Tag: Culture

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The Global Attention Span Is Getting Shorter

It’s not your imagination: keeping up with the sheer amount of content that’s available today — whether it’s Twitter, the news, or the latest show on Netflix — is getting harder. As a result, the length of time that content remains popular — a rough measurement of the global attention span — is decreasing, according to a recent large-scale analysis published in Nature Communications.

The authors evaluated a total of 43 billion tweets and analyzed the top 50 trending hashtags in the world every hour on the hour, from 2013 to 2016. They then calculated the time the hashtags remained popular and found that in 2013, a hashtag remained in the top 50 list for an average of 17.5 hours, but the figure had dropped to 11.9 hours by 2016.

This attention contraction isn’t just a product of the internet. For instance, the researchers analyzed how long certain words and phrases remained fashionable in 100 years of literature made available by Google Books. They found that catchy terms were used in books for an average of six months in the 19th century, but only stuck around for a month by the 21st century.

“I think a lot of people are feeling a kind of exhaustion with all the things that you have to keep up with.”

“The public interest is getting saturated quicker with one topic because there’s more content produced in the early stages of a trend,” says study co-author Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, who studies modern information systems at Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany. For example, in the 1980s, a blockbuster film — defined as a steep increase in ticket sales from one week to another — was released on average every four months, but that time has shrunk to between one and two weeks in 2018, according to the study.

This means that we are becoming interested in trends more quickly, but are also losing interest in the same content more swiftly, says Sune Lehmann, another study co-author, who is a physicist and mathematician at the Technical University of Denmark. The only media sources whose content isn’t becoming unpopular more quickly, according to the study, are scientific research papers and Wikipedia.

“I think a lot of people are feeling a kind of exhaustion with all the things that you have to keep up with,” Lehmann says.

But he speculates it will be difficult for companies to adapt to the increasing pace of social systems if they also aim to make a profit in an attention-driven economy. “The problem, as I see it, is that there are aspects of experiencing rapidly incoming news that are exciting and exhilarating,” he says. “Any site that sells ‘slow news’ needs to deal with the fact that it is challenging, difficult, and sometimes boring to deeply understand a complex problem.”

One implication of a short public attention span may be that it’s harder to hold people accountable, says Lorenz-Spreen. For instance, he explains that it may be increasingly difficult for journalists to conduct in-depth research for news stories due to pressures to break news stories first, and the knowledge that news stories have a short shelf life. And any issued corrections or clarifications might be less likely to reach readers because they’ve likely moved on to other content by the time mistakes are noticed and fixed.

Lorenz-Spreen thinks communication needs reshaping to help people deal with information overload. One intervention, he says, might be to shift journalistic norms away from novelty and towards quality — stories with more background research, or other journalistic news values.

Sebastián Valenzuela, a journalism and mass communication scholar at the University of Wisconsin Madison who was not involved with the study, says institutions, such as governments, are not ready for such fast turnaround. In the scientific world, he says, it may be risky if researchers actively choose to study trendy topics that hit the headlines, but aren’t as important as other pressing issues that demand more time and effort.

For Valenzuela, the silver lining of a shorter collective attention span is that it means individuals, who previously found it harder to contribute to public discourse, can now attract attention more easily. “The traditional gatekeepers of culture, news, and information are losing power.”

But he doesn’t think the issues of faster turnaround and shorter collective attention spans can necessarily be fixed. What’s needed, Valenzuela says, is for institutions to be more flexible and adaptive. “Organizations need to invest more heavily in technology and human capital to filter and process information,” he adds. “If technology is the culprit of information overload and attention volatility, technology is also part of the solution.”

*This article originally appeared on OneZero at Medium.com

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Making Space for Millennials

Introduction

The Church needs Millennials to continue Christ’s mission of redemption, restoration and reconciliation in the world. And Millennials need communion with Christ and his Body to bring wholeness and meaning to their fractured, frenzied lives.

Four design areas are critical for making space for Millennials: culture, ministry, leadership and facilities.

