples of the limits of the nationalist model which consists of a bounded territory wherein members of a polity are then given “rights.” Sure, the Roma have rights but the way are being treated blows open the cover of the EU’s supposedly successful and more Enlightened social democracy.

I am currently Instructional Technology Fellow of the Macaulay Honors College and a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York(CUNY). Previously, I was Substitute (Visiting) Instructor of Sociology at the College of Staten Island. Broadly speaking, my research interests comprise of religion, science and technology, social and cultural theory, new media, identity, and race/ethnicity. I’m completing a dissertation entitled “Technologies of Spirit: The Digital Worlds of Contemporary Christianity” that examines the convergence of religion and digital media technologies, looking at, on the one hand, the largely technological mode of worship and ministry favored by today’s multi-site Christian churches and, on the other, the virtual effect of “God Vision” of everyday visual mapping technologies such as Google Maps and Google Earth.

I have published a number of articles, chapters and books, about which more can be found in the “Research” page.

I also blog regularly for the “here&there” section of the Social Science Research Council‘s religion blog, The Immanent Frame.

Feel free to look around the site and do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about me or my work.

My um…”official” site.

“It doesn’t take remarkable insight to suggest that the defining idea of the coming decade will be the Internet,” writes the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education. No it doesn’t, but perhaps it takes a certain kind of academic cluelessness to say so. The coming decade? C’mon Prof – where have you been for the past 15 years? The current issue of Wired is debating the end of the web.

Indeed, one might say that the Internet’s reign as the defining ideational force of our time started a lot earlier, if the humanities were to give engineering and technology the intellectual respect they deserve. The line between San Fernando and Silicon Valley points not only to the intellectual center of world from the 1970s through the 1990s, but intellectual to a degree that bears comparison with Renaissance Italy and Enlightenment Scotland.

That, I would argue, is a missing component from our broad sense of recent history, and is a result of several factors. First, engineers are, in the main, not focused on  telling stories about what they do in a way that establishes intellectual significance outside their field; rather, engineering becomes technology and technology, under the influence of journalism, turns into a discussion about gadgets and whether or not these gadgets are cool.

Sure, I’m simplifying: there is an interpretive element to these discussions (such as whether the Web is or isn’t dead, or whether the physical book is or isn’t dead), and there is a class of cyber gurus who have emerged from the collision between the Internet, the web, and the news media, who have tried to make sense of what it all means – Nicholas Carr, Dan Gillmor, Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky,  and, not least, Wired’s editor Chris Anderson.

But they have not filled the void. Their commentary may have cultural force in the mainstream media, but it often lacks the sedimentary depth accrued by serious trench work in the history of ideas, science and technology, or philosophy.

Which is why reading Singer anoint the Internet with magically transformative powers  – “Everyone now has access to the resources of the world’s greatest libraries” – or – “The grip once held by a few media owners over what reaches the public has been irreversibly loosened by independent bloggers and reporters who are read by millions” – or – “The biggest unknown is how far and how fast access to the Internet will spread” – is embarrassing. These are cliches. They show  a philosopher so unfamiliar with the state of the Internet and the kind of research into usage produced by analysts such as Gartner, Forrester Research, the Yankee Group, the Pew Research Center, Jakob Nielsen or Ethan Zuckerman, that he takes these claims as givens, not as claims requiring amplification, clarification, and examination.

And this is particularly painful from a philosopher whose field is ethics. What does it mean to say that everyone now has access to the world’s greatest libraries when studies show that many Millennials – the generation born and raised after the arrival of the Internet – can barely use Google to search the web? What does it mean to say that the power of corporate media has been broken by independent bloggers when, increasingly, those corporations are crowd sourcing content from bloggers for little or  (as is mostly the case) nothing? As Ultan O Broin, my old friend and all round tech expert, recently put it in the Irish Times, the claims made for the web as a socially transformative technology are belied by an increasing amount of data.

“Whether or not it draws on scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not science,” wrote the anarchic Paul Goodman in The New Reformation, Notes from a Neolithic Conservative, meaning that technology isn’t self-justifying simply because it may solve a scientific or technical problem, it must be examined within the context of what it does for us and how we use it. In other words, the statement that “a good watch is a watch that tells the time well” only has meaning in a society where timing is everything, where we have ritualized and sanctified time keeping.

In this context, it is time to stop thinking about the Internet as a kind of liberation theology (expressed at its most ethically naive through Wikileaks’ belief that the path to a just society is absolute transparency); the key issue facing everyone in the next decade is figuring out how to use the Internet and how to discern its societal benefits from its over-hyped Utopian promises. This is a critical discussion that demands the engagement of philosophers. If they could only hurry up.

Any kind of emancipatory narrative deserves some sort of skepticism, I think.

