To Live Well, You Must Live Unseen

Sam McDougle:

Do humans, especially children, have a built in bias that tells them where the self is, and if so, how and why would this have evolved? Paul Bloom and Christina Starmans, of Yale Univeristy, published a clever research article last week in the journal Cognition, arguing that children and adults tend to assume the self is in and around the eyes.

...Why we would people have this eye bias? What is it about the eyes that gives them the honor of Official Self Palace?... Think about it – if you’re trying to really understand what’s going on in someone’s head, you can’t just focus on what they say – you have to stare them in the eye. That’s why so many poker players wear sunglasses.

...I would venture a guess that the evolution of the language of the eyes predates verbal language. There’s something more universal, primal, and emotional about looking into someone’s eyes — it’s a language of the reptilian brain, not the cortices of complex thought.

Susan Cain:

Introversion – along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness – is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man's world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we've turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.

If you're an introvert, you also know that the bias against quiet can cause deep psychic pain. As a child you might have overheard your parents apologise for your shyness. Or at school you might have been prodded to come "out of your shell" – that noxious expression that fails to appreciate that some animals naturally carry shelter everywhere they go, and that some humans are just the same. "All the comments from childhood still ring in my ears, that I was lazy, stupid, slow, boring," writes a member of an email list called Introvert Retreat. "By the time I was old enough to figure out that I was simply introverted, it was a part of my being, the assumption that there is something inherently wrong with me. I wish I could find that little vestige of doubt and remove it."

Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favour of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you're told that you're "in your head too much," a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral.

Or, as Lao Tzu said, you like to be forgotten by the world and left alone. I agree with Robert Butler: not everyone wants validation and approval, thanks anyway.

Taciturn and retiring, sequestered in the farthest corner, in unremarkable drab clothing, my hat pulled low, my hair and beard shrouding my face, my eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. I become an opaque eyeball; I am nothing; I see all.

Saturday Shuffle

1. Girlschool -- Demolition Boys
2. Alabama 3 -- Converted
3. Spirit Caravan -- Lost Sun Dance
4. Eisbrecher -- Treiben
5. Dark Tantrums -- Damage
6. Cornershop -- We're In Yr Corner
7. Masters of Reality -- Rolling Green
8. The Chemical Brothers -- The Devil Is In the Beats
9. Gomez -- Army Dub
10. Rammstein -- Ohne Dich
11. Ministry -- Let's Go
12. Loreena McKennitt -- The Gates of Instanbul
13. Raven -- Don't Need Your Money
14. The Dresden Dolls -- Gravity
15. Clutch -- 10001110101
16. School of Seven Bells -- Dial
17. Grouplove -- Tongue Tied
18. Into Another -- Splinters
19. Junkie XL -- Booming Right At You
20. Kyuss -- Apothecaries' Weight

So, the People With the Books, They Went and Stood Up On the Mountain to Get Away From the People With No Books

Lisa Guidarini:

Between you and me, I wish I'd been born much earlier, even long enough ago I'd be turned to dust by now. Because I'd rather not have lived to see all that's happening. Words can't describe how much I hate what's being lost. Call me old fashioned, or backward, or whatever you'd like. Honestly, I don't care. What I dread is the day I have a grandchild who grows up without need of a bookcase, because all s/he needs is a pouch to hold an e-reader.

I was talking to my dad the other day about the publishing industry, print media, and the like. In response to his asking me if I had any interest in e-readers, I said that I only saw a couple possible advantages to them -- they could be useful for voracious readers who have limited living space or those who travel frequently. Being able to download a book instantly is nice, but of course that's only a convenience, not a necessity. I always have enough to read at any given time that I don't need that temptation, and I'm philosophically inclined to appreciate the wait for a book to arrive in the mail, anticipation being the sweetest part of acquisition, after all. Until that day comes when certain titles simply aren't made available in paper-and-glue format, I doubt I'll ever see the need to own one.

