John Berger’s Ways of Seeing still resonates

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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/01/06/john-bergers-ways-of-seeing.html

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I’ve been noticing a lot of classic docu-shows popping up on YouTube in recent months. Sagan’s Cosmos is pretty much a mainstay, but right now I’ve been going through Michael Wood’s In Search Of… series. On the last episode of In Search of [The Trojan War]

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How about all the wonderful James Burke series like The Day the Universe Changed?

…https://archive.org/details/thedaytheuniversechangedIitstartedwithgreeks

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I remember The Secret Life of Machines with fondness. Looks like I’ve found something to watch this weekend.

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See. YouTube has more uses than as a place for misogynist atheists to shit out their brain diarrhea for 20 minutes.

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Profound indeed on the power of the male gaze, though not necessarily ahead of his time. It’s not like a lot of women hadn’t already thought and said such things. And Du Bois also got there way earlier, with similar insights about black American “double consciousness.”

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That said, as was recently said elsewhere, "May men go extinct, they cause us to have mental illnesses.” Ha!

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Don’t forget art critic Robert Hughes’ “Shock of the New” is on Youtube also! Makes a nice bookend to Berger. Both series changed my life and view of the world. https://youtu.be/J3ne7Udaetg

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P.S.- I despise these guys for making it uncool for me to be an atheist and I’d like to send them to the Hell Of Being Locked In A Room With Sam Harris For Eternity

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I wouldn’t say that the most vocal people are the best representatives of a system of beliefs. American Evangelicals would be uniformly model Christians if so. There may be some, even many, who are, but they aren’t the vocal ones.

I’ve been an agnostic atheist since I was a teenager, very much in the Bertrand Russell “orbiting blue teapot” sense. That’s not something I push. I came to beliefs that made sense to me; you presumably have done the same. Presumably so too have Evangelicals who have put some thought into it.

None of this really matters to me. It ain’t the beliefs that are cool or not, and it’s not those that I rely on for personal judgement of others: I tend to look at how they deal with other people. My beliefs, even my personal judgement of others, are things for me to use in my life, not for others. If you want a good yardstick to measure your interactions with me, it would be, have I dealt with you fairly? Ditto anyone else. If I have done so, then my beliefs are as cool (or uncool) as any other.

So, if you want cool atheism (assuming that your views are tending that way), be a cool person who happens to be an atheist.

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Thanks for posting these. Either very timely topics , or more probably timeless topics.

It is however less to do with art criticism and more simply a form of anti-commercialism / socialism (used in the original sense , not the alt-right sense).

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All I know is if I see another Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) recommendation on YouTube despite always telling the algorithm to stop suggesting his shit I’m gonna fly to San Bruno and punch YouTube’s coders in the neck.

All of them.

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Ah. I get the same feeling when they keep recommending Rachmaninoff to me.

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