In making space for Millennials the question should be asked: How can we create transformational space for and with Millennials? 

There are five major reasons Millennials stay connected to a Christian community:

  • Cultural discernment
  • Life-shaping relationships
  • A firsthand experience of Jesus
  • Reverse mentoring
  • Vocational discipleship

Culture

Culture is a reflection of worldview: the values, assumptions and allegiances shared among a group. Watershed cultural shifts taking place as Millennials emerge into adulthood are significantly changing their worldview from the perspective shared by older generations. These changes can be broadly categorized in terms of access, alienation and authority.

Instant, almost unlimited access – which Millennials have had since they began their journey into adulthood – has shaped how they learn, the ways they relate to and interact with the world, and their expectations for church and Christianity.

Millennials have seen corruption at all levels of leadership in almost every type of institution.

Modularity

In a modular world, everything can be taken apart and reassembled in a new pattern. The top down, highly organized studio system has given way to a freelance system. This cultural expression is modularity, and it is the new way our lives – from work to education to relationships – are organized.

What does this mean for the community of faith?

First, it means people’s needs are changing.

Second, if modularity is changing what people need from churches, it is also changing how people engage with churches. As in the realms of family and work, people are piecing together “church” according to their preferences and experiences.

In our modular world, we can get great Bible teaching from a John Piper or Beth Moore podcast, fellowship on Facebook or Skype, an opportunity to serve at the crisis pregnancy center and worship on the I Heart Radio app.

The challenge for faith communities is to help young adults identify what pieces of “church” are inadequate, misshapen or missing in their modular lives and then help them rebuild or fill the gaps.

The calling is not to compete with the other pieces but to make space to help Millennials make sense of them all.

Home, Family & Work

The church has a role to play as a welcoming, stabilizing community for those who are struggling to find their place to belong.

Many Millennials have an idyllic concept of “home”, but the reality is that they are far from it.

  • geographically
  • socially
  • culturally
  • spiritually

While a traditional view of family stil makes a strong showing. the cultural expression of friends as de facto family is as popular as the 90’s sitcom.

In God’s family, teens and young adults are our younger siblings and deserve a place at the family table – and not the little kids table, either! Too ofter we treat young people as troublesome children, rather than as heirs with us of God’s glory (see Romans 8:17).

The Christian community can cast a vision for becoming a wife or husband, mother or father, and help young adults connect that vision to their fragmented lives.

Millennials are drawn to the great outdoors. How could you adapt your communal space to help young adults reconnect “work” with the rest of life?

Cross-cultural Communication

If your standard Bible-teaching method is a 30-45 minute sermon delivered once a week by one leader on a stage at the front of your worship space, you may find it difficult not only to pass on rich Bible knowledge but merely to hold Millennials attention.

Few Millennials need more information, from churches or anyone else. They have access to more knowledge than any generation in history. What they need is wisdom – spiritual understanding that allows them to put knowledge into practice.

Is your community of faith equipping Millennials to be wise about digital tools?

Many Millennials are seeking a more holistic, cohesive approach to tech – an approach that is fully integrated with the Christian understanding of what it means to be created in God’s image.

Wisdom, guided by God’s Spirit, is what allows us to connect right attitude with right action. But teaching young disciples what to think and what to do will not impart wisdom. We must train them (and relearn for ourselves) how to think and act like Jesus – to discern the right way to go and then to get going.

Kingdom culture

Not Jewish culture. Not Gentile culture. Kingdom culture.

Paul wrote: “There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). In a similar way, the Jesus community today is called to transcend, with the Spirit’s help, our generational values, allegiances and assumptions and adopt a shared Kingdom culture.

Ministry

When we conceive of our faith community as a religious services industry, even unconsciously, we understand our difficulty appealing to Millennials as a failure to create brand loyalty – a failure whose solution is a better product and/or better marketing.

