Comprehensivist Wednesdays: What Set Us Free and What It Cost
Details
In this meetup we will explore what happens when the thing that was supposed to free us turns out to be what disciplines us. We will focus on the article "Richard Sennett and Eva Illouz on tyranny of intimacy," which sets two diagnoses side by side and argues they describe one process caught at different moments. Sennett calls intimacy a tyrant: once we measure everything by whether it touches us personally, the impersonal world starts to look stale and public life quietly empties. Illouz reverses the direction. Intimacy itself becomes the thing tyrannized, disciplined by constant self-monitoring, by the audit of who does what share of the housework, by dating profiles built to make people comparable rather than singular.
Our conversation focuses on the gap this leaves open. Neither account names a tyrant. No one designed any of these forces to cool love down, and the tyranny arrives as advice rather than as an order, which is what makes it hard to refuse or even to see. Sennett, writing in 1977, describes people fleeing the cold public world into the warmth of private life. Illouz, decades later, finds that warmth has been rationalized too, that attachment now reads as a threat to autonomy. If these are the same mechanism arriving in two places at two times, the real question is not whether intimacy has been damaged, but whether there is anywhere left where "us" outranks "me."
Richard Sennett and Eva Illouz on tyranny of intimacy: Intimacy tyrannized and intimacy as a tyrant
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TYNX2t2QhmGuYalm2wNjOver767sE7vF/view?usp=sharing
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CJ Fearnley's book "Collaborating for Comprehensivity," is a unique exploration of comprehensive thinking, inquiry, and collaboration, is now available on Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and free PDF formats.
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Welcome to the series "Comprehensivist Wednesdays." Transdisciplinarity, Renaissance humanism, homo universalis, and Polymathy are some of the ways of describing this approach which Buckminster Fuller called Comprehensivity and described as “macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive.”
See the calendar at https://www.meetup.com/52LivingIdeas/events/calendar/
We record all our Meetups and post them on YouTube. Feel free to keep your video on or off as you prefer. Watch Past Meetups here.
Welcome to "Comprehensivist Wednesdays"
Explore transdisciplinarity, Renaissance humanism, homo universalis, and polymathy in ways Buckminster Fuller described as “macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive.”
A Meetup Every Day, Every Week, For Everyone!
Join us every weekday at 8 pm or 9 pm ET. We record all our meetups and post them on YouTube. Feel free to keep your video on or off as you participate.
Watch Past Meetups here.