The irresistible force of my bibliophilic appetite runs up against the immoveable object of my slacker ethos, though, so I do buy a lot of my books from library sales and individual sellers on Amazon or Barnes & Noble so as to avoid penury. Personally, I appreciate receiving online recommendations based on my purchases; I've found many books that way that I didn't know existed. But these last couple days, I had business to tend to that brought me within shouting distance of my local B & N, so I stopped in for old time's sake.

I guess it's been a while since I last did some serious brick-and-mortar browsing because, let me tell you, I was overwhelmed by how many fascinating books I found that I had no knowledge of. I mean, I read a lot of literary blogs these days, and I thought I was staying fairly au courant with new releases. Not only was I wrong, but my recent abstinence helped throw something into sharp relief for me: there just isn't any substitute for browsing in the store. I'm serious, I was almost jittery/giddy with emotion. Quot libros, quam breve tempus! I just wanted to gather armloads of them up and scurry off to a corner of the store, snarling at anyone who dared disturb me. Were you ever told those possibly-apocryphal stories about Soviet citizens who would break down in tears upon coming to the land of freedom and encountering their first supermarket, struggling to believe that anything so wonderful could actually exist? It was sort of like that, only weirder, because I'm around books all the time. I guess it was just some sort of harmonic convergence, where I happened to be in the right frame of mind to be receptive to all the stimuli and have a transcendant experience.

What it was, actually, was a stark reminder that I'm one of those people for whom a "book" is a nexus of associations -- the beauty of the cover design, the feel of the dust jacket, the thrill of an interesting topic, the smell of coffee, the sound of classical music. I stood there and gazed at the shelves and felt as profoundly moved as I ever have from viewing art. I glanced at a copy of Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists and laughed at the idea that this wasn't a "religious" experience for being unstructured and private. I made a hastily-scribbled list of what turned out to be thirty-two books to add to my wish list, and I resolved to make this a ritual visit again.

E-readers are great for people who see a "book" as only a horse and buggy for transmitting information, to be unsentimentally phased out in favor of motor vehicles. Sacrificial offerings to the twin gods of speed and compact efficiency. I sympathize with Lisa, but there are too many things I appreciate about the Internet age to wish I weren't part of it. I'll settle for prolonging this unsteady balance as long as possible, for preserving some pocket, however diminished, where people like me can continue to indulge in books as something greater than that.

Blame It On My ADD, Baby

NYRB:

Why Finish Books?

Slate:

Why Finish TV Shows?

Is this a thing now? Are our attention spans really that burned out? Is it contagious? Because I don't even know if I feel like finishing th

The Question Is Whether You Can Make Words Mean So Many Different Things

Michael Ian Black:

The difference between what Louis said, and what Rush said is this: in his apology, Rush made a point of saying that his personal attacks on Ms. Fluke, were not intended “as a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.”

In other words, when he specifically called Sandra Fluke a “slut,” “a prostitute,” and encouraged her to post sex videos of herself online so he could watch, it was not personal. It was, therefore, general. Which I, for one, believe because it fits perfectly within the larger context of Rush Limbaugh’s twenty-plus years of ad hominem attacks on “feminazis” and gratuitous comments about all female journalists as “news babes.”

With Louis, his insult was actually the opposite: it was a highly personal attack. The target of his insult, Sarah Palin, so infuriated him that he felt the need to call her the very worst name he could think of. His insult referred to a specific woman at a specific time and place.

"Cunt" is the very worst name he could think of? Well, if we're going to take people at their word:

No words are bad, but some people start using them a lot to hurt other people, and then they become bad. They become hard to--and there's words that I love that I can't use because other people use them wrong, to hurt other people... like, the word "cunt" is a beautiful word. To me, there's just beauty in that word, and I don't--I mean aesthetically. It has--it's like chocolatey and round on the ends. I just like the--cunt--I just like the way it sounds. And I don't use it as an insult. I'm alone in the laundry. I'm like, ♪♪ cuunt cuuuunt ♪♪

I just like saying it. I would never call a woman a cunt, except for my mom, 'cause she likes it for some weird reason. But it's a very misused word. It's supposed to mean vagina, which I don't think works at all, because vaginas are so sweet. They're little, pretty things with little flower petal-y lips and--I hear a piccolo in my head every time I see a vagina. ♪♪ Doodle-oodle-doo ♪♪ ♪♪ did-a-liddle-loo ♪♪ ♪♪ bliddle-liddle-liddle-loo ♪♪