If a ministry is successful, we assume, the people whom we serve will gradually become more deeply involved (that is, more loyal to our brand). For instance, if 200 children from the neighborhood attend Vacation Bible School but none of the kids or their parents comes to a church service after VBS is done, we would question whether VBS is an effective ministry. And it’s a valid question – we should assess our ministry effectiveness early and often.

Should the goal of our programs and ministries always be more people actively engaged in our programs and ministries? Is our mission to expand market share and brand loyalty?

Like it or not, consumer culture has shaped what people expect of church.

Millennials are hyperaware and deeply suspicious of the intersection of church and consumer culture.

Closed Doors

What do Millennials think about church? Why have so many closed the door on church involvement? Why, even among those who grew up in church, have nearly six in ten dropped out at some point? Why have more than half been absent from church for the past six months? Why do three in ten Millennials say church is not at all important while an additional four in ten feel ambivalent, saying church is either somewhat important of somewhat not important?

Among those who say church is not important, most are split between two reasons: Two in five say church isn’t important because they can find God elsewhere (39%), and one-third say it’s because church is not personally relevant to them (35%). One in three simply find church boring (31%) and one in five day it feels like God is missing from church (20%). Only 8% say they don’t attend because church is “out of date”, undercutting the notion that all we need to do for Millennials is to make church “cooler”.

A significant number of young adults perceive a lack of relational generosity within the Christian community. 52% of respondents view present-day Christianity as aggressive and critical.

Open Windows

What do Millennials find valuable in church? Their answers can give us insight for what to prioritize in ministry and with Millennials.

A plurality say they attend church to be closer to God (44%) and nearly three in ten go to learn more about God (27%). Getting outside the humdrum of their everyday lives to experience transcendence – in worship, in prayer, in teaching – is a key desire for many Millennials when it comes to church.

Millennials are, on the whole, skeptical about the role churches play in society. This is the closed door. But their hope for the role churches could play? That is an open window.

Respect and Respond

There is one universal when it comes to social status: The person of higher status sets the terms of the relationship, and the person of lower status respects and responds to the boundaries set by the higher-status person.

As a rule, Millennials are not terribly status-conscious, but they are keenly aware that information is power.

The only piece of information a sizable majority of Millennials is comfortable sharing with your church is their first name (82%). Only half are willing to give their last names (53%). Just one-third are comfortable sharing their email address (33%).

Only one in five Millennials are comfortable handing over their physical address (19%), and even fewer their phone number (12%). A mere 6% are willing to grant you access on social media, such as friending on Facebook or following on Twitter or Instagram.

When Millennials visit your faith community, are they welcomed and respected, or harassed and put on the spot? Are they cornered into conversation or physical contact? Are they peppered with requests for personal information? Or are they free to set the boundaries of the relationship, as they feel comfortable?

Life-shaping Relationships

If Jesus’ discipling style is any indication, consistent, deepening friendship over a long period of time and through life’s hills and valleys is an (if not the) essential element of lasting spiritual formation within the community of faith.

Are friendships flourishing that can sustain younger and older adults during seasons of spiritual dryness? Do people of all generations serve together, blessing their community with God’s abundant grace and unconditional love?

Two-thirds of U.S. adults agree strongly or somewhat that Christians should play a
strong role in alleviating poverty (66%). The proportion of practicing Christians under 40 who agree is even higher: nearly nine in 10 (86%).

Millennials have a reputation for being concerned about social justice, even though their record as effective, long-haul activists is spotty thus far. They share an expectation that communities of faith should lead the charge on justice issues like poverty. And when a church’s resources are channeled inward instead of outward, they don’t hesitate to criticize.

To Millennials, sacrificial generosity is non-negotiable when it comes to communities that claim to follow Jesus.
There is an aspirational element involved in this high standard—and isn’t that a good thing? Many in the younger generation express a desire to make the world a better place. Their desire is a faint echo of God’s intention to remake the heavens and the earth into a whole, healed place where he will dwell forever with his people (see Rev. 2:1-5). What would it look like for your church to mentor Millennials to live in the new creation? If young adults aspire to be sacrificially generous but don’t know how, their mentoring friendships should incorporate clear teaching on and rigorous practice of the Christian virtue of charity.

