despite promising several months ago to get back in the blogging swing of things I haven't - I suppose I wasn't really comfortable introducing my thought life to the proposed new audience electronically, so I have been sticking to personal contact... which I think is better. I just had a friend visit last night who more or less despises the internet and e-mail, and in a random conversation with a street musician, he got started on internet conspiracy theories. He is a philosophy PhD student who focuses on Nietzsche's philosophy of education, and particularly writes about how that leads to Christ (rather indirectly). He had a crise de conscience some time ago that led him to begin a revolution - mostly personal in nature, but with implications for his students and writings. That choice to be a revolutionary has led him to a romantic desire to lead a life that is more in touch with nature and God's creation, and less with technology. It started with him walking 5 miles to school, and wearing a uniform (generally jeans and a corduroy jacket), and waking up to his senses. But how is that really so revolutionary, rather than living in denial of the present age? I question the logic of such romanticism, as someone who went through a stage of being a purist, and a naturalist - I made furniture out of wood, and not content with that, decided I need to find and dry fresh wood to make things with (including carving my own spoons), and pushing further decided I should make my own tools and only use techniques from the 18th century (thanks to the New Yankee workshop). At a certain point I just realized that it was ridiculous escapism, and a denial of the world we live in. How is it inherently better to glamorize the antiquated? I think there is something exciting and liberating about knowing how everything works within our massively complex system of the world and not just trusting in "the magic of electricity" - that lights turn on when you flip switches; but I think a pragmatic approach is much more tenable. I could live a completely self-sustaining (or maybe I should say internally enclosed) life with nomads in the desert, minding herds, and I do for a few weeks at a time perhaps, but different places suggest different modes of life. Ironically I think the urban poor are assumed to have both simplicity and access to variety/opportunities, when in reality they have neither. The simplicity of an internally enclosed life is so appealing to the complexity of industrialized peoples, but it's frequent result is poverty and lack of variety. This is why the rural poor come to mega-slums, but when they arrive, the difficulty of work constricts their choices, while the vastness of the social webs lays unexpected traps, and unforeseeable disasters, which are know conceivably resolvable but ever out of reach. But for those who "live among the poor" is it not too easy to take that fraction more of disposable income we have and spend it to keep both sides in reach? Is it not too easy to reach for a nice fresh mango lassi with one hand and a wireless connection with the other? Don't we thus invalidate the true identification with the poor, by clinging to the romantic simplicity of knowing the farmer whose cow produced this milk, and keeping hold of that medical insurance in case anything should go wrong? How then can we truly identify with the urban poor, when we are not geographically circumscribed to simplicity as we would be in a rural area, nor are we woefully shut out of the access and opportunities that cities afford. It takes a more conscious choice to say no to what is within reach in order to identify with those for whom it is always just out of reach...