John Lanchester quoting Karl Marx (but substituting the word capitalism for the bourgeoisie) in his excellent essay on “Marx at 193,” which I came to via Irredenta. I’m familiar with Marx’s errors, particularly his anthropologically- and morally-confused prescriptions and his overestimation of dialectics as an “objective” mechanism in historical development, but this essay recalls his talents as a diagnostician.

In particular, capitalism’s “constant revolutionizing” is why capitalist culture invariably becomes youth culture, and it is why youth is ever-more-respected as a summary font of natural, progressive, authentic wisdom, despite being by definition the most experientially (and often culturally and intellectually) ignorant part of the population. Given the power culture has to shape political discourse, it’s only a slight exaggeration to say, then, that capitalism brings about kakistocracy, even as it does indeed show the power humanity has to shape itself and the world.

In a revolution, the young are of course those with the least to lose. In our constant revolutions it is therefore natural that the young should become the reliable agents of fury, upheaval, change: this is emphatically not because such change necessarily benefits the young or anyone else; after all, youth tend to be sufficiently ignorant of history and indifferent to their own moral incoherence that one cannot seriously claim that their enthusiasm for change is based on anything like analysis. Rather, the phenomenon of maturing alongside revolutions infuses youth with a sense of their own global, ideological, moral importance. For them, “change” is the fruition of their sole, and probably initial paradigm, while for older individuals revolutions are the disturbance of mostly-uninterrogated paradigms according to whose values their entire life’s meaning has been determined.

Thus: capitalism raises each generation alongside a revolution in “the instruments of production, and thereby the means of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” Each generation comes of age with technologies, media, industries which radically alter the nature of social existence, the structure of cities, the dynamics of relationships, the meanings and values which ostensibly sustain and guide us but which now seem merely to tag along. And quite understandably, each generation thinks that this new paradigm —their paradigm, after all, which they absorb easily and even think they shape— is the last paradigm, or at least that it is largely faultless even if it will be superseded. In its turn, each generation comes to think, too, that its reconnection with lingering traditions is enough to preserve them, that its necessitated reinvention of all culture will endure. The evangelical zeal of youth, whether expressed politically or aesthetically, derives in part from the seemingly historic nature of any given teenager’s maturation: not only is the great bulk of cultural and market activity directed at the young, but they occupy a position of magical moral inevitability: a young person might not be allowed to wear what she wants at the office, but does anyone doubt that the world will be remade in her image, and not that of the dreary old morons from previous generations, already dying on the vine?

Capitalism seems therefore to promote a narcissistic infantility of disposition which itself produces more constant revolutions, especially once enshrined in a national “rebellion” myth instantiated in countless films, books, songs. We produce children who coincide in their growth with the fruition of revolutionary technological and economic phenomena; we inculcate them with stories of revolutionaries and rebels, indeed suggesting that to be young is to rebel, whether or not there is any real, enduring purpose, whether or not the values of one’s forebears are “right” or not (such determinations are incoherently considered invalid, epistemologically, even as they form the basis for all continuing moral action). In other words, capitalism raises revolutionaries: children contemptuous of the past in all aesthetic, moral, and political senses who automatically rebel against everything passed down, and who feel that their arrival is the culmination of a history from which they can learn only trivia, not meanings and values which, having been vetted for millennia experientially by humans no different from them, can direct them in their own lives. In doing so, capitalism increases the likelihood that additional revolutions will occur: every atomized revolutionary inventing culture from scratch has a chance at building the next billion-dollar-gadget, the next attention-sucking media platform, the next block-busting franchise of food or films. 

Of course, one errs if one denies that she might also develop any number of manifestly necessary, vital, life-saving and life-improving ideas; even Marx could not deny that it was, after all, this system which has at last shown “what man’s activity can bring about.” It is only a matter of considering the basis of our youth culture: it is not any axiom or principle we’ve discerned through the millennia, nor any scientific theory which supports the infantilization of culture and the empowerment of youth. It is capitalism’s constant revolutions which empower the young, separate them from their forbears, given them their unearned sense of historical apotheosis, and relegate tradition- or elder-based phenomena like “wisdom” to the margins of culture.

