“I want to be alone. I just want to be alone” – Greta Garbo, Grand Hotel

Enjoy your day. I liked that line about being “companioned” 

you may find this interesting http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together.html

wonderful! I discovered it when I was teaching a “technology communication” class in high school and was left with no lesson plan. So I thought “TED talks will have something” – that’s what i showed them. One girl texted throughout it! ha – Ted is a life-saver for me! 

And Garbo delivering: garbo: “i want to be alone!”

Ha Sheri ONeill I don’t think “treasure” surely. For I’m not worth enough money to be one of those! But I do now of the Steven Covey story. Years ago a friend of mine had sent a story, a quite quite good story he had written to a man who had asked him to send when it was finished. My friend never heard back from the man and went into a ‘People are so disingenuos’ mood. He was quite angry for sometime because he never would have sent the story without their having been an invitation. There was all of this expectation wrapped up in it. Months late he found out the man’s fairly newborn son had died. No, we do not know what is going on in another person’s life or how we would react were it happening to us. We just think we do. And then we are off and running with our many assumptions.

Ciao Claudio Romagnoli you are welcome!

Daniela Huguet Taylor and I imagine you absorb their stares with the grace known to people who have the empathy you have! I have this small collection of old printed “booklets” on manners and things like that. In one of them, called “Don’t: A Manual of Mistakes & Improprieties More or Less Prevalent in Conduct and Speech,” there is this admonition: “Do not let your civility fall short, but over-civility is a mistake. Don’t rush to pick up a man’s hat; don’t pick up any article that a stranger or companion may drop, unless there are special reasons for doing so. Be prompt to pick up anything that lady lets fall, and extend this politeness to elderly or infirm men. But haste to wait on equals is over-civility; it has a touch of servility, and is not sanctioned by the best usage.”

I don’t know why that suddenly came to mind, but it did!

Hehehe how very sexist that advice was! For dropped articles, I tend to just call out, “excuse me, you dropped X”, unless they’re burdened or frail.

And yes, I’ve never minded being the odd one out, so they can stare away!

How about this one Daniela Huguet Taylor: “Don’t give yourself wholly to the reading of novels. An excess of this kind of reading is the great vice of womankind. Good novels are good things, but how can women hope to occupy an equal place with men if their intellectual life is given to one branch of literature solely?”

And to think that it’s all gone to Hell in a Hand Basket because all women everywhere are busy reading those dreaded novels….

Ha Sheri ONeill. “Tesoro” in Italian (I think). Then a treasure I shall be…hoping all the while that the good fortune of that words spills over into the treasury coffers…my own of course…

Oh, dear… it were reading that dunnit!

Curious, when you think about it, the idea they had of women having nothing to do but read all day, it must’ve produced real mixed feelings about it, hating them for their indolence, and yet wishing to keep them there!

…

Am in shock now… then it was me!! I must’ve caused about 50% of all the dilly-dally havoc, I’m bound! My poor kids, are sick to the death of me saying “must leave” at social events and then chit-chatting yet some more. So sorry, will amend forthwith!!

See, at it again, dilly dallying!

Edward Morbius it’s one of the blessings of film that it is preservable and, often, sadly, changeable in weird ways. But I’d rather have it than not have it. I watched an interview with a choreographer last night about creating dance for the stage that is not filmed and just disappears and what that is all about. Film is so much a director’s, cinematographer’s and producer’s medium…as opposed to the stage, which is more a writer’s and actor’s medium… I could talk about film/theatre/dancer forever. There I go again, threadjacking my own post!

If you are interested in these ideas explored in a deeper and better way, I suggest reading John Durham Peters book Speaking into the Air

I don’t know Peters’ Speaking into the Air and appreciate you telling me/us about it Steve Llano.Thank you very much.

Referring to Greg Squires comment miriam dunn? I think so too. Greg, you always bring things to think about to the table. I’m not a techie and I’m not a scientist but I do have opinions about the impact technology (and a lot of other things) have on us simply by observing and paying attention to the differences in quality of communication brought about over the course of decades. I don’t honestly know how anyone cannot, in a way, conduct their own mini research by carefully observing life around them.

