The Top 5: Religion of techonology, spirituality, child-care, shifting baselines, overhead surveillance
Welcome to the latest edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation!
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The Top 5 articles for your week:
“The Psychology of Replacing Religion with Spirituality” (Psychology Today)
Because Andy Tix ponders the rise of spirituality.
There’s plenty of research evidence to show that increasing community and meaning contribute to positive life outcomes such as enhanced well-being. I do wonder, though, whether these spiritual “replacements” could start generating their own doubts and questions for people. For example, what really constitutes a “sacred” text? Is Harry Potter sufficient? Would Mary Oliver’s poetry or some other text be better?
“What Happens When We Stop Remembering?” (Orion Magazine)
Because Heidi Lasher looks at what happens when our baselines change. How will future generations know what they’re missing?
Shifting baselines is the idea that each successive generation will accept as “normal” an increasingly degraded and disorganized ecology, until at some point in the future, no one will remember what a healthy ecology looks and feels like. Absent any personal or societal accounting of migrating butterflies, winter snowfall, or spawning salmon, future generations will have tolerated so many small losses in population, abundance, and habitat that eventually they won’t know what they’re missing. Worse, they may not even care.
“Private Equity Has Its Eyes on the Child-Care Industry” (The Atlantic)
Because Adam Harris points out the growing interest of private equity in child care.
Any time there is a windfall of public money, with few strings attached, unintended consequences are nearly certain to follow. Thanks to the new law, more Vermont families will have more to spend on child care, and centers will receive additional money without explicit rules around how to spend it. Both of those facts will make child care an attractive target for private-equity groups looking for an industry with lots of incoming revenue.
“When Eyes in the Sky Start Looking Right at You” (NYT)
Because William J. Broad writes that the old fear around spy satellites is becoming reality.
Anyone living in the modern world has grown familiar with diminishing privacy amid a surge security cameras, trackers built into smartphones, facial recognition systems, drones and other forms of digital monitoring. But what makes the overhead surveillance potentially scary, experts say, is its ability to invade areas once seen as intrinsically off limits.
Because LM Sacasas ruminates on an ignored facet of secularization.
In other words, what if the secularization of consequence for understanding our present moment is not a process in relation to Christianity, but to another, related but distinct, form of religious belief and practice?
Enter the religion of technology.
The “religion of technology” is a term coined by David Noble in his book bearing the same title. Noble was quite explicit about the fact that he was not proposing a metaphor. He was not suggesting that technology was like a religion, or that people relate to their devices in quasi-religious ways. All true perhaps, but Noble wasn’t interested in such things. He argued that, from roughly the turn of the first millennium onward, there was a concrete, objective historical relationship between religion, specifically Christianity, and the Western techno-scientific enterprise.
ICYMI on Wear We Are:
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