"...It's in the game."

I have read many books which discuss the psychological and sociological implications of our plugged-in-world. None have been as intriguing as Richard DeGrandpre’s Digitopia, a collection of essays published in 2001. I like it because he constantly reminds his readers what he is not arguing.

In one particular essay he cites David Grossman (a retired L. Col. Army Ranger and WestPoint professor) who wrote a book on the psychology of learning to kill another human being. Grossman discusses how during WWII there was a failure by many soldiers to fire their weapons during combat situations. Interestingly, by the time of the Vietnam War the rate of fire jumped up from 15-20% to 90-95%.

This begs the question—what changed? Grossman demonstrates this change was the result of various desensitization techniques. I have no military experience, but what I gathered was that soldiers are put through various simulated acts of killing in order to replace a voluntary response with an involuntary reflex.

DeGrandpre, following this line of thought, applies it to our plugged-in-world when he writes, “the context of simulation in which desensitization takes place have been replicated within a large variety of action-oriented media, especially interactive video games” (37).

Now, it is important to note that DeGrandpre points out he is not arguing for a one-to-one cause-and-effect relationship; nor is he trying to oversimplify things. Rather, he is talking about a context of simulation that causes desensitization. In this regard he quotes Grossman again, who gives a great analogy.

Grossman points out that this conditioning media is like AIDS. The AIDS virus does not kill someone; rather, it attacks one’s immune system such that they become vulnerable to death by some other illness. Similarly, conditioning media creates an acquired deficiency in the violence immune system.

Is the rise in violence among teenagers, for instance, a direct result of playing video games? I think if one says yes they are arguing fallaciously. However, if one simply points out that the rise in violence among teenagers is because of desensitization due to various forms of conditioning media, then I think one would be making a valid argument—and they would be in good company too.

Thoughts?

DeGrandpre

Grossman

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Follow Up: A Little Foreshadowing

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Hook 'Em Horns

Like many good things; don't ask me to explain it, just enjoy it!

BCS Rankings

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The Language of Beauty

In Narnia and Beyond, a guide to the fiction of C. S. Lewis, Thomas Howard writes, "poetry (the literature of high imagination) carries the legitimate interest of all measurers and analysts (geographers, astrophysicists, all of us) on through to the clarity and intensity implicit in that interest from the outset" (71).

I wonder what many moderns, with their dichotomy between the bona fide disciplines (i.e. sciences) and the more feigned ones (i.e. humanities), would think of this; for Howard claims that poetry does indeed carry weight for all mankind.

Obviously this claim begs further explanation; and Howard, in typical fashion, gives it:

That is, if the botanist for example, finding himself galvanized by the efficiency and symmetry of the life forms he is scrutinizing, continues to press the question implicit in notions like efficiency and symmetry, he is going to find himself reaching for such words as "beauty" and "pleasure" and "awe", and at this point he is going to need poetry, at least if he wants language to chart these latter developments in his study. It is not that poetry or the poetic imagination uncovers some arcane significance in things that a cloddish scientific analysis cannot hope to see: rather we may say that the poetic imagination wants to speak with a language that charts how we mortals see these phenomena, the thing implicit in poetry all along being that there is perhaps no truer way to speak of the phenomena.

Thoughts?

Link

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How Can Poetry Matter?

Given the nature of the classes I teach, at some point in the course of the year the dreadful "P" word shows its ugly head. At least this is what my students think when I say something like "Today we are going to discuss the poetry of T. S. Eliot..."--it would not take a visitor to my class long to hear much grief and sorrow expressed through horrendous shrieking when the word poetry is mentioned.

I have been thinking lately about why this is the case. Why is studying poetry such a seemingly daunting task? Of course, one could mention the rather esoteric nature of poetry—or, at least, that poetry has become esoteric. But, this is not interesting to me. Instead, I am more interested in the question of whether or not poetry can matter—make a difference in our lives.

This thinking has led me to an article written by Dana Gioia, the chairman of the NEA—who was recently interviewed by Ken Meyers on the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Gioia wrote an article in 1991 dealing with this same question; Link namely, can poetry matter? I found a fascinating analogy that he used to show how poetry can matter. He argues that poetry is like cooking. And, insofar as one could eat without first cooking the food, one could live their life without ever having read or understood a poem. But, asks Gioia, imagine what they would be missing.

Indeed, there is something additive about poetry. There is something about poetry which makes the spiritual nourishment that words provide taste so much better. How can I get my students to understand this? Thoughts…

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Deism: A Serious Problem

I was asked a question this week about how to answer someone who holds to a sort of quasi-deism. This particular person holds the position something like God created everything but has since left us on our own to figure things out. Initially I began to think; certainly no one really holds this position anymore. After all, how would one know for certain that this deistic God did indeed create everything?

My thoughts soon carried me away into thinking about what would influence someone to think this. Hasn’t the Church dealt with this? Or, has it?

My thoughts soon brought me, as they often do, to N. T. Wright. I found this quote in Simply Christian which I found simply remarkable.

Many popular misconceptions of Christian faith make the mistake at this point of trying to fit Christian faith into a residual Deist framework. They depict a distant and austere God suddenly deciding to do something after all, and so sending his own Son to teach us how to escape our sphere and go and live in God’s instead…

Perhaps some in the church—with their teaching that the earth is doomed and must be tolerated until our final escape to heaven—have caused this misconception. Perhaps Deism is more of a problem than I assumed at first.

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Intriguing Introductions

David Lodge in the Art of Fiction, a collection of essays on various aspects of British and American fiction, writes, “However one defines it, the beginning of a novel is a threshold, separating the real world we inhabit from the world the novelist has imagined. It should therefore, as the phrase goes, ‘draw us in’” (4-5).

As I sit at my desk contemplating this quote, I can think of three beginnings that completely captivated me:

Estragon: (giving up again). “Nothing to be done.”

From Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

“Call me Ishmael.”

From Moby Dick by Herman Melville

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.”

From Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

Can you think of any?

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