So what does metaphysics have to do with the assassination of Brian Thompson? As I’ve argued already, what’s particularly powerful about this breach is that it re-embodies accountability. Here’s why it matters: the body is the source of qualitative experience. Implicit in a re-embodiment of accountability is a return to the primacy of qualitative experience. After Thompson was killed, many responded to the glee erupting online with reminders that he is a father and husband. This is an important point, and a telling one. What they are effectively saying is “he doesn’t only have an exchange (quantitative) value as a CEO, he also has an experiential (qualitative) value as a human being.”
They are right, and also making exactly the point Mangione was making, knowingly or not. Big pharma treats living, breathing people with qualitative experiences as meaningless quantities. What the killing does, and what gives it so much power as a breach event, is to remind us that the body is the source of ultimate reality. It is the container of all qualitative value. It forces us to acknowledge that quality is more real than quantity.
Stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it: “Stand by Me” by the Staples Singers. 🎵
First Day Hike at Spring Mill state park.
I’m glad to have encountered Lewis Mumford’s phrase “life cannot be delegated.” I’m also glad for the way L.M. Sacasas invokes Illich to relativize an idea that could become overly rigid–because, of course, a great deal of our work is delegated:
The principle “Life cannot be delegated” is simply a guidepost. It keeps before us the possibility that we might, if we are not careful, delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful. We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world—the very things, in other words, that make life meaningful.
Any recommendations for reduction in blue light exposure? I wear prescription glasses but I think adding those flip down lenses to my existing glasses would look a bit goofy. I’ve switched my laptop and phone to night mode all the time. I will likely attach a filter to my laptop screen.
I’ve listened to two episodes of “The Telepathy Tapes” and my brain is melting. It’s a podcast series that explores the clear evidence of telepathic (and other remarkable) abilities of some non-speaking people with autism. It’s astonishing–and it pretty clearly breaks scientific materialism.
I’ve gotten away from hiking over the past year—and I felt it today. It does me a lot of good in a lot of ways when I’m regularly in the woods. I’m going to get back to that.
After the recent rain, there’s a lot of water rushing out of Donaldson Cave at Spring Mill State Park. You might call it chthonic water. (Ha ha?)
I think about this one now and then. The most sensuous poem I know. The minute observation of his father’s work is deeply moving.
Digging
Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
It’s okay if you don’t like Christmas. Take this as your official permission. 😄 It’s the year’s most potent mix of guilt, obligation, and expectation. Simplify your way out of it wherever you can. And where you do find ways to simplify, utterly refuse the guilt that will try to undo your work.