Human beings are all biological machines, though our functions are not wholly determined by the reproductive purpose that shaped us. Individually, we are all more or less deficient and more or less unique in our needs. Indeed our “needs” cannot even be comprehensively or objectively defined. Philosophical advice, therefore, can only ever be approximate and good philosophy – like good literature – can be quite general, but never definitive.
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Sometimes our spirit is just a “bad kiln” and the whole act of life is a sort of compromise1. But even in this absurd predicament, the human animal can still find moments of clarity – of bliss – that it plucks from diverse sources and holds by way of compensation. Since we are all working with different raw materials, it is instructive to write out your own maxims – as Marcus Aurelius did in his Meditations – and return to them regularly. This will serve as a reminder of how to live well and push you closer to the Tao.
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James Lovelock proposed that the Earth’s biosphere acts as a single organism to regulate the temperature and habitability of its surface. Tolstoy’s view of history was similar, where individuals – even those with the stature and force of character of a Humboldt or Napoleon – play unwitting roles in a greater, more general flood of human activity, governed by myriad invisible forces. Looking at humanity as a kind of superorganism, we see that the vast majority of people – those who cannot usefully contribute to the fight against global warming, or the relentless exploitation of the world’s resources, or any of the other major threats to civilization – would do better to stop worrying and focus on their life at measurable scales. Attending to tangible, small-scale decisions gives us a sense of personal value and benefits those close to us. You can volunteer in an art or conservation group, get involved in local support groups or school governorships. If more people decide to “sweat the small stuff” and really engage in their immediate environment, we may find that the bigger picture looks after itself. Only when you have mastered the small things that you have real control over should you move onto generalities. As Voltaire famously observed, il faut cultiver notre jardin.
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Many of us do not pay sufficient attention to the reality of what our life means to those around us. We fixate on the frightening stories projected by our portable computers and we go to great lengths to isolate ourselves from our surroundings. In Oxford, it is now more common for me to see students running or walking with headphones than without; and fast, efficient vehicular transport is everywhere privileged over the long, meditative dérive. In the past, religions like Christianity would encourage regular self-scrutiny. On a weekly or even daily basis, priests would remind their errant congregations that they were being supervised by an eternal, lidless eye and that their actions would be weighed accordingly. Having lost our belief in the metaphysics of religion, we have thrown out many of the rituals that travelled in tandem, including the useful habit of looking at our actions from “outside”.
The Self has insinuated itself onto the altar recently vacated by God and human interests have been allowed to eclipse all other considerations. We idolize certain characters in literature and art, but rarely think about how people would react if they could watch our own lives, as though we were the hero in a story. Would they admire my strength or wisdom? Would they view my actions with approval? Why not? In trying to answer these questions, we can better appreciate our own significance. You may be shocked to discover – as I was, on reflection – that you are not a particularly good person.
As religion’s hold on young people has waned, other stories have grown in influence, playing on similar themes. Walk into a public viewing of The Return of the King and you will see that the cinema is packed with young men of the most diverse extraction. All will be deeply conversant with the script and the screenplay. Some of them may reach such a pitch of excitement that they quote the script out loud, along with the film; others are absolutely silent, their faces rapt, eyes glittering, as they follow the Madonna-like figure of Liv Tyler and squeeze the hands of their terrestrial girlfriends. Watching these films is a form of communion for these men. They idolize Aragorn and Faramir – noble characters with wide appeal – and their response is subconscious, absolutely religious and animal.
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Is there any reason why religious rituals cannot be resurrected for atheists? I would argue that watching a sermon by Rowan Williams or Malcolm Guite is just as valuable for me – a secular atheist – as for a true Christian believer. And reading one of Williams’ essays or poems is just as illuminating, just as moving. It is interesting to wonder why modern attempts by de Botton and Grayling to secularize religious teachings have met with little success. Is it a failure of concept or execution? Could it be bad luck? Perhaps it would be better to just go and skeptically participate in religious services, arm-in-arm with the faithful.
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Losing touch with our physical environment makes us vulnerable to errors of judgement. Part of this is linked to our obsessive consumption of digital media, which turns other people into categories and isolated soundbites. If all we have to work with are journalistic reports, then we tend to become interested only in a person’s ideological identity, as McCarthyists, communists and Catholics were in the past. The Twitter user does not debate with humans: they engage in skirmishes with “TERFs”, or “woke” people. But these terms (so often incorrectly applied) are distortions of reality. Bellow observed that people who watch lots of television derive their observations ready-made, packaged by somebody else. This is dangerous for common sense, because it is predicated on the human context, on specificity and texture, which cannot be communicated via newsprint. Common sense develops rather through action and direct enquiry. The loss of this intuitive mode is damaging to thought. Einstein said2: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift”. I think we see this in the absurd and totally disproportionate vilification of J. K. Rowling. Her views on transgender rights – expressed with the utmost respect and careful moderation of tone3 – are misrepresented by some as a form of physical violence or taken as proof of an irredeemably flawed character. There is much that can (and should) be said about the scape-goating and straw-manning of Rowling, but for now it is interesting simply to note that, had these frothing critics met Rowling before her views on transgender issues became public, they would – unanimously, I am sure – have declared her the very model of a wise and decent person.
