Ahh the “New Media makes you dumb” debate. The WSJ has it going, and Slashdot picked it up.

My spin agrees with both sides, in the context of actor-responsibility/meaningless-drone. That itself is a rough divide for humanity; I mean, how many of us are *fully* determined in our thought patterns? Most of us are in small ways, but not in all ways. Further, we are only as determined by what is available to us. If no one is ever forced to turn off the TV, read a book, or read a full webpage, they never will. Humanity is *that* fickle. We’ll live in the present, assuming the past isn’t consequential. The Internet has only “given the people what they want” in that regard.  To this end, Shirky did a wonderful job with the history of new media; theories are only good if they hold water across time & place.

But this consistently distracted state is in some ways my own life. I have trouble filtering out background conversations when in a restaurant, among other examples. I’m sure it’s giving rise to affective disorders (let’s not get beyond simple parole: dis-order = out of order). How can someone know what to love if there is no order or priority to in and out-flow of info, people, experience, etc.

The spiritual consequences are huge then. Jesus’ 2 commands of love God & fellow-man could be well-undermined by this novelty. That’s why I’m agreeing with a friend’s recent Facebook status: “Discipline is remembering what you love.” Discipline isn’t about saying “no,” so much as remembering, and remembering & reflecting is being killed off.

Reflection is a time-intensive activity, one which now-now-now-or-you’ll-miss-it-or-get-too-far-behind media won’t allow for, and as noted, is required:

“The researchers were surprised by the results. They had expected that the intensive multitaskers would have gained some unique mental advantages from all their on-screen juggling. But that wasn’t the case. In fact, the heavy multitaskers weren’t even good at multitasking. They were considerably less adept at switching between tasks than the more infrequent multitaskers. “Everything distracts them,” observed Clifford Nass, the professor who heads the Stanford lab.” — Nicholas Carr

This is exactly what the other side of the debate agrees with as well:

“Reading is an unnatural act; we are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers.”–Clay Shirky

But what I like about Clay’s statement is the next line: “Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read.” Resources maybe anything from mothers to educators, from $ for private tutoring to the publishing industry.. but it is always about time. My own time reading is only worth it if I spend the time to stop every other paragraph or so. Ideas need to sink in for any foundation to be placed. Who wants a skyscraper built on unset, wet concrete? That’s the best analogy I can give for what the Internet is doing: providing shortcuts for our memory, and keeping us from remembering anything. Even the act of scrolling a webpage is vague. Turning a page is much more definitive. I can’t glance-back as easily as I can scroll back & forth. (Ok, maybe not the best example..)

I suppose what this means for future information-design is clearspace. Data can also be held better when it is interacted with. Static graphs are visualization of too many numbers; interaction/overlays, compare-contrast is a beginning for too many graphs. Fickle “daily info-graphics” sent to my inbox or RSS reader only clog my mind, unless they spark interest  for further research (assuming I know where & how to research it!). I’d much rather have the data in contrast with something else, both of which are in connection with present values and personal states of knowledge. This way graphics could be delivered to my inbox for me, which overlap/redundant, and over-time help me learn and meat specified goals.

And finally for a sociological perspective. This little idea about remembering can be expanded further to include any binary-division, even gender-roles. While there’s a pressure from amongst egalitarians to “be equal” between/across genders, there is also a consequence of each gender doing everything, overburdening itself with too much. But that is still no “win” for anyone who would espouse a fascist (Modernist) sociology, where each person must fit the role assigned 100%. (I’m looking at you SB-preachers!)

Update: NYT picked this up too with their own spin that sounds like a good middle ground/awareness campaign.

Background Point #1: The 20 Statements Test
I was forced to do the 20 statements test last Monday in Socio Theory class, only to discover 2 things:
(a) a deep, anti-labeling drive/push (based surely in too many labels placed upon me through my life)..
(b) a natural reaction into the subjective.
Obviously this is an accusation that I’m self-focused..

But this sociology class is teaching me more about myself than any other class. It is showing me some distinct traits which are good & bad. Philosophy only gives me options. I like studying the human nature, and I like considering the philosophical options, however, I still enjoy some concrete things every now & then. But I’m not a scientist. I’d rather let someone else run the numbers, do the methods (is that what research assistents are for?). I’ve got plenty of ideas.

