You know how we're always trying to compare yesterday's heavyweights and quarterbacks with today's? Problem is, you can't, because you're working with that proverbial apples-and-oranges thing. But maybe today's millions of blogs and twitters can help us compare, if not celebrities, perhaps cultures....!
Here's how this might work. Surf today's blogs and twitters, and you've got yourself some hard evidence as to what's on a lot of people's minds. By one survey, the top five topics with the 20-50 age group: Celebrity gossip, political gossip, connecting, hobbies and musical favorites. Fifty years ago there was no blogging/twittering to surf, so you have to check the major newspapers. Among the top five topics with the 20-50 age group: Vietnam, the sexual revolution, political correctness, NASA and musical favorites.
That was the Sixties Generation. Fifty years earlier, the Greatest Generation's 20-50 concerns had to do with: Finding a job, getting an education, earning enough to raise a family, surviving the war and musical favorites.
We at least know one thing here. Music always has a place in the minds and moods of the young. But what about arriving at some value judgments among the three generations? Can any be made? The nation's most prominent survey institute, the Pew Center, usually prefers not to quantify generational values. Only generational views. So some sociologists at the University of Iowa are planning to take up the slack.
They're noodling this question: Does the blogger/twitter generation have less significant matters on their mind, or is it mostly the ubiquitous technology that makes it easier for them to talk about the insignificant?
The study is not yet underway, but one thing seems likely. It's results won't be tweeted!
THE SMILE
Along with the Bible and Shakespeare, it always impresses to quote Einstein. The great scientist said many things over a lifetime, but one of the more intriguing is: "You can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle."
As with all Delphic-like observations, this can be taken in different ways. I suspect he meant that with or without a God, everything can been experienced as miraculous by its very cosmic beauty. In his case, he saw the miraculous without a miracle-worker. Other scientists have reached different conclusions. In the meantime, whatever/whoever is responsible for this miraculous cosmos must smile.
Having presumed that, the presumer might be asked to decipher the smile.
This brings us into a realm where few of our maps work. If there is a great What or Who, it's not likely that even the Einsteins will be able to fathom its smile. Most likely, the smile is what always comes from fulfillment. In the event of a What, the biologists tell us once the evolutionary process began, it eventually became an inexorable force that fulfills itself by its very inexorability. In the case of a Who, the Bible tells us he said, "It is good."
Either way, one can imagine the smile. And the 6 billion of us crowding this planet as an integral part of the smile. When each of us is born, a small cherished few to celebrate; when each of us dies, a small cherished few to mourn. But the process -- Evolution or God -- continues.
This continuity, this inexorability, beckons us like a fantastical, musical Merry-Go-Round. Can you hear it? The music is always saying: "Come ride with me....!"
What got into you on August 26th Jack? - THREE bloggies! You're irrepressible.
ReplyDeleteBut today you REPEAT the "generations" one. Is that a Zen trick?
With regard to "Smile" - Don't be so assured of the eternal continuity of the "good". Some cosmologists are now suggesting something different: You heard of the "big bang", well the end will be a "big fizzle" into nothingness.
And looking at your entries of the 26th -
"Generations": I'll send no sweets to the tweets!
"Health Care": I'll take YOUR view.
"Mozart/L'il Richard": Music is primordial - crickets, birds, wolves.
The Radio Lab video on "Moments": Very evocative. The video may be a good study for the neuroscientists - one's memories often pass in just that fashion.
Love & Stuff - Jay
Jay,
ReplyDeleteYou're right -- I can't seem to stop myself! Maybe I'm subconsciously trying to get it all out of me, before there's no longer any me....as a for a "zen trick" I don't think I've evolved that far, but it sounds like a goal ....yes, "the smile" may indeed be other than a good one...like I posed for that future dinner for three, Chekhov's comment haunts me ("Life is a tragedy full of joys")....so I'm far from a cosmic optimist, despite my Catholicism...it makes me think of that haunting bumper sticker: "Shit happens and then you die!"....like you, I fear that may be true...but then I comfort myself with the feeling that -- like going under for an operation -- when you die, if there is no God at least there's a big sleep in which there is no more pain, no more sorrow, no more sadness...oh, and by the way, I love your notion that memories will do just as well as what the neuroscientists conjure up...if you've noticed, I fear these guys and their code-cracking will convince them (and many of us) that we are little more than evolved planetary dust to be understood via only our brain circuitry and gene pools...so you see, I still have a place in my worldview for an "other"...what some call God...what others are still noodling...but this "other" out there has to be more than just our circuits and genes.
Lets stay in touch -- one heart to another!
Love from both of us
I think technology allows anyone to talk about anything....and a lot of it is in fact insignificant...at least to anyone outside that particular person's inside circle. Isn't that what the phone and meeting IN PERSON used to be for?
ReplyDeleteAmen....! Technology can connect, yes, but also isolate. Like everything else in life, moderation. Today's bloggers and tweeters are often other than moderate
ReplyDelete