George Oppen, in “Of Being Numerous: Sections 1-22,” quoted by William Ball in his wonderful essay on and review of Robin Sloan’s Fish. We all know something is amiss with the state of our media; there is too much flux, perhaps, or at least too much for the time we have. It is a dilemma for both readers and writers, and a formal solution is inevitable, if hard to anticipate. As Joshua Heineman once put it:

Creating a good blog is like writing a good book that no one reads past the first page. Creating a good blog is like hiding your treasure under piles of new treasure. Creating a bad blog is like burying your trash under piles of new trash.

Ball discusses David Cole’s cultivation of a personal canon: a collection of texts which are valuable in themselves, in their static composition and content; these are not the streams of personalities to follow or sites which update and are “always interesting” in some entertaining sense; instead, they are works, essays, presentations: the finished instantiation of ideas and explorations.

We leave a wake of text and data behind us now. Our boredom becomes accidental artifacts, little messages or clicked icons; our enthusiasms, where monetizable, are turned into product features and fed into streams designed to attract others’ attention. Much of this wake is nearly meaningless, although the data often seems very close to meaning, isomorphic to it somehow; nevertheless, one is confounded by a sense of emptiness at the core of even the most complete digital representation of selfhood.

There are things we live among and to see them is to know ourselves. Facebook is not such a thing. If for no other reason than its punishing obsession with currency, with now, the social Internet cannot be a library or a ruin; such spaces lack the giddy futurity that advertising requires, the orientation towards a time of easy fulfillment just beyond this moment of inadequacy (which advertisers work to ensure will never end).

Of course, a canon partializes in its own ways. Ball quotes Sloan’s distinction of “stock” and “flow” in media:

“Stock” and “flow” are terms from economics (static quantities like inventory and dynamic quantities like payroll, respectively) and are, to Sloan, “the master metaphor for media today… Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets… Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today.”

[O]n the internet, stock is swept away by flow. Not that the flow isn’t sustaining. Not that there is any more or less stock than there has ever been. Only that we have trouble holding on to things we cherish on the internet. Why? 

A canon is a kind of stock, and I’d make one myself were it not already embedded in these words. I worry, however, that the development of types of stock isn’t enough, because the answer to Ball’s question —why do have trouble holding onto the things we cherish?— is that we don’t. Instead, we have trouble cherishing what makes us enduringly happier, better, more present; we have trouble knowing what to cherish; we know only the happiness of escape, submersion into flows that flow into other flows. We are sediment carried along by rivers, half-perceiving the landscapes along the passing banks. Perhaps this is what we want, this ecstasy of dissolving, merging, giving over our agency to the currents. Nikki Giovanni wrote that

a river would stop
its flow if only
a stream were there
to receive it

Otherwise, it must make its own way to its end, cutting earth, jumping banks, slowing and spreading itself across a delta. A flow solves the problem of where to go, what to be: just dissolve and enjoy yourself. There is something aristocratic about the cultivation of a canon, in part because there is something aristocratic about self-creation. The standard assortment of roles and identities isn’t enough; one wants to make one’s own way. A canon is a rejection of “Most Emailed,” of what websites believe you’re influential about, of all the automated or aggregating presentations of culture as a mechanically-reproduced consumable, a burger or a vitamin. A canon asserts that one’s individual self-hood is real, that one’s past is meaningful, that one’s choices are significant (if only for oneself), and that one’s future will not be the result of accidental flows but of purposive decisions made within a context of ideas and discourse. And it restores to their rightful place these ideas and discourse, by separating them from the flows of which they may have once been part and taking them seriously as works in themselves.

But it cannot address our preference for flows over stock. There have always been “things we live among ‘and to see them is to know ourselves’”; now, we are transformed into things like “profiles” and “avatars,” and we truly do live among them, but to see them is an unmemorable distraction, gives us little useful knowledge or experience, is somehow the opposite of knowing ourselves. And if people detect this —subtly or overtly— most seem not to mind.

Frank O’Hara, from an interview in What’s With Modern Art? quoted by Buongiorno. 

Much of our technological and cultural labor is driven not by our interest in ending death or securing the safety of the species, but by our desire to take the attention of others —against their will and without their permission— and use it for our own ends: some high-minded, some commercial, some gently egocentric. There is innocence in our pursuit of one-another’s attentions, but there is also consequence: we may be ordinary hawking proles just trying to get by in the attention-economy, but when the “slightest loss of attention leads to death” the lolling, gesticulative banter of the advertising-sponsored Internet masks an undeclared, unfavorable exchange: our time, awareness, attention for diversion, small serotonin bumps, temporary highs; we are permitted the exhaustion of drives rather than their culmination.