Background Point #2: Carmen’s Theory of Society.
I (like most people) value what’s in me too much; others read this in me, and find no ‘room’ in/nearby me for themselves to value me/attributes of/things in me. I have been actively stopping other ppl from valuing me. I should start letting other ppl value my qualities.. cuz that’s their job, not mine.  Society only works when other ppl value what’s in me, and I in them.

Background Point #3: NYT Depression Article. Just read it. (over & over again! )

Quick, Fake Responses to all this, in particular to Carmen’s Theory:
-Waaay too idealistic.
-That’ll never work
-That hasn’t worked
-That’s why I’m so self-consumed; others never valued me
-Ok, so maybe some ppl valued me, but I didn’t value them, cuz of an unequal distribution. That is, Older ppl might have valued me, and I might have valued them for their place in my life (being old ppl).. but a lack of peer-valuing has contributed to an uneasiness in me, and self-reflection. The “rumination” theory of the mind, that we get focused and obsessive about certain attributes we got picked-on by others long ago.

Perhaps a real response:
What I value is what I value; it is initially sourced in what I find outside myself (like everybody else). But because of various ruminations/imaginations/strong-mindedness, I create a world about me, fanciful, unique-to-me, and nearly impenetrable.

It all starts with something very small which I find amazing or appauling. Then, instead of  (a) “tempering” any next idea or thought regarding this against reality, or (b) perhaps as many others do: just leave it be, I continue on my mental jaunt, which to me is fun. It no longer seems imaginative but very, very real – more real than the external world in which the idea was sourced. This, of course is not simply my personal, willful “commitment” to rationalism; a free-willful choice is hardly what I feel! Rather, my mind has come to a near-enslavement of rumination by sheer habit. This enslavement is where I feel all/most of my determinism/anti-will ideology.

Consequences of all this:
I feel oddly confused, relieved and surprised by all this self-learning. Carmen noted how most of this information did not come from inside of me. (Read: I’m not that amazing after all.) Second, this is all certainly a relief, that there is a new platform from which I can actually live my life and take part in what actually is the external world.

Most importantly, for all those med-students who wish to be psychiatrists (which likely I should have seen a loooooooong time ago! ..but they’re all booked up in this city..) I have some words of advice:
1) You will not solve your patient’s problems unless you understand their context, and method of mental processes. Read: I hope you took your psychology & sociology classes seriously in undergrad!
2) You will not change the world with drugs. Hopefully you already know this. But hopefully you understand your role as a counselor more than as a doctor.
3) You will get more “data” on mental issues than anyone else ever will. You have the chance to be the best at what you do. Make sure you get the data & be a good mental scientist. (See #1).

Anyone who has read this blog knows I’m a HUGE fan of Johannine lit, and that thanks to the last class in undergrad I took which explained it for me. But in detail, John, being a good shepherd himself, attempts to teach each person to listen to God’s voice (truth) – not just in example, not in knowledge, but in experience – in a soul. “You already know, what you have already heard from the beginning..” He is always calling us to look to what we know, and dive in deeper instead of thinking you already know it, and trying to add on novelties.

Contrast this with Conservative Evangelicalism, which seems to presume Jesus & Paul going around shouting. So in the image they perceive, they fulfill and follow! However, such shouting to the masses is likely not the reality of the matter: Jesus was very discerning, even selective (Zaccheus!) & did not shout or assume all men were willing & able to listen..

John however, followed this selectiveness, speaking to those who can hear instead of forcing ears to be open, or trying to open men’s hearts and lives into conformance, only killing men in the end, creating callous hearts unable to feel or hear the shepherd’s voice, which ought to be known and heard much easier without all this violence..

Now, I understand how all this happened: mid/late modern individuals felt the truth needed defense or modernizing.. that it was an untenable position in the eyes of the masses and needed to be made ‘hearable’ to men’s ears. Sadly, with the updating of this ‘hearability’ or the truth, it weakens the hearability in one’s soul, and even those ‘ears’ were already being closed up by other anti-humane Modern traits and trends.

So what of it all? We are now in a place historically where men’s hearts are pushing against these systemic heart-closing trends, and the most of us who grew up with the half-truth are returning to its fullness once again. To avoid such troubles, what ought we expect in our lives? In our ‘small groups’, amongst our friends, towards our modern cubicle jobs?

Most of us in our 20′s are holding on to some form of identity statements. There’s a set of reactionary statements we make, pushing us from our stodgy, modern childhood & adolescence through our college brains into something called ‘life’ now. Most of us don’t have a good idea where we’re being pushed into, and most of us are ok with just being reactionary. It’s a tad healthy to ‘get away’ from all that was killing us and driving us crazy, but at the same time, it’s not very healthy to not have a solid, grounded, well-explained and considered position or two. Most of us are addicted to reactionism, since it’s just too easy, relative to being responsible & chained down or something.

