Thinking - Quareness Series 86th "Lecture".
Back during 1840 the American writer Edgar Allan Poe described the "mad energy" of an aging man who roved all night through the streets of London, as an excruciating despair which could be temporarily relieved only by immersing himself in a tumultuous throng of city-dwellers. Refusing to be alone such a man "is the type and the genius of deep crime...the man of the crowd". In stressing the significance of solitude, Poe thought it a "great misfortune" to lose the capacity to be alone with oneself, to get caught up in the crowd and surrender one’s singularity to mind-numbing conformity.
Twenty years later Ralph Waldo Emerson, in quoting Pythagoras, wrote..."In the morning, – solitude; … that nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company". For Emerson the wisest teachers would need to impress upon their pupils the importance of "periods and habits of solitude" which make "serious and abstracted thought" possible.
Hannah Arendt, a German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism and found refuge in the United States, spent much of her life there studying the relationship between the individual and the polis. She came to see freedom as tethered to both the private sphere (vita contemplativa) and the public/political sphere (vita activa). She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to act spontaneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the capacity to think and to judge in private, where solitude empowers individuals to contemplate their actions and develop their conscience...to escape the cacophony of the crowd i.e. to finally hear themselves think.
Now this lady, back in 1961 was commissioned by The New Yorker magazine to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi SS officer who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust. She wondered how anyone other than a wicked sociopath could perpetrate such evil. However, she soon found herself surprised by Eichmann’s lack of imagination...his consummate conventionality. She concluded that while Eichmann’s actions were evil, the man himself "was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous, with no sign in him of firm ideological convictions". She attributed his capacity/eagerness to commit crimes to "thoughtlessness". For her it was his inability to stop and think that permitted Eichmann to participate in mass murder. And echoing Poe's suspicion of something sinister lurking deep within the man of the crowd, she came to recognise that "a person who does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can count on its being forgotten the next moment" (= a rather striking observation in the light of our current era public/political environment). Eichmann had shunned Socratic self-reflection. He had failed to return home to himself, to a state of solitude. He had discarded the vita contemplativa, and thus he had failed to embark upon the essential question-and-answering process that would have allowed him to examine the meaning of things, to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, good and evil.
Echoing Socrates himself..."it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong"...Arendt wrote..."because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer". It is not that unthinking men are monsters, or that the sad sleepwalkers of the world would sooner commit murder than face themselves in solitude. What Eichmann showed for Arendt was that society could function freely and democratically only if it were made up of individuals engaged in the thinking activity which required solitude, and this formed her belief that "living together with others begins with living together with oneself".
It's relevant here to remind ourselves that philosophers have long made a careful and important distinction between solitude and loneliness. In Plato's Republic we are proffered a parable in which Socrates celebrates the solitary philosopher. In the allegory of the cave, the philosopher escapes from the darkness of an underground den (and from the company of other humans) into the sunlight of contemplative thought. Alone but not lonely, the philosopher becomes attuned to both the inner self and the world. In solitude, the soundless dialogue "which the soul holds with herself" finally becomes audible.
Echoing Plato, Arendt observed..."Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about … when I am one and without company but desire it and cannot find it". Her inner self was a friend with whom she could carry on a conversation, that silent voice which posed the vital Socratic question...what do you mean when you say …? As she declared..."the self is the only one from whom you can never get away – except by ceasing to think".
In today's hyper-connected world where we can communicate constantly and instantly, it's rarely most of us remember to carve out spaces for solitary contemplation. We seem to crave constant companionship in both the real and virtual worlds. But as Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude (our ability to be alone with ourselves) then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting caught up in the crowd and "swept away by what everybody else does and believes in" and in a cage of thoughtless conformity, no longer being able to distinguish "right from wrong, beautiful from ugly". In truth solitude is not only a state of mind essential to the development of an individual’s consciousness (and conscience) but also a practice that properly prepares one for participation in social and political life. Before we can keep healthy company with others, we must learn to keep company with ourselves.
Many jobs that exist today are set to disappear quite soon as artificial intelligence is seen to outperform humans in more and more tasks. Many new professions are likely to appear (e.g. virtual-world designers) but such will probably require more creativity and flexibility than heretofore. A crucial issue then would be how to create new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms and perhaps finding ourselves with large numbers of people who are not just unemployed, but unemployable. This in turn points to a further problem of how to keep the masses occupied and content, given the real possibility that human beings might go crazy if they cannot engage in purposeful activities.
One solution for this new "useless class" might lie with economically redundant people spending increasing amounts of their time within 3D virtual reality worlds, which would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the “real world” outside. And this can be regarded as a very old familiar scenario given that most of humanity for a long time past have found much meaning in playing virtual reality games...aka "religions". Our main stream widely adhered-to religions tend to invent all sorts of imaginary laws/rules for a holy life but in reality such exist only in the human imagination...no known natural law requires for example the repetition of magical formulas. The committed adherents may go through life trying to gain points in their own favoured virtual reality game...if you pray every day, you get points...if you forget to pray, you lose points...if by the end of your life you gain enough points, then after you die you go to the next level of the game (aka heaven). As religions show us, the virtual reality can be superimposed on the physical reality...it need not be encased inside an isolated box. In the past this was done with the human imagination and with sacred books, and now in the 21st century it can be done via computerised technology (e.g. smartphones, etc.). A current "in your face" example of this can be easily observed in the conflict between Jews and Muslims about the Holy City (Jerusalem)...looking at the objective reality of the place all you see are stones and buildings with no holiness anywhere...but looking through the medium of such as the Bible, the Qur'an and/or "appropriate" software, you can see holy places and angels everywhere.
The idea of finding meaning in life by playing virtual reality games is of course common not just to our religions, but also to our secular ideologies and lifestyles. Consumerism too is a virtual reality game...you gain points by say acquiring new cars, buying expensive brands and taking vacations abroad, and if you have more points than everybody else, you tell yourself you won the game. In the end though, the real action always takes place inside the human brain. It doesn't really matter whether the neurons are stimulated by observing pixels on a computer screen, by looking outside at a Caribbean resort, or by seeing heaven in the mind’s eye...in all cases the meaning we ascribe to what we see is generated by our own minds...it is not really “out there”. The meaning we ascribe to life is always a fictional story created by us humans.
Of relevance here may be the concept of "deep play" i.e. a made-up game invested with so much meaning that it becomes reality. In the future we're facing into, such virtual realities (generated inside or outside computers, perhaps even in the shape of new religions and ideologies) may be the key to providing meaning for the so-called useless class of our post-work world. In any case, the end of work will not necessarily mean the end of meaning, which in truth is generated by imagining rather than by working. We can now increasingly see that work is essential for meaning only according to some ideologies and lifestyles and indeed some people in all cultures and eras have found a lot of interest and meaning in life even without working. And in the near term future we may well be able to play deeper games and to construct more complex virtual worlds than in any previous time of our history.
Some of us may be inclined to ponder about truth and reality and whether we really want to live in a world in which billions of people are immersed in fantasies, pursuing make-believe goals and obeying imaginary laws i.e. the kind of world we have been living in for thousands of years already. But even such musing is itself an "inside the head" matter...a state of being we flesh and blood humans cannot possibly escape...
"there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" (Hamlet)...and that's really why it's so vital for our well-being (both personal and social) to foster and truly value our precious ability to think...and to think clearly.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
January, 2018.