(May 16, 2024) L. M. SACASAS: The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Life https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-stuff-of-a-well-lived-life
- “Why An Easier Life Is Not Necessarily Happier.”
- Borgmann opposed devices to what he called focal things (e.g. a guitar). Focal things demand something of us. They require a measure of care, practice, and engagement that devices do not. Our use of them induces our focus, which they invite by design.
“The experience of a [focal] thing is always and also a bodily and social engagement with the thing’s world.”
Albert Borgmann
- another of Borgmann’s core claims: our experience tends to be enriched by focal things and diminished by devices
When society is built to run like a machine for the optimization of profit and productivity with little regard for the constraints inherent in the embodied human condition, then we are tempted to embrace the device paradigm as a matter of survival or because we have been conditioned by the machine and have internalized its values.
These appear to be the two paths presented to us: one in which the device paradigm colonizes more and more swaths of our experience and we are increasingly reduced to swiping along a glassy surface of endless content, or one in which we refuse the lure of limitless and meaningless consumption and reclaim focal things and practices along with the skills, satisfactions, and community they generate.
Arnold, B. (2009) The Irish Gulag – How the State Betrayed its Innocent Children Dublin
- [Peter Guy: The Casey Effect] Some two years prior to the Casey scandal a priest in the Ferns diocese in Wexford, Father James Doyle, was convicted of having sexually assaulted a young male. A local newspaper, The Wexford People, covered the story closely but in this instance, the public refrained from directing their anger towards the perpetrator but rather towards the newspaper itself. A number of the complainants were primary school teachers who, according to one group, ‘felt it was unnecessary to expose Doyle in such an undignified manner… the coverage was gutter press reaction to a man who had done so much good for the community.’ Other reactions described the coverage as ‘ill-judged and irresponsible’, ‘discriminatory’ while one lamented the fact that the media did not exercise a ‘little discretion.’ (Mooney, 2011: 60-61)