I would agree that there is a kind of zealotry about technology. Even here, it’s a hot potato to even question whether it’s all good, all healthy, all meaningful. Eve A raises the ever present balance issue, which, it seems to me, is the key issue. In business it is common now to walk into someone’s office and have them not even take their eyes off of their email while simultaneously talking. The “screen” has a power to it, an urgency, a Must Pay Constant Attention to Me energy about it that overrides human contact. Simone Weil’s, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” goes out the window in a heartbeat when there is a message, a task, a mission in the ether that must be accomplished.

Although it isn’t what Greenfield is specifically addressing, I cannot help but wonder if one of the things in the brain that is becoming so easily altered is the individual’s ability to decide balance for themselves (and everything else). I have a stepdaughter who is doing research into altruism (she’s an evolutionary psychologist) and I often wonder what affect it will have on me if ever there is a scientific “declaration” that, Yes, people are intrinsically, inherently, biologically, evolutionarily, physiologically and naturally altruistic in nature…or that, No, people are not inclined to altruism, they choose to be so only for personal selfish gain…or any other “proof” about The Way We Are.

Would such a declaration change the way I behave for the better or for the worse?  In other words, without any such proof I personally do believe that people are altruistic. I personally do believe that an over-fixation on technology is addictive (and therefore unhealthy) as, say, cigarettes or sugar.

Safran Zoer’s essay is just as much, for me, about being human and not forgetting that we are. Not easy to do these days.

Well I’m no evolutionary psychologist Giselle Minoli, but I’m not sure that I see much of a problem with altruism, in principle at least. I think that there’s probably been a reluctance to admit credence to the idea of it because it on face value challenges some world views. The idea of a selfish gene, and the sceptics approach of caution over anything construed as an ethical natural law for one thing. Or the political view that altruism is a form of weakness, to be avoided if one is to be a more complete human.

That it demands an adequate explanation in evolutionary terms is of course right. From a neurological perspective, it’s basis is measurable, and its mechanism known at least in a broad way. The link between mirror neurons, intelligence and the capacity for empathy has been described, and I provided one link that deals with that subject. There are others. Besides the mechanics of empathic capacity though, there are two related matters. The first is utilisation, and the product of that utility. This varies a lot between individuals, and entails a lot of other factors related to psychological organisation.

The second, related to altruism, is the question posed from a evolutionary perspective of what benefit it provides to an individual. a formal description is or will be quite technical, and a complete description is dependant upon a satisfactory description of the necessary brain functions and their environmental precursors. In general though, altruism as an evolutionary tactic is not that difficult to accept as long as we have an elastic enough concept of the selfish gene, including group behaviour, together with a better description of environmental influence on selective outcomes.

An example of the interplay between altruism and self interest was seen in the last Ice Age, when cooperation between nomadic Homo sapiens was a necessary condition for survival. Most of the river settlements in Europe are evolved village groupings, where excessive competition, or War, lead to death and mass death, and compromise led to survival of an extended group, a group of members greater than the members of ones own blood line. From an evolutionary perspective, individuals with active mirror neurons and associated capacity utilisation had a competitive advantage over others. In other words, we don’t necessarily have to dismiss altruism as contrary to the principles of natural selection, though it brings up many interesting questions about environmental modifiers and self initiated modifiers, the last being a sub type of environment.

Well I’m first of all delighted to be able to say Giselle Minoli that you have in those phrases demonstrated the functional utility of altruism.

Utilising empathic capacity to reason a strategy that leads to an action within your environment will place you at either a competitive advantage or disadvantage to another environmental condition. That environmental condition may be another person using a different strategy, and if so, a different outcome to that actor.

That outcome in the extreme could mean the difference between life and death, or some other difference. Life as we know it. A selective process.

I want to address this more completely. Next comment.

About whether empathy as such has diminished at all in recent history Giselle Minoli, I would have to say that I have deduced that it has. I watched Susan Greenfields talk after I posted the link, and I noticed that she mentioned that there is at least one study that shows a decrease in empathy, whatever that means in the studies terms, over the past thirty years. That seems like a valid result to me.

The reasons for this I think are many and varied and interconnected, with each reason I could conjecture being debatable. However I would include these.

