Welcome 1.2

Now that we're all in and settled, I just wanted to say Welcome Again, this time to all our new contributors! We now have a slightly broader representation of the thirtytofortysomething zeitgeist, and a much more diverse collection of interests. The danger of mutating into a sports blog has been averted- thank you Kathleen and Karin- and I hope that our Blogorrhea will now live up to it's appellation and become a random and eclectic mix of stories. On paper, we are a demographer's dream: two urban dinks, a suburban family and a west-coast hippie (walk into a bar). Being the news junkie that I am, I hear a lot of pundits lately telling me what they "know" about what I believe, about what is important to me, based on my demographic classification. But the reality is that we all defy our stereotypes. The dinks might happily give up their safe, white-collar jobs and trendy neighborhood condo to become a transient professional poker player and an environmental warrior. Our hippie can always be found on a Saturday afternoon watching a bunch of rednecks in big, hydrocarbon-spewing V-eights spend three hours turning left really fast. And I am certainly as far as one can get from being a soccer mom, and not just because I have never been to a soccer game in my life. So as we tell our stories, not only will we defy what the experts “know” about us, we will probably surprise each other as well. But as The Boss says, that’s where the fun is.

There is a philosophic idea I find intriguing which claims that every individual’s interpretation of the things they encounter, their understanding of the world, is informed and shaped by the accumulation of everything they have encountered before. Philosophers are quite fond of taking intuitively obvious ideas and giving them complex explanations and esoteric names. In this case, the ability to remember stuff and use it to figure out new stuff is referred to as one’s camera obscura. There is a reason philosophers do this, though, and it is not simply that we are logorrheic. Well, maybe a little it is. But it’s also a way to try to identify something more subtle or complex that might be hiding within an otherwise mundane idea. We see that little thread and need to pull on it, trying to unravel the whole thing. The concept of camera obscura suggests that a person can never achieve a truly objective understanding of the world. That, in fact, our understanding can by definition only ever be subjective. Whether there is really such a thing as ‘absolute truth’ is irrelevant, because the very nature of the way we learn prohibits our ability to ever find it. Interesting notion, eh?

Ok, maybe not.

But here is an equally interesting conclusion that could be drawn from that premise- I’m calling it the Second Law of Sociodynamics. (Ok, it’s more of a working title.) Theory aside, the practical reality is that most people within a given society share many similar experiences. As a result, their ontological beliefs tend to be similar as well. The more experiences they have in common, the more likely they will agree that certain things are ‘true’. But what happens when we encounter someone with different ideas? A different belief about the true nature of a thing? Even if we don’t agree, their ideas, that experience, contributes to our overall knowledge base and therefore becomes part of what colors our understanding of everything from that point on. And we have similarly contributed to theirs. Our respective understanding of the world has just moved closer together- even if only slightly. Now if we could imagine this process on a global scale, where people from Chicago listen to the stories of people from Nairobi, who had been chatting with people from Hanoi, who just got off the phone with people from Sydney… eventually we might start to see a kind of social entropy. All of our ideas mix together, inevitably leading to a kind of ‘blending and smoothing’ of universal ontology. Relativism would start to look a little more universalistic, and maybe the world would start to become a less contentious place.

Ok, I’m done getting all We-Are-The-World on you. I have no delusions that Israelis and Palestinians will stop hurling explosive devices at each other because I told you all about the funny thing the dogs did yesterday. But as the old saying goes, entropy starts at home. The fact that hockey fighting is good, that drugs are bad and that “The Count” can bring the vicious knees when needed has already been assimilated into my consciousness; and although I would disagree, I now know some people may hold the belief that two tents might be excessive. The perspective of my camera obscura has been enhanced, and now reveals to me a slightly more refined image of the world.

So tell me all your stories, and welcome to the blog!