More of Jesus

The fact remains that eight out of ten young adults say growing to or learning about God are the two most important reasons to attend church.

Leadership

There are four factors that emerge as essential to developing the next generation of spiritual leaders:

  • authenticity
  • significance
  • reverse mentoring
  • vocational discipleship

Authenticity

What does it look like to “be authentic”?

It means being true to who you are. Don’t represent yourself as something you’re not.

Many of the institutions previous generations respected as pillars of a healthy society have been disgraced by scandals during Millennials’ formative years. Corruption has been exposed within trusted institutions like government, big corporations, national sports teams and organized religion. From President Clinton to Lance Armstrong, from Tiger Woods to the Catholic church, from the NSA to Martha Stewart, Millennials have plenty of reasons to be skeptical.

Young adults aren’t looking for perfect leaders. What they are looking for is leaders willing to admit they’re not perfect. Hypocrisy is one of the biggest criticisms Millennials have of Christians. A full two-thirds of Millennials believe American churchgoers are a lot or somewhat hypocritical.

Instead, lead from your strengths and be honest about your weaknesses.

Significance

Millennials want to make an impact. Barna research for 20 and Something shows that Millennials want passion for their job (42%) even more than a job that helps them become financially secure (34%) or that provides enough money to enjoy life (24%).

As a generation, they have an undeserved reputation for a lack of loyalty. As a rule, however, this is inaccurate. While it’s true that Millennials do not generally demonstrate loyalty to organizations or institutions, most are extremely loyal to causes and people.

Reverse Mentoring

They’re not interested in earning their way to the top so much as they want to put their gifts and skills to work for the local church in the present—not future—tense.

More than six in 10 Millennials like that they know more about technology than older adults. And, the truth is, the church needs the next generation’s help to navigate digital terrains. Aside from a fluency in technology, you might look to your Millennials to “mentor” you in the following areas:

  • Global perspective
  • Sustainability ideas
  • Social concern
  • Optimism
  • Entrepreneurial spirit

Vocational Discipleship

Nearly half of Millennials (48%) think God is calling them to a different work, but haven’t yet been willing to make the change.

This is where vocational discipleship comes in. Because Millennials are so concerned about the significance of what they do, older Christians who are also established professionals or tradespeople can help them

  • 1) identify their life’s work, and
  • 2) help them connect it to their identity as a Christian.

More than one-third of Christian Millennials (37%) do not have an older mentor who
gives them advice about work. Almost two-thirds of all churched adults (63%) say that, in the past three years, they have not received any teachings or information that helped shape or challenge their views on work and career.

Helping young adults connect the dots between faith and work makes a difference to their lifelong pursuit of Jesus.

Working and Leading Together

In the not-too-distant past, the most common method of career training was apprenticeship. An unskilled worker who showed promise was apprenticed to a master craftsperson, training under his or her guidance until the apprentice could carry out first the basic and, eventually, the highly skilled aspects of the craft. Even from the very beginning, although she didn’t yet have the knowledge or skill to work on her own, the apprentice was right in the thick of it, in the shop alongside the master and other apprentices of varying skill levels, learning the rhythms of the craft and offering her brute strength and boundless enthusiasm to the shop’s success.

Facilities

What is your favorite place to connect with God? To connect with others? How about the best place to spend time in personal reflection?

Most of our modern churches have excellent areas set aside for corporate worship, group learning and community-building. But they leave something to be desired when it comes to personal reflection and prayer.

Overall, the “un-churchy” atmosphere of the space, which had more of a corporate vibe than a holy feeling, and the absence of Christian symbols failed to suggest transcendence.

First, cathedral-style churches seem to Millennials like fine china compared to the everyday dishware of the modern churches.

