Deep Thoughts

Worth Pondering

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CS Lewis, describing his protagonist, a sociologist, in That Hideous Strength:

..his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than the things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance: any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow…he had a great reluctance, in his work, to ever use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes,” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.

This phenomenon is a plague of our present era, and is by no means limited to sociologists.

Previous Worth Pondering post.

Worth Pondering

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Like all intelligent men who are not in any way creative, Sir Robert Peel was dangerously sympathetic towards the creations of others. Incapable of formulating a system, he threw himself voraciously on those he came across, and applied them more vigorously than would their inventors.

–Andre Maurois

I don’t know enough about Sir Robert to have an opinion about whether this was a fair assessment of him, but I think it’s a valid and important point in general.  “Intelligent but not creative” describes a high percentage of people in academia, ‘nonprofits’, and the media (as long as you don’t set bar for ‘intelligent’ too high, especially in the case of the media)…and I think this has a lot to do with their eager adoption of theoretical frameworks such as critical race theory, cultural Marxism, and various types of gender theorizing…and the special and often weird vocabularies that tend to go with such things.

The need to conform, the desire to promote oneself and to feel superior, and the search for meaning also play a part, of course.

See Lead and Gold, which is why I discovered the Maurois quote in the first place. As LG notes, the voracious-framework-adoption phenomenon is also found in business, though at a somewhat lesser level than in academia, media, and nonprofits, I think, due to the exigencies of competition and the need to deal with reality sufficiently well to actually produce products and services.

See also my post Professors and the Pornography of Power, which cites Jonathan Haidt on what he calls the single-lens approach.

Previous Worth Pondering post.

Interesting Discussions

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At Instapundit,  Glenn Reynolds highlights a comment and posts it for further discussion:

The comment:  “I get the feeling that our govt leaders and business leaders are sort of bored with keeping a great system and country running. They must do something transformative and sensational! Green! Pride! Equity! And so they wreck the system they were charged with running”

Glenn’s response:  “I think this desire for exceptional significance is an unfortunate hangover from the civil rights/Vietnam era, and I think the activism of that era was hangover jealousy of their parents’ generation’s World War II experience. Now it’s degenerated into causes that are basically fake.”

At Twitter, Claire Lehmann says:

“Catering to everyone’s exquisite emotional preferences in childhood & beyond has not created a generation of strong, healthy, productive individuals. It has created a generation of neotenic hairless pets whose only skill is taking selfies & ordering packages from Amazon.”

Related post at Quillette:  Harry Potter and rites of passage

At LinkedIn, some assertions about ‘digitization’ and ‘digital dinosaurs’ and subsequent discussion.  (I find all the current talk about ‘digitization’ to be kind of strange…all modern computers and the information systems based on them are digital, as were early mainframes, and, before them, punched card systems.) Note the comments by Bill Waddell, who used to comment at CB.

Society, Social Media, and Human Nature

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The Instagram Panopticon, at Quillette, discusses the way in which social media has encouraged people to carefully curate their self-presentations and to judge the self-presentations of others.

I think it is certainly true that new kinds of media can affect how people think, feel, and interact…and this effect is nothing new. Joseph Roth, who lived in Berlin in the 1920s, wrote about the impact of radio:

There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack…No one listened any longer to the song of the nightingale and the chirp of conscience. No one followed the voice of reason and each allowed himself to be drowned out by the cry of instinct.

He didn’t like photography very much, either:

There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack…No one listened any longer to the song of the nightingale and the chirp of conscience. No one followed the voice of reason and each allowed himself to be drowned out by the cry of instinct.

But the focus on self-presentation and on evaluating the presentations of other goes back much further.  Consider, for example Russia’s ‘paper Facebook’ of the 19th century.  No computers and no telephones, but, among aristocrats and the well-off, visiting cards were  very important…and:

The cards, decorated with vignettes and lettering, were usually piled somewhere in the entrance hall of a rich house – either on a coffee table or tucked behind the mirror; so when a guest was coming, while he waited for the servants to tell the host he’s got a visitor, the guest could assess the popularity and social ties of his host by looking at the cards.

The fashion mongers of the era flaunted each other with a set of business cards from famous and popular people, just as some people now flaunt how many Facebook stars they are friends with!

There were even bot-equivalents to increase one’s count of Likes:

Some people even paid the doormen in rich people’s houses for visiting cards of famous persons – princes, counts, rich businessmen – to tuck these cards behind their mirrors and make their guests believe they are sometimes visited by such ‘posh’ persons.

Going back even further, in one of Fielding’s novels a woman takes great pleasure in going through the visiting cards of people who called on her.  Again, similar to like-collecting on Instagram or Facebook, probably exactly the same dopamine hit.

So yes, changes in media do influence human perception and behavior…but we must be careful not to ascribe things to new media which are really human constants.

Faustian Ambition (updated)

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A post on ambition at another blog (in 2010) , which included a range of quotations on the subject, inspired me to think that I might be able to write an interesting essay on the topic of ambition in Goethe’s Faust. This post is a stab at such an essay.

The word “Faustian” is frequently used in books, articles, blog posts, etc on all sorts of topics. I think the image that most people have of Faust is of a man who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for dangerous knowledge: sort of a mad-scientist type. This may be true of earlier versions of the Faust legend, but I think it’s a misreading (or more likely a non-reading) of Goethe’s definitive version.

Faust, at the time when the devil first appears to him, has devoted his entire life to the pursuit of knowledge–in many different scholarly disciplines–and is totally frustrated and in despair about the whole thing. It is precisely the desire to do something other than to pursue abstract knowledge that leads him to engage in his fateful bargain with Mephistopheles.

If it’s not the pursuit of abstract knowledge, then what ambition drives Faust to sell his soul? C S Lewis suggests that his motivations are entirely practical: he wants “gold and guns and girls.” This is partly true, but is by no means the whole story.

Certainly, Faust does like girls. Very early in the play, he encounters a young woman who strikes his fancy:

FAUST: My fair young lady, may I make free
To offer you my arm and company?
GRETCHEN: I’m neither fair nor lady, pray
Can unescorted find my way
FAUST: God, what a lovely child! I swear
I’ve never seen the like of her
She is so dutiful and pure
Yet not without a pert allure
Her rosy lip, her cheek aglow
I never shall forget, I know
Her glance’s timid downward dart
Is graven deeply in my heart!
But how she was so short with me–
That was consummate ecstasy!

Immediately following this meeting, Faust demands Mephisto’s magical assistance in the seduction of Gretchen. It’s noteworthy that he insists on this help despite the facts that (a)he brags to the devil that he is perfectly capable of seducing a girl like Gretchen on his own, without any diabolical assistance, and (b)a big part of Gretchen’s appeal is clearly that she seems so difficult to win–a difficulty that will be short-circuited by Mephisto’s help.

Mephisto, of course, complies with Faust’s demand…this devil honors his contracts…and Faust’s seduction of Gretchen leads directly to the deaths of her mother, her child by Faust, her brother, and to Gretchen’s own execution.

Diabolical magic also allows Faust to meet Helen of Troy (time and space are quite fluid in this play) whom he marries and impregnates, resulting in the birth of their child Euphorion.

So, per Lewis, yes, Faust is definitely motivated by the pursuit of women. But this is only a small part of the complex structure of ambition that Goethe has given his protagonist.

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