This is why attention-seeking is not merely aesthetically unpleasant but is in fact immoral: to insist on taking the attention of another is a kind of theft, a destructive coercion. Rare moments and our works notwithstanding, our shared failure is that we are all bored, lazy, trivial, and proud; the lifelong struggle to be attentively engaged, hardworking, serious, and humble is both ennobling and quixotic, but part of that effort must be that we refrain from stealing one another’s attention for boring trivialities or the lazy pride we accrue like sediment. We shouldn’t impoverish each other.

The humblebrag isn’t harmless, and neither are products which game your attention, whittle away your life while you’re too distracted or addicted to notice, and return to you only the shaved splinters of software-interactions and an unmemorable occupancy.

Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 1948. This sort of leisure is the prey being hunted to extinction by technology in general and the Internet specifically, and it is this leisure which permits the creation of sustaining human meaning.

Leisure, Culture, Selfhood

Pieper’s thesis, unreasonably condensed, is that our interiorization of the dynamics of capitalism and the destruction of transcendental narratives of all sorts —principally religious, but not exclusively— have together made leisure of this sort alien and incomprehensible to us. Instead of real, contemplative, open, and receptive leisure, we pursue “leisure activities” which utterly mistake the purpose of leisure and as a result fail to satisfy our deepest needs. Above all, they’re incapable of connecting us to “the real” in the world or of immersing us in “the real” in ourselves.

This lost sort of immersion, this wordless confrontation with reality, is profoundly intimate, and from it we develop authentic personal and civilizational culture (as opposed to “content”). The changes such leisure catalyzes are not easily communicable or quantitatively measurable; they are not for the curriculum vitae, the business card, or the interview, nor for the cocktail party or photo album. They do not relate to intelligence or “skills” as such, and can be experienced by any person of any class; they may incidentally correlate to characteristics we deem useful, but that correlation is emphatically not their point. Indeed, they cannot be the result of pursuit; the discovery of enduring wisdom, the achievement of awareness, the maintenance of a serene relationship with the self and the world, the sensation of joy, result from an “open” and “receptive” attitude wholly at odds with that of “self-improvement.”

Leisure in this sense is both the crucible of all durable human meaning —what Pieper calls culture— and totally without transactional, measurable, economic point. The Greeks, Romans, and pre-Industrial Revolution Western societies understood this; indeed, the Greek word for leisure, in fact, is the basis for the Latin word scola, the German schule, and the English school. And Pieper cites surprising passages from Aristotle and Plato as well as more contemporary thinkers which suggest that the connection between repose, wisdom, and culture was once clear, even if it now seems difficult to defend. (It should be added that much of Buddhism and Hinduism seem to embody this thesis as well, for example in the relationship between Theravada monks and society, or the notion of the sannyasa stage of life).

In just a few centuries, however, this idea has vanished as the values on which it depends have been replaced. What cannot be communicated and measured is now felt not to exist —if you dispute this in the arts, you likely nevertheless insist on it in matters of religion, for example— and the impossibility of exteriorizing leisure or its fruits, of conveying contemplative communion or translating it into something quantitative, condemns it to irrelevance (or worse).

Pieper apportions much of the responsibility for this to capitalism, Marxism, and the transformation of individual, sacralized labor into “work” (physical or intellectual): if the majority of a society’s activity implies certain values, members of that society adopt those values. We are our utility (this is the real meaning of ideas like “self-esteem”: what is our use to others?). We think as our economies “think”; we consume and produce as they do; and we insist on fungibility, reproducibility, and exchangeability as criteria of meaning. What is valuable must enable transactions.

Pieper could not have imagined, however, the apotheosis these market values would achieve in the technology of our age, an age of “total technology,” or what Neil Postman called “technopoly.”

Technopoly and the Self

Think of culture (both in general and the micro-culture of selfhood) as we create and experience it now, and consider Postman’s description of technopoly:

“…the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology. It does not make [non-technological forms of culture or self-hood] illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.”