Second, we talked with the field groups about Starbucks versus the independent coffee shop, and many participants agreed that, while they might aspire to the ambiance, community and authenticity of the indie coffee house, they usually find themselves at Starbucks.

Visual Clarity

On the whole, Millennials have a strong preference for unambiguous visual clarity. Practically speaking, field group participants expressed appreciation for clear signage and directions for how and where to find information. More philosophically, Millennials want to be able to answer the questions “Where am I?” and “What’s expected of me?” by looking for cues in their surroundings. Cathedrals and traditional churches have such cues in spades, yet modern churches are often designed expressly to be ambiguous.

Millennials want a church to be open and honest about what it is and about what it is trying to accomplish.

Religious iconography connects people to the traditions and history of Christianity.

Respite

Our churches are places of action, not places of rest; spaces to do rather than spaces to be. The activities, of course, are designed to connect people with God and each other—and some Millennials hope for that, too—but many just want an opportunity to explore spiritual life on their own terms, free to decide for themselves when to stay on the edges of a church experience and when to fully enter in.

Is it a wonder we see an uptick in Millennials seeking out liturgical forms of worship? Or that Millennials who know about Lent are more likely than their parents to practice it?

Many Millennials connect their desire for peace directly to their expectations or hopes for church.

Your church. It it a place of energy and activity? Where do Millennials go to experience Jesus’s invitation, “Come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest”?

Nature

Our findings reveal two core questions churches should ask about their facilities.

  • First, how do we bring the outside in?
  • Second, how do we bring the inside out?

Instead of using landscaping simply as a frame for the building, could we use it as a legitimate ministry space – a sacred place in its own right?

Building for the Whole Body

Again and again, we have circled back to five reasons Millennials stay connected to a faith community: cultural discernment, mentoring, vocational discipleship and life-shaping relationships with God and other people.

There is no cookie-cutter, mass-production solution for welcoming Millennials to your
space, but there are questions your community can keep in mind as you build to include the whole church body:

  • How do our facilities present visual cues? Can people easily answer the questions “Where am I?” and “What is expected of me?”
  • How do our facilities offer respite from the outside world? Can people find a place of peace that is accessible and comfortable?
  • How do our facilities connect to Christian history and traditions? What symbols or design elements evoke a sense of the sacred and tell the story of God’s actions in the world?
  • How do our facilities integrate elements of nature? How can we bring the outside in and take the inside out?

Cultural discernment, intergenerational friendships, reverse mentoring, vocational discipleship, and an experience of and connection with Jesus are five reasons Millennials go to and stay in church. How well do your facilities, inside and out, allow you to facilitate these important outcomes?

 

For more information feel free to go and buy the book Making Space for Millennials from the Barna Institute at https://resources.barna.org/products/making-space-for-millennials

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Transmitting Culture: 5.

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Hoofstuk 5 – Tool Lines

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Ethnos (Nasie) contra Technics (Tegnologie)

The palaeontologist and material anthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan notes that cultural diversification has been the principal regulator of evolution at the level of Homo sapiens.

Anthropology conceptualizes it under culture, and it is obviously based in a language, the most tenacious of all group memories. All human beings have the same emotions but do not express them with their body in the same ways: their code is cultural (or ethnic). It would not be absurd to maintain, in opposition to the clichés, that culture is what splits apart the human species while technology unites them.

A cultural system suggests a fanning outward of places. A technological system evokes a combination of tracks.

…we replace the pair technology/culture with the opposition technological-convergence/ethnic-divergence, which would be its translation further developed.

In this sense, the technological structuring of the world, taking us from wheel to airplane, also carries with it the very real potential to culturally de-structure the world.

Likewise do we now witness the digital encoding of all information so as to make all channels in the end converge through the phone line, integrating telecommunications, nationwide computer terminals, TV, movies, CDS, and pixellated photographs into unimedia (multimedia is a misnomer, the world having become techno-uniform).

