Walter Ong, Human Transformation, Catholicism and The Aesthetics of Technofuturism

Comments

1. kat says:

   August 28, 2004

   When I discussed getting laser surgery with my very Christian eye doctor, he told me he was uncomfortable with things that messed with God’s work, aka the human body. Firm agnostic that I am, it was difficult for me to get past this and hear what he was really saying: that the operation assumes that there’s a bunch of tissue in the eye which doesn’t serve any purpose, and even though there’s no scientific evidence to back him, he’s not comfortable with the assumption.

   Which is a good point. He didn’t talk me out of surgery, but I’m still thinking about the whole thing.

   I think Christians – the ones I know anyway – are very conservative about their bodies… which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If we’re moving towards teeth-phones and such, we may really need the Voice Of Irrational Caution in the back of our society-head.

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2. gordsellar says:

   August 29, 2004

   Kat,

   What you say, all of it, makes sense. But I think there’s a difference between being conservative and losing your imagination to ideology.

   The difference between questioning the validity of a scientific assumption and assuming something is impossible is that the former can make sense regardless of your beliefs, while the latter not only doesn’t make sense according to a whole array of beliefs, but also cuts one off from possibilities that certainly do exist.

   From my example,I’d say that the scientists who assume that tissue X in your eye is useless (though they may be correct) are closer to the people I described as ridiculing the idea of tooth-phones. They’re cutting themselves off from a very real possibility for reasons that are far from established. Which means I have more in common with your doctor than you may imagine.

   In any case, the mode of ridiculing the idea of a tooth phone was what got my dander up. “Ha ha, I’ve known people who thought their teeth were talking to them, but they were all in the psych ward!” got me somehow. I’ve never mocked anyone’s beliefs that way; when confronted with the claim that prayer has demonstrable, concrete results that “prove” the existence of God (a far more questionable and shoddy thought, really, philosophically speaking), I discussed it logically and politely. I didn’t cackle in amusement. I wasn’t snorting when I said, “If you’re judging which religion is true by mere global popularity, then of course Islam wins, hands down.”

   As for the danger of tooth phones, I think the step from cell phone (or, as they say in Asia, hand-phones) to tooth phones is a much smaller one than from landline phones to mobile. The big cultural jump has already been made, at least in Asia, and the reduction and relocation of the phone is a minor detail, in my opinion. That’s why laughing at the idea at all seems so bizarre and kind of sad to me.

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3. gordsellar says:

   August 29, 2004

   Of course, the hands-down thing about Islam is disputable… this web page says I’m wrong, sort of. It depends on how accepting you are of the notion of self-identification. As you must know, I am very skeptical of it, and suspect there are likely far more practicing Muslims than Christians in the world. In terms of setting up theocracies Islam is also more “successful” (for whatever that is worth). I think there is a lot more pressure to practice Islam in “Muslim societies”, of course, but then again enforced practice is practice. In Christian societies I think there’s little pressure to practice, but a great deal of pressure to self-identify as a practicing Christian. Besides, Islam is, apparently, growing while Christianity’s numbers are dropping. So who knows which stats are worth what?

   But I was wrong strictly thinking that Muslims outnumber Christians on the common scale of measurement.

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