So what are we to hold on to? What is “what we have heard since the beginning”? Our childhood? The politics and weird social ideologies surrounding “Jesus loves me”? How our parents are too squishy to have anything behind them? Or, our novel ideas which we would say are ‘the beginning’ to our ‘new’ lives as rational adults?

The answer to these q’s are obviously “yes and no”. There’s truth just about anywhere, and that’s the point. Modernism has taught us to learn something, learn it’s place, and them move on from it. That is “growth”. But John’s repetitive writing is obnoxiously incompatible with such a late western ideal. In all my studying of the philosophy of mind and Artificial Intelligence, there’s one thing that makes us human, and it’s not ‘choice’ like The Matrix held up. It’s our forgetfulness. Sure we can ‘learn and move on’, but life isn’t so hierarchical or ordered. We forget (oddly enough, in a logarithmic curve), and we need to be reminded, and relearn not just ‘the place’ but the places each idea influences.

For instance, we are taught to ‘love your neighbor’. (That is sufficiently ‘from the beginning’ as well!) Our first modern question is “and who is our neighbor?” We can learn through someone telling us that we are “to love everyone.” But most of us will not learn such a lesson until they fail to love everyone they meet, and learn the consequences of creating so many broken hearts in this world. This is the repetition we need, for the forgetfulness we bear, and the central point behind grace and mercy shown to another as well as us: we fail, and given enough time, we just might succeed once in awhile.

So back to our small-group. What and how are we to expect our friends to grow and learn? It’s awfully depressing to hear the same issues and concerns each week over and over again, but it’s awfully pressured to feel like we ought learn something weighty upon our hearts.

I’ve never been a fan of ‘a new topic each week’. It’s fickle, and who is doing anything more than repeating their trite identity-building resolutions/reactions anyways? Book-studies are better, and oddly enough, they are more pointed. That’s my point: perhaps ‘small groups’ ought not be focused on the people involved, the times that are compatible to meet, topics agreed upon, but each group have one central goal/theme/recurring idea. “We go to the ‘grace’ group”, or “This is the ‘wrath of God’ group”( ) that kinda sounds fun. The point is to focus our lives around a topic we believe we need to learn, and then to dive in, reminding each other each week ow that has played out in our lives for good or ill, how we forgot, how that could have been useful to survive the week, or perhaps in mildly more intellectual fashion: compare-contrast: each week is a new topic, yes, but how does some societal problem, theological point, sermon this week fail or succeed with or without mercy, or love? This way we learn the depths of God’s truth, love, mercy and wrath. Perhaps even reading a book on the topic, or reading another book off-topic to see how it is or is not shown in characters’ lives..

This all sounds so fruitful to live in the reality of  human forgetfulness instead of in the modern assumption of learn-and-move-on. Most of us will never move on from the Gospel. The love of God is not something to ‘step up from’.. Our lives are not just built on top of his grace, but each brick’s substance is his grace.

I accidentally spoke a worthwhile statement last week. While in the context of shot-gun God-talk, of which I rarely tolerate, my mind decided to construct an almost-argument starting with “Modernism is too much,” meaning, “Raising the pure objectivity to the level of pure and absolute authority, and/or all the knowledge and personal, intellectual and otherwise internal requirements created and piled up upon us over the last 100 highly rational and scientific years is more than we were built to handle.” 

Let’s start with the intellect: to achieve the height of intellectuality, you must learn all that history has recorded, and then dive deep into some small minutia of the matter. “Leading edge” is always exciting, but nevermore has it taken so many anti-social, inhumane years and years to get there. It is nearly impossible to maintain oneself across multiple personal responsibilities (read: be a ‘whole’ ‘normal’ person) and be a deep-deep researcher/academic. 

Even in areas of “faith and science” do we really know via low-level empiricism what it is we are doing or studying? (What is it that makes a human mind tend towards happiness or otherwise? Is it really *just* drugs?) To one, “God” is as contrived as “evolution” is to another. Both, by their intellectual merits alone are seemingly just overblown constructs of any given data. That is, Modernism has given us so many data points and connections, to know it enough to speak clearly about it is hardly easy. 