The planet toward which we are heading, in other words, will be one complete, interconnected – or intraconnected – whole, in which the interdependence of the elements will prevail over and soon frustrate any remaining values of originality.

We knew this goal as national in the last century, know it now as global, and will be known as intergalactic one day.

…imprisoning the globe in order to liberate men.

Taking into account Francois Dagognet’s formulation that matter travels faster than mind, one could understand this discrepancy as a de-synchronization of, or difference in, rates, the simple effect of inertia from culture’s relative slowness of change.

This latter is a tough fishbone to swallow and consists of a negative retroactive effect of technology on culture.

Hier word gemeen dat tegnologie en kultuur eintlik twee itenteite is wat twee teenoorgestelde funksies het. Tegnologie poog om te verenig terwyl kultuur poog of eerder inherent verdeel. Daarom deur ‘n universele voor te stel word die gevaar daar gestel dat daar geen moontlikheid gelaat word nie vir enige innoverende denke nie en so alle vordering insigself inhibeer wat weer tegnologie laat inval op ditself.

Agteruit Vordering

…ever since urbanites no longer walk they have ended up…running. And with fanatic devotion. In parks or, lacking that, in the living room, on treadmills.

Die draf effek in die argiewe

In our day of delocalized on-line access and long-distance digital consultation, electronic circulation should for all intents and purposes render the concentration of materials in physical sites useless.

The less there is of collective coherence, the greater the number of communitarian symbols, that is, ostensible mediations that knit the individual to a collective heritage whose stability and visibility are reassuring.

Rather than erasing sites of memory and commemoration, digital delocalization and audiovisual amnesia generate them in profusion.

Die teenoorgestelde van dit wat verwag word vind egter plaas as iets uitgelaat word. Die tegnologiese era met alles wat digitaal gestoor word word daar verwag dat fisiese plekke van herinnering sal verminder maar die teenoorgestelde word waar omdat hoe meer die data op digitale manier gestoor word hoe meer is daar ‘n interne drang in die mens om homself te stabiliseer deur vergestalt te gee aan die fisiese aspek van geheue.

Die draf effek in die ruimte

Telecommunications have contributed to making tourism the largest industry in the world. The real surprise is that, as we shrink distances, we are all the more compelled to explore the periphery.

What the land loses in functional value, it can soon recoup in affective flavour.

Since going to the moon, we have been relearning a certain love of the land.

The more vast distances are domesticated, the more small is beautiful.

Self in die spasie waarin ons leef is hierdie retro-aktiewe progressie teenwoordig, dat ons spreekwoordelik met elke tree wat ons vorentoe tree ook een wil terug gee.

Die drag effek in taal

We had expected that normalization by stereotype would transform all these living idioms into dead languages, confining them nobly to the literary registry or degrading them into provincial patois more or less in a state of vagrancy. Yet in the face of the new utilitarian medium, the language of choice becomes one’s native speech, territorial and useless. The vernacular is resupplying itself with mythic value, becoming a site of spiritual, religious, or magical references.

Culture is on the side of the vital principle, whose nature is to be multiple, disruptive, and proliferous – the opposite of technology, if you prefer.

Die draf effek in kleredrag

Dress too, as much as language, is a typical feature of ethnicity.

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Why should the disappearance of nation traditions of cinema, or minority literatures, or languishing arts and crafts not stir up the same worry that has focused on the extermination of whales and seals?

Still, this bottom-line preservation of differences has its risks: returning to balance can itself become convulsive.

This is the case when the identity spasm, as a reflex against the utilitarian eradication of peripheral memories, pushes one to the point of fundamentalist insurrection.

It is precisely in those richest Western countries where urban centres, political parties, churches, television stations, buildings and roads, houses and stores, and tastes and odours are the most interchangeable (or the least identifiable) that cultural singularities are most insisted on and valued.

In the zones where tradition dictated life structured by faith, fundamentalism takes on the guise of a culture for those decultured by technology or a return to the soil for those uprooted from it.