No culture (or paradigm of selfhood) has ever taken its orders more directly from technology than ours; our music and visual arts, for example, are the result of technical specifications and network programming requirements above all else, and their forms rise and fall as quickly as industry needs. The most pure expression of a medium being the message must be the music video, a form born of technology in search of content and fatally bound to the fortunes of a defunct broadcasting model. The art, so to speak, of the hour-long drama, the animated GIF, the “interactive installation,” or the blog post is hardly different, and hardly likelier to last. 

If the tools and processes of capitalism or Marxism reduced communities to classes, creators to functionaries, makers to workers, families to consumers, our technopoly has reduced us to users and culture to media (and increasingly online content). That is to say: culture is synonymous with technology, and because we derive our sense of self from culture, so too is selfhood. Life is what can be posted; you are what can be saved and shared as data; culture is what the Internet can convey; meaning is what you perceive online.

The Medium is the Meaning

Meaning, of course, is the great problem of any human life not concerned solely with organismic survival. What is my life’s purpose? Why should I endure my hardships or enjoy my successes? Is happiness my goal, and of what does real, abiding happiness consist? Instinct is not enough, the claims of our consumer-hedonistic society notwithstanding; the satiation of urges will not sustain you through decades, even with the most exotic rotations. Generations ago, we had static, mythical sources of meaning, but no longer, and not only is there no going back to religion as a persuasive, logically-compulsory authority, authority of any sort will not again suffice. We are now democratic in both politics and epistemology.

In the absence of persuasive transcendental belief systems —God is dead, everything is permitted— we look to one another for meaning. Smeared across vast suburban landscapes, a world of diaspora, of exile from the cities in which we live but within which there are no public spaces and no neighbors, we find one another in the only space in which social interaction is still possible: online.

What do we find there? We see Facebook photos of smiling, active couples and learn that love means shared hobbies; we inattentively scan the tweeted utterance of our purported friends and learn what matters, what is important, what counts; we note the data in each other’s profiles —a person is her favorite movies, which she selects from a licensed, partial, auto-completing list, or the hashtags he includes after remarks about arbitrated trending topics— and we form a model of what it is to be a human. We follow one another on service after service, seeking amusement, beauty, some justificatory clues, hinted potentialities, signs of meaning. But our expressions of selfhood are dictated by what we can post, share, photograph, upload, link, capture. We see culture and selfhood as shaped by market forces, technology constraints, business decisions, and arbitrary software designs. No form of meaning stands apart from the technopoly and remains relevant; there is no evidence of meaning beyond those actions which can be turned into apps or pages and made to generate profit.

In the democratic capitalist technopoly, therefore, meaning is defined by forces that take no note of meaning-in-itself, reject as irrelevant everything that cannot be made into discrete, monetizable, digital units. Technology requires user actions; leisure-as-repose cannot be initiated by a click, shared, or sold. Neither, for that matter, can love, wisdom, or joy.

(Their portrayal, however, can be, and if the primary sense one has online is of a perpetual performance, a performance in which the performers do now know they’re performing and cannot stop, this is why. A perceptual world without any conceivable instantiation of subjective interiority is a world in which only what can be portrayed exists. It’s no coincidence that the rise of simulating technologies corresponds to the ascendency of appearance over essence. To take one example, this is why artists have been replaced by people who portray artists in their simulated mercuriality or their de-rigeur vices. Creative inner-struggle perhaps once drove archetypal artistic despair, but what’s inside no longer exists, so the portrayal reigns. An artist who doesn’t “act like” one isn’t one. The same is true for politicians, the beautiful, the talented, even the ordinary.

Thus: the substitution of culture’s portrayal for culture, and thus too the pervasive sense of unreality and disconnection we experience amidst what is theoretically the most informative and connective technology in history).

Flight and return

When one is away -away- from the technologies of portrayal which shape our lives -away from television, away from the electronic display, away from the status message and the news feed, one quickly begins to recover a sense of selfhood apart from speech or post. One again experiences the self without mediation, social dilution, distraction. And, if one is afforded sufficient time, and is perhaps immersed in the rhythms of the natural world, one can experience “a co-respondence, eternally established in nature… not yet descended into words… the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion -in the real.” One begins to emerge.