Even vagina's too harsh for-- they should be called, like, a falalalala. [sings pleasant sounds] There should be a butterfly fluttering around every vagina all the time. Just all the time. Little butterfly. When you go to the doctor, he's like, "Well, the butterfly looks good, so we're in good shape." How do you look at something that pretty and say, "That's a cunt!" -- that doesn't fit at all. Maybe if it was a giant vagina and it was attacking a town and throwing busses around and knocking over telephone poles. Then you could say, "Hey, somebody shoot that cunt with a bazooka!"

I guess, then, that he either meant it as a compliment toward Palin, or he thinks she's Godzilla.

Anyway, the gist of what I've been seeing about this argument seems to be that people like C.K. and Bill Maher are just guilty of isolated transgressions, but Rush is a certifiable misogynist, or as one recent article put it, Rush Limbaugh obviously and unambiguously hates women. Is that true, though? It reminds me of being accused of "hating America" -- it's so all-encompassing as to be nonsensical. I mean, I'd say that, like all conservatives, he hates change, if anything. I'm sure he likes women just fine, as long as they share his politics or keep themselves confined to a largely subordinate role in society. On the other hand, liberals support general concepts of gender equality, but often have no problem using crude sexual or racial insults toward individual members of the group in question who dissent in some way. Does that make them misogynists and racists to whatever degree, or just jerks?

Or, as the A.V. Club wisely sums up:

And thus really, as always, this all boils down to who said what about whom and whether you already like them, and we're not even going to pretend as though we don't like Louis C.K. a whole lot more than Rush Limbaugh or Greta Van Susteren.

One Always Finds One's Burden Again

Philosophical biographies of Nietzsche: good. Philosophical biographies of Nietzsche that contain brief examinations of his similarities to Epicurus? Why, it's like when some genius thought to mix peanut butter and chocolate.

Through all phases of his career, Nietzsche speaks repeatedly of one's Aufgabe, one's 'task' or 'mission'... Part of what is involved here is the so-called 'paradox of happiness': just as playing the piano or typing goes better if one avoids thinking about where the fingers are going, so happiness is best achieved, not by aiming directly at it, but rather by absorbing oneself in commitment to some task other than the achievement of one's own happiness... This is a fundamental theme in all of Nietzsche's writing: to cultivate oneself fully, as an integrated person, one needs a life-unifying task that gives unity and coherence to all one's lesser projects... Nietzsche holds, I think, that genuine happiness is a matter of having an other-directed, life-defining task and feeling you are making a good job of it; making, as we say, 'a contribution'.

...Then again, in contrast to the frenetic pace of modernity and to its obsession with activity and production, the new culture will place a high value on 'idleness', will make a great deal of space for the 'vita contemplativa'. Active men are 'generic creatures', herd types: since they act rather than think, they have no chance of thinking, in particular, that there might be something wrong with the culture which they inhabit and which shapes their actions. Only thinkers have a chance of challenging the status quo, of becoming unique individuals.

...Nietzsche would not, of course, be Nietzsche if his philosophy were an exact repetition of Epicurus. The crucial respect in which he departs from the Epicurean injunction to 'live modestly' is his ongoing concern for the regeneration of culture, his mission to build—not by direct political action but by the quiet exercise of small-scale 'spiritual leadership'—a new society. Possessing a life-unifying 'task', a life-defining meaning, is, as we know, an essential ingredient of happiness as Nietzsche conceives it, and cultural regeneration—through the writing of his books— is his own life-task. This grandeur of ambition that is, in a broad sense, political seems to me something like the opposite of Epicurean inconspicuousness, of Epicurus's recommended 'inner emigration' from politics... Happiness has to be more than Epicurean ataraxia; it demands a life-defining task. Indeed, there cannot be ataraxia in the absence of a life-defining task.