Firstly, greed is good. The propagated idea that the best outcome for the individual matters as the only fundamentally meaningful quantifiable value, and that there is no such thing as society, as Margaret Thatcher put it. Alan Greenspan promoted these values as the Feds chairman, his ideas based very largely in the Ayn Rand school of thought. This at a time when China was still a land of bicycles, and the relative power and influence of the United States was vastly greater than today. In short, Capitalism won, and the trans Atlantic dynamic trickled down both wealth and ideology to wider society, and more than that, as the base upon which developing countries built their economies. Except for outliers of course.

Secondly, and connected to the first, the financialisation of assets and privatisation. The conversion of more and more things that often were considered common property or goods, or simply free, such as water to trades or tradable instruments. One method of quantifying this change is by calculating the scale and distribution of debt instruments. As banks do.

Thirdly, communications, and I’ll include travel here. Expanded communications can vastly complicate decisions about things where they impact upon self interest. Rapid change can be stressful, and something as simple as increasing air traffic has a psychological implication for ones own calculation of safety. Of course we use communications in what we hope is a narrow controlled fashion for things like social networking, but these controlled interlinkings are intentionally directed and its topology fully imagined and therefore safe. However other kinds of communications can also require strategies involving self interest.

Lastly I’ll just put consumerism and rights. Stricter and deeper notions of choice and accumulation of rights through civil dispensation. This is a subject for another day I think, because it includes things like social responsibility of citizens, corporate responsibility and things like charity and philanthropy. Questions that go to the heart of what we actually mean by society.

So overall I think it’s true that we don’t exercise, as Susan Greenfield would put it, those capacities as much as people used to, and if you don’t use it you lose it.

I’ve just seen your last comment so I’ll reply to that I think.

Decreased empathy in the “Haves”… perhaps?

The thing is Giselle Minoli, that altruism only becomes problematic if it’s described in terms that exclude environmental determinants.

Alterations in gene expression can be influenced by environment, it would seem[1].

As your rational thoughts affect the actions you take, presumably, and these actions form part of your environment, then these self referential processes are themselves capable of being selective inputs.

So, actions based even upon denial of self interest may lead to better selective outcomes, depending only upon the values you use to describe that outcome. In a way this is common sense. Many a time a mother has been asked to decide between her life and her childs during childbirth. Without the capacity and utility of altruism, one woman will elect self survival, but her line will perish. Another who elects for the life of her child will die, but her line will prosper. In this, altruism has been selected as a positive attribute. It doesn’t imply that the decision was in any way mechanistic or even deterministic I don’t think.

[1]http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/098ns_003.htm

I’ll have to defend that miriam dunn. It’s really late here so I’m not sure I should do that now. Just quickly though I’ll comment tomorrow that I think travel does broaden the mind and leads to a better understanding and knowledge in general. It’s made the world a smaller place. But it has its effects.

An anecdote springs to mind. A journalist I read told of how he was travelling through Tokyo airport and masses of people orchestrated fairly uniform spacing between their moving bodies in all directions. The journalist arrived in Melbourne airport, Australia at two in the morning, with the airport completely empty except for his co passengers, was walking a hall and bumped head on to someone walking the other direction.

I’ll expand on this idea of exclusion limits tomorrow, and re think whether its right or not.

Thank you for taking the time to read it Gideon Rosenblatt. I do think there is something in the air about this topic that we are addressing. On the surface it’s a balance issue. A little beneath that there is the nagging question about connected/disconnected, engaged/disengaged, present/not present. And underneath that is the very large looming question – What is our purpose within all of this and are we doing something constructive and useful and helpful…or are well just taking up more of our individual and collective time? Onward!

I think when it comes to human behavior, we have left the arena of evolutionary pull, to be honest. We no longer feel a part of nature, only its master or its victim. We have medical and technological advances that no longer seem extensions of ourselves. I was in a conversation about beauty yesterday and noted that the modern fixation on thinness in women no longer seemed evolutionary and someone remarked they thought the use of c-sections made fleshy, hippy women no longer essential for attractiveness. I find that an unsupported claim but the “idea” behind i seems to be worth considering in other areas. 

