This is interesting... so I'm jumping straight in over my head...:-)
Doug C reports on a lecture:
...
> religion is fast vanishing what is going to bind people together. The only
> answer given tonight was football.
Football, yes. But also music. Star Trek. Parenting. Poetry?
Any shared interest, especially if it's a passionate one. And yes,
religion or spirituality, which is not necessarily in the traditional
form anymore. The idea that football, or Star Trek, or rock'n'roll,
are religions, makes a lot of sense to me - it's not just a joke.
I was thinking last night about what I have faith in. Not in some
person in the sky, that's for sure. But I do have faith in other people.
Quite a lot of people, actually... and particularly in people who
are members of the communities I feel attached to. The thing about
living urban & global is that they're not necessarily your neighbours
any more and you might have to go looking for them. To me this is both
a problem and a great source of potential. It's great that we can care about
people on the other side of the world. It's a problem that we might
not care about the people living next door.
> The only other thing I can think of is
> dialect..texting for example. Each generation replaces the exiosting dialect
> by a fresh argot.
Yes, these disposable dialects create a sense of something shared, and of a
special group, an "us". But the dialect itself, and the groups,
seem to be gradually absorbed by the wider language and community over time.
Gangs and secret societies and urban slang have been around for a very long
time.
(There's a site called Urban Dictionary, possibly urbandictionary.com.
My web browser isn't working right now so I can't tell you the URL.
There's a lot of crap in there, but if you want to find out what some piece
of urban slang means you'll probably find it there.)
> But the basic problem is that our mnds are programmed to
> live in communities of less than 200 people
...
> And oh there was another point re Theory of Mind. Women are better than men
> at it hence their superior verbal skills.
But is the poet's or shaman's mind differently "programmed", somehow?
Sure feels like it in the case of the poet. The gender difference
seems to be reduced, for a start, at least in some of us.
I'm a poet but not, so far as I've noticed, a shaman.
Some people seem to be both.
Janet
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Janet Jackson
<[log in to unmask]>
www.arach.net.au/~huxtable/janet
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