Of course, striving for inconspicuous serenity in Epicurus's day was a bit of a neverending struggle itself, as Nietzsche himself recognized:

The Greeks, in a way of life in which great perils and upheavals were always present, sought in knowledge and reflection a kind of security and ultimate refuge. We, in an incomparably more secure condition, have transferred this perilousness into knowledge and reflection, and calm ourselves down with our way of life.

Nonetheless, I agree that happiness is a byproduct of fulfilling effort, not a goal itself, even if I suspect that Nietzsche's modest choice of cultural regeneration as his task reflects his ingrained Prussian/Protestant work ethic and high-strung temperament. It's enough for me to spend my days writing things that I'll never be quite satisfied with and recording songs that will never seem quite finished.

I Would Prefer Not To

T & V Buchholz:

We are a nation of movers and shakers. Pilgrims leapt onto leaky boats to get here. The Lost Generation chased Hemingway and Gertrude Stein to Paris. The Greatest Generation signed up to ship out to fight Nazis in Germany or the Japanese imperial forces in the Pacific. The ’60s kids joined the Peace Corps.

But Generation Y has become Generation Why Bother. The Great Recession and the still weak economy make the trend toward risk aversion worse. Children raised during recessions ultimately take fewer risks with their investments and their jobs. Even when the recession passes, they don’t strive as hard to find new jobs, and they hang on to lousy jobs longer. Research by the economist Lisa B. Kahn of the Yale School of Management shows that those who graduated from college during a poor economy experienced a relative wage loss even 15 years after entering the work force.

Perhaps more worrisome, kids who grow up during tough economic times also tend to believe that luck plays a bigger role in their success, which breeds complacency. “Young people raised during recessions end up less entrepreneurial and less willing to leave home because they believe that luck counts more than effort,” said Paola Giuliano, an economist at U.C.L.A.’s Anderson School of Management. A bad economy can boost a person’s weighting of luck by 20 percent, Ms. Giuliano found.

Notice how popular the word “random” has become among young people. A Disney TV show called “So Random!” has ranked first in the ratings among tweens. The word has morphed from a precise statistical term to an all-purpose phrase that stresses the illogic and coincidence of life. Unfortunately, societies that emphasize luck over logic are not likely to thrive.

Your information economy revolution is over, Buchholz. Condolences. The bums won. Maybe their sense of community outweighs their need for adventure. Maybe they're content to live with less. Maybe they're sophisticated enough as consumers to be suspicious when authors of books like Rush: Why You Need and Love the Rat Race try to sell them the same old Protestant work ethic, now with extra fear of cultural decline. Or maybe they just aren't listening and don't care what you think. Good for them.

J'accuse...!

Conservatives take offense to admittedly obnoxious language from an entertainer and start talking about boycotts. I'm going to hazard a guess that this is, like, totally different and unfair somehow.

I did like this from John Cook, though:

I am sick of spending all my time talking about how we talk about what we talk about when we talk about policy, instead of talking about actual policy. I am sick of recriminations and demands for retractions and counter-retractions and shocked outrage and line-drawing and line-crossing and apologies and non-apologies and boycotts and petitions. I am tired of watching every national debate inevitably pirouette out of the realm of morality, or merit, and into a rhetorical funhouse where insults bounce from mirror to distorted mirror. It's our dominant mode of political debate now: We don't evaluate arguments for their logic or elegance or force (or lack thereof), but for their appropriateness relative to metrics of racism, sexism, patriotism, religious bigotry etc.

Textual Harassment

Chad Wellmon:

For Heinzmann, late eighteenth-century German readers suffered under a “reign of books” in which they were the unwitting pawns of ideas that were not their own. Giving this broad cultural anxiety a philosophical frame, and beating Carr to the punch by more than two centuries, Immanuel Kant complained that such an overabundance of books encouraged people to “read a lot” and “superficially." Extensive reading not only fostered bad reading habits, but also caused a more general pathological condition, Belesenheit [the quality of being well-read], because it exposed readers to the great “waste” [Verderb] of books. It cultivated uncritical thought.