Ah yes! you are absolutely right (in that, I agree with you so you must ne! lol) Ideas are the pull now – but sadly some of them are very bad. Grassroots will save us, hopefully

miriam dunn such a pithy observation. My own interpretation of that Gideon Rosenblatt is that what we can create is becoming our reality and it may be irrelevant if there were an evolutionarily pull toward it or not when we are edging closer and closer to creating whatever reality we want. If all girls are taught that they are fat, not because all men believe this but because a few who are in charge of the imagery put that preference out there in force, girls will simply find a way to become skinny in order to survive in their culture. Plastic surgery is the new evolutionary tool.

I posted some vintage bra ads today – and they were shaped like torpedos! I wondered who on earth designed these cones for breast-holding and why on earth women wore them! Well, all part and parcel of the issue of control of the female form, really. THAT is a huge topic, and I didn’t mean to change streams — just making connections. 

What a great blog Giselle Minoli and thank you for +’ing me in….(para 6 needs the l in laughter and everyone in this stream is very familiar so I didn’t want to take your time to read a private post on that,hope that’s OK)….

But yes,Gilles thinks I am very physically sexy BUT indeed (a good thing for the future!) he thinks my brains are the sexiest thing…..I would think Brian would also think your brains are sexy…..

You know,even when you are alone,pruning your bushes,you are not REALLY alone as long as you have that occasional snake,the humming of the bees,etc.

The weight thing is so societal isn’t it? But when Gilles and I met I was 5 lbs thinner due to TV and he HATED it and so OK,fine,I gained 5 lbs. But honestly although HE thinks my body is perfect,when I grab a pair of shorts (as in yesterday to walk the dogies) I easily fit into 10 years ago and they are TIGHT it drives me batty and I want those 5 lbs OFF. And now that I think about it,IS it societal? No, I got used to THAT weight,not THIS weight for 30 years and I would like to “go back” without thinking I’m going to lose my sex appeal to my husband!

LOL talk about a threadjack there…..back to vanting to be alone!  

I’m such a dope. I just sliced my finger pruning my roses. No gloves. Yesterday I said to myself, ‘You know you are really pushing your luck. Get your gloves. How hard is it?’ Did I listen? No. Pretty far down on the evolutionary scale and not much into survival I’d say…

Matthew Graybosch I don’t Notify anyone, hardly ever. I just post. I’m always afraid of bothering everyone….

miriam dunn I am on the road and have been for three weeks and will be for at least 3 more so I was thinking that when life calms down I would do it for a Buy Yourself a Fetching Miriam Dunn Hat for Autumn!

Best obey Herself Matthew Graybosch…

+Kim Crawford your particular Five Pounds might be the difference between you as an individual feeling good and not feeling good. But that is not what is affecting most women. For most women it is 20, 25, 30 pounds that they are being told to “take off.” The message is that Weight = Beauty. Weight most certainly Does Not = Beauty. In fact it has absolutely nothing to do with it at all. Nor does body type.

The tennis playing Williams sisters are equally beautiful and fit. Go back into the history of fine art and sculpture and the extremely thin model was not the prize. Nor was it in the movies until very recently. Marilyn Monroe would not be considered fat. So, too, Sophie Loren and Anna Magnani.

The message is absolutely cultural and is so powerful that once a girl, a woman gets sent this message, unless her confidence and sense of her self are so strong she will succumb to it because it is everywhere. George Balanchine’s dancer were long and lean. Arthur Miller’s were not. Nor were Pina Bausch’s dancers. But the public awareness of Balanchine’s dancers was the more powerful image and, unfortunately, in the world of dance, the greater one.

Once a message such as “You can never be too thin or too rich, gets printed in the media,” we are doomed. It takes off. It has wings. It gets repeated on sorority floors, in gymnasiums, at dinner parties, in the back seats of cabs, on the subway…in front of the bathroom mirror and people start to believe it.

Beauty = Fit. Beauty = what’s right for the individual. Beauty = Brains. Beauty = determining what’s right for the self. And if 5 pounds less for you is right for you, that is different than being five pounds lighter because someone said a number, a shape, a size, is what to shoot for.

I’m so tired of seeing young women spending their lives obsessing over what they look like, instead of becoming scientists and architects and engineers, and artists, and filmmakers, and writers and…doctors!

we’ll be here all week

🙂

Exactly! 

Catching up now. What a haunting essay, particularly the last paragraph. 

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