It really seems, indeed, that history takes back with one hand what it grants with the other: openness here, closure there.

When communitarian drives reach paradoxical high tide in the age of interdependencies, do we not witness, within the parliaments and governments of the most self-regulating representational democracies, a replacement, in parliament and government, by ethnocultural interest groups of the old ideologically cemented, dominant formations (witness politics in Israel, India, Turkey, and [South Africa])?

A levelling of political differences may mean a renaissance in prepolitical identities – and, after deritualization, theocracy?

We would observe an alternation of phases of decentering and recentering, to correct one imbalance with another, however gropingly (South Africa?).

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Dit wil lyk of hierdie hele boonste afdeling handel oor die ewewig wat die natuur altyd sal probeer handhaaf, inherent. Hoe ons egter tussen hierdie twee lyne beweeg is van groot belang. Die aarde sal altyd streef na balans, soos ek altyd sê, maar hoe die mens by daardie natuurlike strewe na balans aanpas/inpas is belangrik. 

Soos ons hier sien, vir elke tree wat tegnologie vorentoe gee, hetsy in spasie, taal, of kleredrag wil die mens inherent ‘n tree terug gee om iets van die verlore te laat behoue bly. Dit is ‘n vreemde verskynsel, maar dit is tog daar, en weerspieel hierdie innerlike soeke na balans in die mens. Daar kan nie net heeltyd na die eenkant van die wipplank geloop word nie, daar moet ook na die ander kant geloop word om te keer dat die plank nie die grond raak nie. Partymal sal die plank meer na die anderkant na die grond wees en ander kere die inverse. Wat wel waar is, en ook baie tragedies, is dat die een wanbalans homself soms sal moet uitbalanseer deur ‘n nuwe wanbalans te skep. Hier wil ek amper neig om Apartheid as voorbeeld te noem. Apartheid was ‘n wanbalans in die kulturele geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika en nou probeer die land homself deur demokrasie weer te balanseer, maar soos bogenoem, omdat die regende party nou in ‘n staat verkeer van relatiewe wanbalans gryp hulle terug na hulle fundamentalistiese wortels wat hulle geleer is in ‘n stadium van wanbalans en so implimenteer hulle daardie waardes heel onwetend en skep so weer ‘n wanbalans. Dis ‘n bose kringloop. Dalk is dit soos die Prediker sê dat daar niks nuuts onder die son is nie, dit verander net van vorm maar die inhoud bly dieselfde.

Die mens se behoorlike studie

Mediology examines what defines the human branch in its essence, by which means it can be distinguished from that of our simian cousins, that is, Homo sapiens’ aptitude for handing down acquired characters from one generation to the next, notwithstanding the most formal laws of molecular biology.

Here is to be found all the difference between natural life and historical life, the latter an internalizing duration: man is the only animal that can conserve a trace of his grandfather and be modified by it.

Yet what I am, what I believe, and choose, depends in large part on what their works and days made them. Heredity belongs to all living beings; inheritance belongs only to man.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes, on this difference between man and animal, there is another very specific quality that distinguishes them and about which there can be no dispute: the faculty of self-perfection, a faculty which, with the aid of circumstances, successfully develops all the others, and resides among us as much in the species as in the individual. By contrast an animal is at the end of a few months what it will be all its life; and its species is at the end of a thousand years what it was the first year of that thousand.

A legacy is made possible on what condition?

A naturalist was able to observe that we were the only species of animals able of influencing its own evolution.

Ek het besluit om hierdie hoofstuk nie verder te lees nie aangesien dit baie op die biologiese hammer en ‘n mindere fokus het op die kulturele en bloot in verskillende biologiese terme wil oorbring dat oordrag(transmission) wel moontlik is in die mens anders as by diere. Diere se eerste paar maande bepaal hulle lewe, waar ‘n mens lewenslank in staat is om homself te verander anders as ‘n dier. 

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Dit was dan Hoofstuk 5 – Tool Lines

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