Debate is heating up over the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. President Obama has proposed extending the tax cuts for all Americans except for those families who make more than $250,000, citing its commitment to keep taxes low for middle-class Americans. Republicans are holding out for full extension, arguing that all Americans deserve tax relief. It’s common to hear people argue that the $250,000 cut-off is both arbitrary and unfair. As my Congressman, Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., put it, “$250,000 in Fairfield County does not make you really rich.” Republicans argue that raising taxes on the $250,000-and-over crowd would hit middle-class small-business owners who could be creating jobs. Once again, I feel compelled to remind everyone of the uncomfortable truth: I’m sorry, but making $250,000 a year makes you rich in this country. Even in Fairfield County. Here is my column from February, reprinted below.

Here we go again. Whenever the subject of taxes comes up—and it’s come up in the debate over the Obama administration’s decision to let many of the Bush-era tax cuts expire this year—we’re treated to a chorus of complaints that people who make $250,000 a year aren’t really rich. Raising taxes on these people, we’re told, would be raising taxes on the middle class. Media Matters has assembled a few choice quotes on the topic.

As I argued in an article in August 2008, now reprised and updated, I have two pieces of bad news for the over-$250,000 crowd. First, the reversal of some of the temporary Bush tax cuts is probably inevitable, given the appalling mismanagement of fiscal affairs between 2001 and 2008. (It’s rich when Bush-era economic officials, like Edward Lazear, Greg Mankiw, and Keith Hennessey, carp about the fiscal situation.) Second, for those of you making more than $250,000, I regret to inform you yet again: Yes, you are indeed rich—any way you slice it.

To a surprising degree, feeling rich or poor is a state of mind. There are people who pull down $3 million a year who are miserable and feel strapped for cash and people who make $30,000 a year who believe they have everything they need. But income data can surely tell us something. And they tell us that $250,000 puts you in pretty fancy company, especially after the collective pratfall the economy took in 2008. The Census Bureau last summer reported that real median household income was $50,303 in 2008, down 3.6 percent from 2007. It’s likely that figure fell further in 2009. So a household that’s making $250,000 today is making about five times the median. In fact, as this chart shows, only 2.476 million U.S. households, the top 2.1 percent, had income greater than $250,000 in 2008. (About 20 percent of households make more than $100,000.)

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In dealing with aggregate nationwide numbers, we should of course take account of the significant differences in the cost of living from state to state. $250,000 doesn’t go as far in Santa Barbara or Manhattan—in most places, actually, where television anchors and their on-air guests live—as it does in, say, Paducah, Ky. As census data show, state median incomes vary from $67,508 in New Hampshire to $37,416 in Mississippi. But even in wealthy states, $250,000 ain’t bad—it’s nearly four times the median income in wealthy states like Colorado, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. And even if you look at the wealthiest metropolitan areas—Washington ($85,236), San Francisco ($76,068), Boston ($70,334), and New York ($63,957)—a quarter of a million dollars a year dwarfs the median income.

But people in Georgetown mansions don’t necessarily compare themselves with fellow Washingtonians in Anacostia. Relative income works mostly at the neighborhood level. As we know from the work of Cornell economist Robert Frank, people assess their well-being not so much on how much they make and consume, but on how much they make and consume compared with their neighbors. After all, you have to compete with them for status and for important positional goods such as housing and schools. And here the $250,000-isn’t-rich crowd has a point. In a few ZIP codes and neighborhoods, to be sure, brandishing a $250,000 salary is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. There are significant numbers of rich people—including a healthy contingent of filthy rich people—in places like New York City and San Francisco. If you want to live in a neighborhood where starter homes cost $1 million, and you want to send your kids to private schools, and you want to go on great vacations and have a beach house, then $250,000 likely won’t cut it. When the investment banker down the street just got a $2 million bonus, the knowledge that you’re doing better than 98 percent of your fellow Americans is little solace.

But the places where $250,000 stretches you are few and far between: some of the swankier East Coast and Chicago suburbs, several neighborhoods in Manhattan, chunks of the California coast. Even in the most exclusive communities where the wealthy congregate, $250,000 is still pretty good coin. Consider this: In late 2008 Forbes ranked America’s 25 wealthiest neighborhoods. In all of them, someone making $250,000 a year would probably not be able to afford his dream house. But in all of them, someone making $250,000 would be doing better than most of his neighbors.

Once again, I await the tidal wave of e-mails, blog posts, and comments from hardworking, self-made people who earn $250,000 a year but don’t feel financially secure and don’t consider themselves rich, especially compared with the venture capitalist next door. Having spent my entire adult life in and around Washington, Boston, and New York, I feel your pain. I’m eager to listen and empathize. Tell me all about how insanely expensive housing is in any area with good public schools. Tell me about how many seemingly undeserving neighbors make so much more than you do. Tell me about how you want an income tax system that accounts for geographic differences in the cost of living (the Alternative Yuppie Tax?). Just don’t tell me you’re not rich.

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Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek. You can e-mail him at “)moneybox@slate.com‘); and follow him on Twitter. His latest book, Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, has just been published in paperback.

Illustration by Natalie Matthews. >

“CHUUUUCH,” as the kids say.