Yet human pride comes in and decides to decide and speak and re-create anyways, this found in no greater contemporary faux-ideology of “All religions are the same” simply repeat the past instead of learning from it.

Sadly, this is what I see when looking at the ascendency of the human race. We aren’t going forward so much as we are doing a new version of the same-old. What looks like four steps forward become only one. Again: if Modernism has given us too much data to handle, we won’t handle it; humanity will ignore it, and we’ll all be our own geniuses by our own standards. 

How hard is it to be original.

Not understanding something drives me up a wall. Even worse, when I’ve been told something over and over so much that I can no longer think about what something is actually communicating. Latest example? Proverbs 16.3: “Commit your works to the LORD, and your plans will be established.” Seriously, WHAT does that MEAN?

First off, it’s in parallel with the next verse, and in context with the whole chapter on intention and action.

Second, this whole idea of “committing” as an isolated act like a magic wand or a magic spell/incantation is bunk. That’s hardly Christianity, and that’s hardly helpful. So what of commitment? Isn’t it kind of like responsibility? A kind of promise? It’s certainly trust-faith.. despite what happens, I’m “committed” to do something.

Now, that kind of commitment is usually based more on a person’s pride and willpower to enact and overcome obstacles… and that kind of pride-based commitment is forbidden in the fifth verse: “The LORD abhors every arrogant person; one can be sure that they will not go unpunished.” So, in making plans, we can commit to them only if they are deemed worthy by our God, correct? That seems to make so much more sense than using God as a pure transactional Santa Claus; however, this task of getting a stamp-of-approval on our plans is of course harder than we expect.

With God being a person, who wants the best for each person (and knowing that His love is best for everyone), we now have responsibilities attached to this commitment-ing we would like. Sure, “just ask God”, but don’t play Him, He’s certainly no fool.

Any one of us can plan and “commit” to any plan, independent of any external circumstance, but to press forward despite circumstance and independent of the One-who-knows (the future) is certainly foolish, and explicitly dangerous and likely painful. And isn’t that what these verses in chapter 16 are on about? Anyone can act, but there’s consequences, and actions are to be in context and backed up by more than a single person’s pride.

So, I suppose it’s less of “commit to your plans” as popular notions request, and more of “commit to God”, who knows your plans and who has plans of His own. But still, this “commit my plans to God” is a funny grammar.

35% of Ami professional smart-phone addicts want
87% don’t know when to stress about work and when to sleep

So says http://www.internetnews.com/stats/article.php/3772821

Think of who these ppl are.. they’re likely not the early baby-boomers. Maybe they’re the late ones. But they’re DEFINATELY the Gen-X’ers, and the GenY’ers just keep going mindlessly calling it “the new life.”

GenX’ers & Y’s grew up with a novel thing: gaming consoles. Our parents grew up with something tech-novel too: TV. Millenialls grew up with the internet, and smartphones are honestly a continuation of that novel-tech. And what happens every time novel-tech comes out? Ppl don’t know what ot do with it. There’s no social precedent keeping boundaries from addictions. Ppl go crazy.

I’ve had (still have) smartphone-y devices around me. Do I check them like these crazy wife-replacers? Nope. It’s all about being proficient with them enough to STOP GETTING ALERTS as well as keeping your values in place. Honestly, my mobile life is better served with smartphone-ish devices than without. I’d rather talk with people as I’m looking info up (or scribble out my thoughts for later referral) than to wait for my laptop to boot, or have to walk into the other room where the computer is.

Yes, we do live in a new Information Age. Previously people lived their lives just dandy without Search and Accessing info OTA. There’s nothing wrong with that, but lately people want the information that is available to them, and more information can mean more meaningful (accurate!) conversation. Less speculation when the facts are available. And I’m all about less silliness like that, so long as people don’t trade silliness for silliness.

Modernist Christian:

“Do this because it’s ‘the right way’ (as outlined in the Bible)”

PoMo Christian:

Listen, that thing you do- is it really getting you anywhere? I mean,  I know you’re always blaming it on ___, but doesn’t your heart ache for something more?

Let’s be clear: PoMo is about more than simple relativism. It’s deeply tied to subjectivity, and subjectivity isn’t bad. It’s only bad when it’s absolute. And so is absolute objectivity of humanity. This is life people, not a prison camp. There is such a thing as grace that allows for crazy statements like “Don’t be too religious“* and “Go in peace” to a whore.

To one who’s violently embedded, it’s tough to tell one on the other side the other’s right. Again, humility saves the day:
“Love and logic keep us clear”

Yes, Miracle Drug is an amazing song. Still.

