Meaning, Memories & Tibet
Hannah Arendt on the Human Condition: Productivity Will Replace Meaning
You begin the task; you complete the task. You begin the task; you complete the task. For Arendt, this is a description not of work but of labor. In terms of freedom and meaning, labor is the lowest tier of human activity; unfortunately, it’s also the tier to which most other kinds of human activity are being reduced.
The accelerating cycles of labor and consumption are replacing free human action with instrumentalization, and meaning with productivity…
Arendt offers this analysis in her prescient 1958 book, The Human Condition, which provides an account of what Arendt calls the vita activa, the life of activity.
— Jack Madden, Philosophy Break
Smells, touch, feelings … why can’t I form any sensory memories like other people?
Have you ever had the experience where a smell or a taste pulls you into a world of memory? One bite of a cookie of a similar kind to those in your old school cafeteria, and suddenly you can practically see the linoleum floors and hear the squeak of plastic chairs. Most people can have these sudden reveries – I can’t.
When I have come across descriptions of this phenomenon – Proust’s madeleine scene, for instance, or the memory bubbles in the movie Inside Out – I’ve always assumed that it was some kind of metaphorical device. I had no idea that most people actually re-experience moments from their pasts in some sensory detail, even if it’s a bit shaky or faint.
— Sadie Dingfelder, The Guardian
Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth
A glance at history, however, reveals that not all the many and widely varying forms of Buddhism have been free of doctrinal fanaticism, nor free of the violent and exploitative pursuits so characteristic of other religions. In Sri Lanka there is a legendary and almost sacred recorded history about the triumphant battles waged by Buddhist kings of yore. During the twentieth century, Buddhists clashed violently with each other and with non-Buddhists in Thailand, Burma, Korea, Japan, India, and elsewhere. In Sri Lanka, armed battles between Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils have taken many lives on both sides. In 1998 the U.S. State Department listed thirty of the world’s most violent and dangerous extremist groups. Over half of them were religious, specifically Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist.
— Michael Parenti, Red Sails