Most are familiar with this reprieve, and as well with the regret one feels as one cedes to the essentially addictive habit upon returning to the world of breaking one’s silence: a post about one’s vacation, perhaps. But worse is that most of us are now unable even to get away; should we be fortunate enough to lose the fetter of an Internet connection, we still insist on taking photographs, ostensibly to record the moment for ourselves but actually because at every step we imagine how our experience might be conveyed, portrayed, broadcast. We interiorize technology as it interiorizes the market’s emphases; we all search for what can be transacted upon, for attention or esteem or approval or money. We blink into a sunset, search for our phone’s camera, and imagine how the photo will play on the screens where our avatar lives, screens belonging to other selves whom we know only as representations.

And as networks extend their influence, it is ever-harder to experience real repose, the deep communion with reality that produces authentic meaning and enduring culture. We live in a de-cultured culture, subsumed beneath an avalanche of transitory, ephemeral, temporary meanings, soon to be buried by new posts, new photographs, new digital artifacts of those acquisitive, performative “leisure activities” which are now the primary source of meaning in our lives (and most of which, of course, cost money in one way or another).

None brings us closer to whatever is essential and unmediated, unadulterated inside of ourselves, nor to any ultimate reality; indeed, perhaps no one believes in such things any longer. But if the existence of something apart from postable, quantifiable, monetizable, digitally transmissible data is in doubt, one thing is not: the Internet is an expression of radically materialist and utilitarian values which stand in opposition to leisure as Pieper described it, and therefore to the source of culture as it existed for millennia. Even if one prefers the dynamic, competitive, addictive, temporary cultures of portrayal and enactment that prevail now, it is hard to imagine life without even the possibility of repose. Yet it is harder still to imagine how such repose could ever be possible without the sort of radical disconnection from the expanding technopoly which, perversely, is considered a turning-away from the world, rather than a return to it.

Jonathan Franzen’s essay on social media, on ‘liking’ as a pitiful, narcissistic dilution of real experience, seems to have been met with wide acclaim; it is quoted everywhere, it seems immediately, obviously true, it resonates. Many of its points are fascinating, but most interesting is the claim above: “To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived.” By asserting the centrality of pain -and thereby of suffering, death, and evil- to human life, Franzen echoes a broadly-held, mostly intuitive sense that the so-called “problem of evil” is not a meaningful philosophical problem at all. That is: it is not hard to imagine how suffering, death, and evil could be vitally important for human life to have meaning, how they could be in fact be necessary for the existence of the good with which we hope to technologically replace them.

Earlier, Franzen writes that

“…the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.”

By calling them “our wishes,” Franzen rhetorically trivializes our preferences: to not be killed in hurricanes, to not see our children starve to death, to not be eaten away by disease, to not languish in a life whose circumstances reflect arbitrary fortune, the bad luck of being born poor, marginalized, persecuted, weak. The virtualization of reality is an effort to combat the arbitrary, unearned suffering which has defined our lives since the dawn of the species. Technology seeks to make our agency primary among organizing forces in the universe; we want not to be victims. We want not to suffer, particularly pointlessly. We want happy, safe lives for ourselves and others.

Yet Franzen’s argument insists: a painless life is not a real life, and as a result pain is as integral to the order of human reality as love, as sex, as hope. What is noteworthy is that this argument is so commonly accepted that he scarcely expands on it, offers it as a claim which is prima facie the case. Even in popular culture, it has become something of a narrative trope: in films, literature, even in music one regularly encounters the depiction of nightmare utopias, dystopias, in which the capacity to suffer has been eradicated, in which chance has been eliminated. These depictions show us reduced worlds in which, say, androids provide us with sex without the immense difficulties of relationships, or in which we are genetically modified to be incapable of irrational sorrow. They are not happy stories, though; they invariably assert that something crucial is lost if there is no suffering, no death, no conflict, no evil.

That is: this “telos of techne” is revolting to us even as we seek it.

