61–70 of 73 posts
Obligatory classic takedown: http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/simone-weil.htm
I've posted this before, from Emerson's self-reliance. It is describing geographical roots but the human want for short-term novelty at the cost of building on something more familiar is applicable to all sorts of aspects of life. Moderation is key, and so in circles (like mine) where people crave new experiences rootlessness seems much more common an issue than provincialism.
Simone Weil gets good coverage on HN. Last year I bought a biography of her after reading a thread on HN. She was an interesting character.
> We need these roots. You might. I need friends and family, some community participation is nice, sure, but I don't particularly feel the need for gods, ancient traditions or worship, which these seem to be tied up with in the text. > Our culture is not in danger of dying; it is already dead, and we are in denial. This just seems like unnecessary hyperbole.
>I don't particularly feel the need for gods, ancient traditions or worship You do. It's just that in modern society we've substituted these for more easily digestible, commodified, manufactured replicas. Hollywood celebrities have replaced the pantheon of Greek gods. Consumerism is the new piety. Techno Utopianism and liberalism (in the classical sense) has supplanted the ancient traditions of old. The Zuckerbergs a…
So I say again, you may need these things, I don’t.
> We need these roots. You might. I need friends and family, some community participation is nice, sure, but I don't particularly feel the need for gods, ancient traditions or worship, which these seem to be tied up with in the text. > Our culture is not in danger of dying; it is already dead, and we are in denial. This just seems like unnecessary hyperbole.
The content seemed to be talking about the fundamental common operating system for societies, not individuals. Individuals might have varying needs but as long as their needs align well with a superset of a culture's fundamental tenets the society would be relatively harmonious, or at least that's the way I see the author approaching the subject. I don't think these fundamental tenets need to have a theological basis…
> We need these roots. You might. I need friends and family, some community participation is nice, sure, but I don't particularly feel the need for gods, ancient traditions or worship, which these seem to be tied up with in the text. > Our culture is not in danger of dying; it is already dead, and we are in denial. This just seems like unnecessary hyperbole.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are not deeply connected to the natural world at all. Otherwise we’d have panicked about the mass extinction we are causing already and we’d do more than talking about addressing climate change. We are profiting off nature, turning it into a domesticated version we hope will be sustainable (but have no proof it will be, quite the contrary). And yet it’s true that we never understood the world around us so well. Th…
You have misunderstood the word connected . The parent commenter meant that we are intertwined with nature, not that we are responsible caretakers.
In any case, connected or not, nature is about to give us a good kicking.
These cultures have been uprooted, but still have a common, shared identity, which seems to qualify rootedness. Otherwise we'd not have Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and Uzbeks, but some single, post-USSR identity, those demonyms having failed to have any official meaning for 3+ generations.
I _do_ think, on the other hand, that modernity has led others to question more about what's around them. Others have latched onto the resulting uncertainty and fed those questioning half-truths and outright lies, definitely, but this to me doesn't qualify as uprootedness.