Convex vs Concave Lifestyles

Discussion

To "worry about this ever-expanding cult of safety and to nod in agreement with so much of sociologist Frank Furedi’s description of the “Paradox of our Safety Addiction.” He argues that “the zero risk mentality breeds a culture of anxiety and a hunger for authority,” as well as many other problems. And my addled brain is also recalling a distinction I once read about in The Haunted Inkwell: Art and our Future by Benedictine monk, Abbot Mark Patrick Hederman. This distinction regards the seminal calling for a Christian to live in a fashion he called “convex,” with a center outside ourselves, in a place which Rilke called “the Open”; a life that was freed from from a “covetous vision” of things; a life lived with a bit of “venturesomeness.” Hederman contrasted life lived in this creative, artistic, and expansive way with a life he described as “concave”; more isolated and devoid of venturesomeness and risk, with a center on the self and its preservation, like the modern day hikikomori.

I find it ironic, then, and illuminating, that cave men and women lived life in a relatively “convex’’ way and, for all our vaunted progress, we are becoming more and more risk averse, vexatiously “concave” (etymologically this means something like “hollow togetherness,” which has a really creepy, but, from a campus ministry perspective, diagnostically accurate feel to it, like “lonely in a crowd,” and like Sherry Turkle’s “Alone Together.”)

Instead of Goorbuuck and Frill’s balanced “conversation” (which etymologically means “a turning among”) that went, prudentially, beyond the evocation of death, most modern facsimiles of conversations, which McLuhan described as “interfaces” (long before ZOOM, and defined as “a place of interaction between two systems”), stop at the left-brained, super scientifically true truism that, yes, the children could, theoretically, DIE." (https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2020/05/feeling-claustrophobic-in-the-big-wide-open/?)