* Amazing that we have an entire book in the Bible devoted to the concept of ‘enjoyment’(whether it’s possible) & never once references ‘prayer’!

Mom once told me that she tried to raise me and my sister without worry or fear of whether we’d have enough food or clothing.. maintaining a certain level of childhood innocence.

Such an idea is lost on the past few generations — allowing their children to watch the full-on violence and sex in ‘R’ movies. Talk about taboo to my 9yr old mind!

But this is no posting about child psych.

Rather, somewhere along the way my concept of reality wasn’t sufficient. I realized wholly lacking in my perspective was any idea of battle or fighting. This is rapidly a problem in the ‘real world’; not all fighting is bad. Bingo. That’s the emasculating idea that many of us were raised under. All fighting is bad. There is no reason for battles. Lies. Insufficient Lies.

There is a battle raging around us. This is clear historical Christian teaching. Likewise, to not take sides in this battle is to be taken out. But our identity as soldiers is not concrete nor in solitude. Soldiers exist to protect all the art of life and civility that we all so deeply want. The soldiers life is one of the hardest; he is like a stone wall the external fire rages against, yet the other side of this wall, the children play, the baby feels fully secure.

Full knowledge of suffering

So this is life, and the reality lived in. Like it or not, it holds powers over you and I.. life, death, pain, joy. We are all a ruddy bunch of addicts, the most of us. All trying to posture and pose to maximize the joy and life or minimize the death of pain.

Call me crazy, but that sounds shallow. Why would we admire those who come out on top of suffering? Why do so many storylines have trouble in them? There’s a growing majority of the masses which seem happy being addicted & shallow — filling the gap between the happiness reality can provide and the happiness they expect.

It’s just that: what baseline of pleasure and pain do you or I expect to take on in any given week ..day? How far do we expect people to screw us over? Not to live in paranoia or fear, but to be taken in surprise at the pain of this life doesn’t seem so great an idea either.

4.12: do not be astonished that a trial by fire is occurring among you, as though something strange were happening to you

This is not prosperity! This is life, and it hurts. The term suffering contains more than direct persecution — beatings, jailings, and the self-focused question of “would i be able to endure?” Fact is, we are left in this world, under the reign of the enemy’s darkness, and under the pressure of divine teaching. Reality: suffering. And it’s this painful reality of ours that isn’t left alone. Jesus (God).. suffered. What ought I expect? And what posture ought I have towards all the marketing of modern idealism? There used to be a great term for this: plastic. Used for any and all things cheap and fake. Good term. I can’t find a reference for this usage, but I think it was part of the 60′s hippie reaction.

Deep

So many think they’re being ‘deep’.. or bitter-cynical-self-justifying-liberal when they ask, “Why all the pain in this world?” Or more directed at the personal: “Why doesn’t God stop all this pain?” I’m not so convinced this question (even if it were unanswerable) to be worthy to self-justify. Or satisfy.

I can’t say I’m a mystic about much, but I must admit there’s something deeply reasonable and satisfying to hold that reality now is full of suffering, that it’s for all of our best (if not for sorting us all out!).. There’s something amazing about these verses:

what will be the fate of those who are disobedient to the gospel of God?¹⁸And if the righteous are barely saved, what will become of the ungodly and sinners?¹⁹So then let those who suffer according to the will of God entrust their souls to a faithful Creator as they do good.

Pain is planned.. woven in the fabric of the lives we’ve got. Pain is worthy of trust.. not in itself, but worthy of bringing out trust in us.

Love is so sweet because of suffering..
Suffering is made bearable only with love.

This past Sunday’s liturgy involved the confession of misuse of intellect and imagination. My mind has been working underground on that generic idea since, and with luck, here we have a post.

As a child, I could not stand scary movies. (As an aside, I couldn’t stand the suspense of mystery novels either!) I could never walk up the stairs to my room, or from the basement– I’d have to run. Fear. A compulsion that ghosts or scary things were after me. If it was dark, and if I had my back turned, then they were there! I’ve called it childish and irrational, and tried my best over the past 15 yrs to keep my cool, with limited success.

In another vein, the past few years have made me aware of my disinterest in fantasy novels or movies.. Fantasy as in sci-fi or anything with gnomes, fairies, unicorns, orks, trees that walk or talk (no matter how many boulders they throw), wizards, etc. No LOTR or Narnia for me.

