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stop counterculturalism now

A Graduate Student Avoiding his Ph.D., Being Productive,
or Being Creative and Useful in Any Real Way...

Thursday, October 20

So, for one of my psychology courses I have been reading that

"Love, partnership, and marriage have been found to be positively and highly correlated with subjective well-being, as well as with one’s health (Myers, 1999)."

So, as Jack Johnson, the Grateful Dead, Andrew Bird, and Queen come up on shuffle on iTunes, I also have been reading about the political implications of this research. If anyone happens to be interested in political theory, I'd like to know what you think of the Communitarian perspective, mentioned in another article I read for this week.
posted by Brent, 4:55:00 PM

3 Comments:

Huh. This is really interesting. I expected something more along the lines of, we need to reconfigure social structures that place individuals or nuclear families as our primary social units, so that instead, your kinship network, the group in which you function, consists of, say, the people on your block, or your homeroom class or your place of worship or just your circle of friends. I tend to think that broader circles of human connection and interdependence will make you more resilient, right? (Although I've been wondering about this lately, thinking, isn't it true that the wider a kinship network is, the more likely it is to experience loss, or repeated loss, and how does a community cope with that?)

But this piece seems to be more about shifting society's whole orientation from an individual to group-based mentality, and the overriding goal seems to be achieving shared morals. I came away from it pretty skeptical. And there you have it, my looooong comment.
commented by Blogger Anna, 11:23 AM  
I didn't feel skeptical when I read it... which is unusual for me. The last Zen teacher I talked to made similar points. Start with your homeroom class. If everyone took care of themselves and their family, then larger circles would benefit by extention.
commented by Blogger brent, 2:09 PM  
I guess my only difference with the piece is that it seems to start out at the macro level, at the results the whole society would/should see, rather than in that homeroom classroom. Plus it still seems to put alot of emphasis on the nuclear family--parents and children--as the primary social unit. While I was growing up I always felt like I had the best parents in the world--but I was so close to some of the other parents who lived on my block, that I could turn to them if my own parents couldn't give me what I needed. Now when I think about having kids I wouldn't want to do it without having a cohort of this kind. Maybe this isn't so far off from how you think about things?
commented by Blogger Anna, 7:51 PM  

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