...Carr’s recent and broadly well-received arguments wondering if Google makes us stupid, for example, rely on a historical parallel that he draws with print. He claims that the invention of printing “caused a more intensive” form of reading and, by extrapolation, print caused a more reflective form of thought—words on a page focused the reader.

...Even the form of intensive reading held up today as a dying practice, novel reading, was often derided in the eighteenth century as weakening the memory and leading to “habitual distraction,” as Kant put it. It was thought especially dangerous to women who, according to Kant, were already prone to such lesser forms of thought. In short, print did not cause one particular form of reading; instead, it facilitated a range of ever-newer technologies, methods, and innovations that were deeply interwoven with new forms of human life and new ways of experiencing the world.

Well, huh; I did not know that reading often and widely had ever been seen as anything less than a virtue. Learned something new today!

The widespread anxiety over the Internet age that people like Carr have profitably exploited is understandable. The pace of modern life does seem to be constantly accelerating. The robots and jetpacks we were promised have never materialized, and we work longer and harder for less reward. The basic principles of sustained concentration and deep thought that Carr seems to want to rescue are unobjectionable; I just think he's being ridiculous in acting as if they are fundamentally incompatible with being online. Perhaps he's even being a bit too generous in assuming that the majority of people who allow themselves to be easily distracted and overwhelmed while working on the computer were ever going to be sitting around composing sonnets and rondeaus, discussing science and listening to chamber music.

I value that sort of contemplation and reflection myself, of course. But I think I manage to engage in it fairly often despite being online many hours a day. I find plenty of arresting material online that captivates my attention and forces me to concentrate and contemplate, and I still manage to set aside a couple hours before sleep to read dead-tree books. Carr is almost determinist in his insistence that technology inevitably warps anyone who allows themselves to be contaminated by it. Yes, of course it requires time and effort that could be spent playing with our phones and checking our Facebook walls to sit down and write like this, but is it really the gadgets that eat up all of our time or is it the entire matrix of assumptions and purposes that accompany them?

In other words, without checking to see how much more eloquently Ellul and Mumford have already said this, the system that produces social media and smartphones is following a logic of its own, devoted to capital above all else, which has led us to this state where we work longer and harder than ever for less reward and security. If you're frazzled and stressed and can't sit still long enough to finish a long article, maybe your life is just too complicated and unbalanced. Maybe you're like countless other people who work too much to afford a bunch of shit they never have time to enjoy because they work all the time. Are you willing to make the sort of professional and social sacrifices it would take to have enough free time to read great books and write substantial letters to your friends? Are those Epicurean standards of refined, rarefied pleasure worth enough to you to become an underemployed hermit if need be, or are you fine with banal company and frivolous conversations? Yes, I'm afraid it's true -- people often want contradictory things, or they even profess to want one thing for the sake of respectability while secretly wanting another.

I mean, I agree that Twitter is like kudzu, but it's not like there's really a shortage of good long-form writing out there; someone's gotta provide the substantial content for all the twits to link to. I agree that it represents a fetishization of novelty above all else, a sea level of discourse, but in my experience, most people don't talk about much besides gossip and trivia in everyday life anyway. It's one of those unquestioned cultural understandings, that we should want to value contemplation and deep conversation while taking time to smell the flowers, but we're mostly content to just pay occasional lip service to it while continuing to live distractedly and suck the marrow out of a KFC Bucket Meal. But we don't ever ask ourselves if we really are the kind of people who value such things, and if not, whether that truly is some sort of moral failing. Blaming the nature of the Internet is itself just another way to procrastinate instead of pursuing that line of thought.

What annoys me about Carr's shtick is that it panders to the sort of educated suburbanites who like to flatter themselves as the sort of people who would write short stories and villanelles for pleasure but never seem to actually get around to doing it, the sort of people who have achieved the professional career, the nice house and family, but still have a nagging sense that they're missing out on something vital and a sense of guilt for finding themselves drawn to superficial entertainment in their free time. Instead of a more penetrating look at the necessity of our work and what we expect from it, or how far we're willing to go in sacrificing bourgeois respectability and success for the sake of personal contentment, we get this "Oh noes the Internet is eatin mah brainz" trendy neuropop.