Reading List

Dear Friends,

Welcome to another edition of   Reading   List !!  Thank you for joining me.

We have two interesting pieces in this edition.

In the first link, let me invite you to an interesting essay on the body of work by French polymath and writer Rene Girard. Some of his ideas have greater relevance in our day to day life. One interesting thought from his writing is the origin of human desires. According to him, at a deep neurological level, when we watch other people and pattern our desires off theirs, we are not so much acquiring a desire for that object so much as learning to mimic somebody and striving to become them or become like them. Girard calls this phenomenon mimetic desire. We don’t want; we want to be. Girard analyses the origin of human conflicts deeply. We admire our models for being our inspiration, and we simultaneously come to resent them and hate them for being our obstacle and rival. He also outlines two kinds of models. Internal and external. If the models are external and far away, the chances of conflicts are rare. But when our model is close – if they’re our peer, co-worker, neighbour, or even a family member – we do the opposite. We desperately hide the fact that they are the model for our admiration and jealousy. Drawing on history, he considers hierarchy and religion as defences against mimetic violence.

 Religion is the ultimate source of hierarchy. No role model is more powerful, virtuous, or farther away than God. God is not your peer. Analysing the original sin, Girard feels that the sin of Adam and Eve was eating from the tree of good and evil. In Girard’s view, knowledge of “Good and Evil” is really knowledge of Self and Other. The moment they discover their nakedness is when they find out that there is an opinion of the other, that this opinion somehow matters, and that you ought to care about it. At the beginning of the Old Testament, this moment is the seed of our worst behaviour: pride, shame, envy, and the other components of mimetic conflict. When it comes to the modern age, what are the relevant main ideas of Girard? When people are hooked to the internet for huge amounts of time, an immediate effect is the unhappiness generated by online life. According to Girard,  it makes it easier for us to find the stuff we want, tell the internet what stuff we’re looking for, and have stuff advertised to us that we might want. While this is undoubtedly true, it’s a sideshow compared to what’s going on: the internet makes it easier to gaze longingly at the people we admire and envy. It creates an overpowering amount of pressure to become and be seen as a particular type of person. This, in turn, make many people miserable. Social Networking and the web is like our own version of eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge: the Internet is a supercharged, everyday reminder of the presence of Self and Other. Read this engaging essay from the blog of Alex Danco.https://alexdanco.com/2019/04/28/secrets-about-people-a-short-and-dangerous-introduction-to-rene-girard/comment-page-1/#comment-4581

In the second essay, Derek Thompson probes why the modern man has less time despite all technologies. Once upon a time, it was thought that, when technology improves, we will have a lot of leisure time.  When we look around, we find that the main objective of many innovations was to reduce the working hours by automating several things.  However, what happened was very different.  We have saved time in one job and found new ways of filling that time.  Thompson identifies three main reasons for this. Firstly, while technology creates higher expectations, those expectations generate more work. We’d collectively prefer more money and more stuff rather than more downtime. We are victims of the curse of want. Secondly, a lot of modern work aims to maintain our class and status rather than meet life’s basic needs.  Once this maintenance and accumulation stretches for the next several generations, we never have an opportunity to grab more leisure time.  Finally, the bosses and government decide the number of hours people work, and it takes another round of questions to understand how much people should work.  This article is primarily aimed at work culture in developed countries. However, how much someone should work and how much leisure we need are essential questions for everyone. Read Derek Thompson here.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/why-you-never-have-time/603937/