Sympathy is easy when you live online: you can virtue signal with black squares or little rainbows whilst having no genuine feeling for anyone who disagrees with you, or for the person down the road with a distasteful opinion and a life loaded with extenuating circumstances. For good evolutionary reasons, most of us are generous to people we know, or to strangers that do not threaten us. Most people also harbour exaggerated opinions which can be massaged into softer, less virulent forms through conversation. This is not evident if you have never spoken to a stranger, or spend all of your time listening to podcasts.
If all you can see of a person is 280 characters, then your opinion of them is necessarily reductive. Without serious conscious effort, your brain will extrapolate that person’s entire character from one comment on a single issue. You will become a snob, in other words. And because their comments live on in cold characters immutable, you cannot assess the person’s level of conviction. You do not know if they have changed their mind, you cannot catch their ironic smile, or the spark of humour dancing behind their eyes – all these details that are automatically and subconsciously interpreted during a conversation, which we use to inform our emotional response. Presumably this is why, in an era of near-ubiquitous video conferencing, government diplomacy is still conducted in person.
The greatness (and goodness) of individual men and women is a fairly static quantity when averaged across time and culture. In The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow’s eponymous hero unashamedly places the brilliant, crippled Jewish property magnate William Einhorn in the same league as Caesar, Machiavelli and Ulysses. Augie says:
“It was him that I knew and what I understand of them in him. Unless you want to say that we’re at the dwarf end of all times and mere children whose only share of grandeur is like a boy’s share in fairy-tale king’s, beings of a different kind from times better and stronger than ours. But if we’re comparing men and men, not men and children or men and demigods… then I have the right to praise Einhorn and not care about smiles of derogation from those who think the race no longer has in any important degree the traits we honor in these fabulous names.”
If your point of departure is that your interlocutor is stupid or evil then you will understand nothing about your point of view or theirs. Why? Because if you assume that their opinion is a natural concomitant of faulty brain chemistry, then nothing can reasonably be done about it. Chances are that you will go further and illogically assume that their stupidity/iniquity proves you are correct. Suppose instead that this person is averagely good or averagely reasonable and you will find they generally have a good reason for holding the opinions they do. This is because we are like machines – we have errors of input and errors of computation – and like all things we obey laws of averages. Chomsky has brought up the same point in the context of scientific enquiry4. He observes that finding the right question is equivalent to finding a fruitful way of looking at a problem, which means that finding the right question takes you a long way on the journey towards a solution. The crucial point is to look at some physical phenomenon and not just assume that it is obvious. Deciding that an apple falling from a tree is a surprising fact rather than an inevitability may lead you down a path of inquiry that eventuates in new knowledge.
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Machines are fallible. Humans are fallible. When making a decision about what to think or do, we carefully weigh our personal experiences against the opinions of others. There is no absolutely general way of doing this, which is probably why the faculty never evolved.
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In politics, straying too far from the middle – in any direction – always leads to ideological inconsistency and disaster. Why? Perhaps because our human needs are in conflict with one another5. Perhaps also because rules of government must function on average to be successful. Our needs and desires sit on scales that we measure against the reality of our own lives. In politics as in literature, we use our own experience as a yardstick. We want autonomy, but not too much. We want support, but excessive support is impractical and counter-productive. Rules are developed (ostensibly, at least) so that a maximum of people experience a minimum of discomfort.
Now this “middle path” of politics may seem a rather insipid, toothless goal to strive for: we all know that we should tolerate others, try to question our own opinions, maintain a degree of skepticism… But it isn’t really, because many of us do not truly apprehend it, nor do we always vote for it. There is a world of difference between knowing and understanding. Ethical ideals must be weighed against the exigencies of life and experience is needed to harden knowledge into understanding. We are all of us like the birds in Attar’s story, who travel in search of their King, the Simurgh, whose name means thirty birds. Borges describes how a host of bird-pilgrims journeys through seven valleys or seas on their way to the Simurgh’s castle6: “the next to last bearing the name Bewilderment, the last the name Annihilation.”. Most of the pilgrims desert or succumb to the rigours of the journey. In the end, however:
“Thirty, made pure by their sufferings, reach the great peak of the Simurgh. At last they behold him; they realize that they are the Simurgh, and that the Simurgh is each of them and all of them.”
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Footnotes and References
- Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, Penguin Modern Classics (2001) ↩︎
- James Lovelock and Bryan Appleyard, Novacene, Allen Lane, pp. 20 (2019) ↩︎
- J. K. Rowling, J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues, http://www.jkrowling.com [Last Accessed: May 2024] https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/ ↩︎
- Noam Chomsky, Asking the right questions, YouTube [Last Accessed: May 2024] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGs-4h0wQj4&list=LL&index=2&t=2231s ↩︎
- I will discuss this point further in my next article, Prisoners of Progress, which examines our relationship to technology. ↩︎
- Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, Vintage, pp. 130-131 (2002) ↩︎
Philip Bradford 