As for exhibit ‘C’ toward my non-standard imagination, my childhood was filled with two things: Dinosaurs and Legos. (Note the glaring lack of comic books like most boys). My childhood was not taken over my narrative or storyline of any sort. I still don’t read novels like many adults do, be it Harry Potter or Ted Dekker (Here’s to you Tim!). Rather I was caught up the the amazement of the granduer of dinosaurs, of the reality of another time, and of construction and interworkings of pieces of any sort– stretching them to their limit.

My imagination was non-narrative, but instead, constructivist and ideological, if not mechanical. Any wonder why I now take interest in contental philosophy? Sure I enjoy logic, but I’m not a pure analytic in my approach. I like considering the large ideas at play within the masses.. perhaps my world is a world of lego-men after all!

But tonight after watching a zombie-filled movie, as I walked from shadowy room to shadowy room in the winter dark, I was struck by this idea of imagination: My mind is strong, and it seems to project the non-real into reality. My mind is unable to make monsters appear before me and others like true wizardry, but for all intents and purposes, my mind is overactive enough to make me believe )behave) as if I could be attacked out of nowhere.

Take this into another realm.. many have trouble with depression, OCD or even trusting others. Is this simply a matter of having a strong, overactive mind projecting issues and concerns into one’s reality which are not? A matter of having the mind “push back” instead of simply being a tool to process and understand? Imagination running wild of a new sort?

Or again, all the ideologies in the world, from Democritus’ atoms, Descartes’ reality, Kant’s Phenomenology, Hegel’s history, Modernism’s dream, Christianity’s hope of a New Heaven and Earth, Nirvana, even Hindu castes.. these are all strictly in the category of imagination. The one difference would be whether any one of these dreams were to pan out. Just because something is unseen does not make it imaginary, but as well, to live in a presumed imaginary world which ends up being reality, that would not be so foolish of the faithful.

And precisely the point: the faithful trust that reality is more in line with their imagination than what is commonly held. This can lead to discrepency over the logical outcome of lifestyles given what is or is not included and prioritized in the ideology. This idea of faithfulness is also consistent with the requirement to “remember the dream.”

A Disciplined mind.
Something I don’t hear mentioned often is disciplining the mind. Discipline, in general, is spoken of, perhaps only in reference to one’s will or perhaps emotions, but training one’s mind to swap between reality and imagination would seem to be of use, for avoiding mental illness, as well as keeping faithfulness.

If there’s any one cliche which gets me and the rest of my generation going, I’m sure is “Love (marriage) is a commitment.”  “Ack!” shouts the responsibility-shirking segment of society as it runs over to pragmatic and sentimentalist camps.

*Sigh*  .. more polarism, less understanding. Let’s try this again without (a) force-feeding/legislating morality and (b) reacting without consideration.

Do I doubt prima facie that love (and yes, I’m referring to the love which lands you squarely in life-long marriage!) has commitment? Of course not. It’s the baggage of the word itself which I and those like me fear: 2 people, for the majority of their lives, stuck in the same house together with no ability to communicate, no real interest in each other’s personal good.

“That doesn’t sound like any fun!” Cries me and those with me. “Of course it ain’t!” retorts the older generation. Stuck again.

Round 3: What my generation is afraid of is the lack of personal connection with someone whether you’re stuck with ‘em or not. That’s not saying they’re afraid of being stuck with someone. Just the  dissolution of personal interest, communication, etc which their lack of anthropological foundations leaves them to be relationally agnostic. “I dunno if I could commit to her.. what if I change? If she changes?” “Change” is thus one of the fears; unfounded in how or why people change, and not understood.

All this simply because PoMo adequately ripped up any foundation or storyline which makes sense of how people change. Anthropology is thrown out to sea on the waves next to anything & everything else.

Solution? Get an anthropological framework which is founded in reality!

But back to commitment: it’s not commitment which brings or causes impersonal dead relationships. Rather, commitment enacted is the life in the relationship. Commitment shirked is the death feared.  Commitment enacted is what will stir the waters to face miscommunication which leads to death. But not facing miscommunication without knowledge: commitment enacted will bring you to learn how to communicate, and how to be personally connected with another.

I think I get what the old guys are meaning, but the difference is I’ve got ideal dreams of living out of commitment, and they’ve got reality. Reality is that it’s a lot harder as years go on to fight and work on the disconnects which come up unseen. Hopefully studying a bit about human development(see, anthropology is your friend!) will fore-warn a bit.