In a sense, we are like children who rage against the rules and fiats of our parents but desperately depend on them to circumscribe reality, to structure our moral and experiential lives, or we will be terribly deprived, lost. But of what are we deprived? The possibility of heroism? Of sacrifice? Of devotion? Of goodness against evil? And how does suffering structure heroism, nobility, love? And how might one argue that the suffering of others is a morally-acceptable cost for the leavening, as it were, of one’s own reality? It is simple enough to dismiss such questions as superstitious, as epistemologically imprecise; unless one is religious, one can perhaps avoid thinking of the relationship between evil and love for one’s entire life. But only an ideologue would insist that there is no mystery to the human need for conflict, anguish, pain.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, sentenced to a decade of imprisonment and exile in the Soviet Union for critical remarks about the monster Joseph Stalin, knew much about the suffering wrought by evil in the world; even had he not experienced torture and banishment, that he lived through World War II and what followed in Russia would have acquainted him with the full range of human barbarities. The temptation to blame systems of government or economics, ideologies, parties, others would have been enormous. Yet Solzhenitsyn did not think that evil was apportioned to some and not to others:

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

In the heart of every human being there is good and there is evil; it is not possible to imagine a human without evil, or at least it is clear that such a creature is not human as we understand the term. To be human is to be divided against oneself, and to be both wounded by the evil in others and saved by the good in them; it is to depend on this ambiguous, moral and immoral heart.

Franzen discusses the insidious redaction social networks prompt: how we are eager to be liked and therefore mask, conceal, censor what is unlikeable about ourselves, falsifying our humanity and acting against the spirit of love in the process:

“If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick.”

To experience the fullness of love, one cannot partialize oneself, amputate those elements of oneself that play poorly on profile pages, accustom oneself to perpetual public performance. That we do so by the hundreds of millions, oddly, answers Solzhenitsyn’s question: “And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” If Franzen is to be believed, it turns out that nearly all of us are.

That we recognize, however, the facile surreality of this act, that authors write op-eds in the New York Times denouncing it while we all nod in assent, seems not only to suggest that the cultural change is not nearly so novel or permanent as Franzen claims -I recall feeling contempt for people who liked my performative personality in high school- but also to offer a kind of glimpse into the popular conception of the world’s moral order, a referendum on theodicy, as it were.

Is it the case that despite our intellectual arguments, we intuitively do not want a life free from conflict, pain, evil? Do we know in our hearts that such a life would be a kind of stagnation, a distracted, superficial trance, an anti-life without the possibility of transcendence? It is discomfiting to say so in the face of the horrors wrought by evil in our world; even Franzen cannot bring himself to the honest conclusion of his argument, absurdly saying that “pain hurts but it doesn’t kill.” But of course pain kills; and what causes pain -evil, chance- is as likely to cause death as anguish. A novelist is unlikely to have a popularly palatable moral worldview, but it seems that even Franzen feels some pressure to redact himself here: our age is the age of technological teleology, and to assert as a lunatic anachronism that pain -the pain of war, the pain of abuse, the pain of crime, the pain of violation, the pain of murder, the pain of inequality, the pain of politics- is necessary to the human experience is sure to prompt the kind of defriending few of us can bear.

Walker Percy, one of my heroes, in “Novel Writing in an Apocalyptic Time.” This was cited in an interesting interview with Winston Riley about his Percy documentary, which itself was brought to my attention by SDS.

If one decides, through whatever arrogant or idle impetus, to write about the liberal arts or about culture —both of which tend to involve the sincerely-held opinions and solemn aspirations of others, their hearts and their egos, their weaknesses and their foibles, their tastes and their ideologies— one must weigh at times the value of honest criticism against the pain it might inflict.

I tend, for personal and philosophical reasons, to more highly value the feelings of others than any putatively truthful assertions I might want to make, for a few reasons:

• I am desperate to be liked. This is likely the most important reason of all.
• I doubt sincerely that my thoughts are sufficiently epistemologically valuable (or defensible!) to justify wounding even a stranger whose behavior I find repugnant, absurd, or imbecilic.
• I care about people more than I care about positions or beliefs, which I tend to consider a subservient class of psychological phenomena. That is to say: I think people wear beliefs like clothes; they wear what they have grown to consider sensible or attractive; they wear what they feel flatters them; they wear what keeps them dry and warm in inclement winter. They believe their opinions, tastes, philosophies are who they are, but they are mistaken. (Aging is largely learning what one is not, it seems to me).
• Criticism must serve some function to justify the pain it causes: it must, say, avert a disastrous course of action being deliberated by a group, or help thwart the rise of a barbarous politician. But this rarely occurs. Most criticism, even of the most erudite sort, is, as we all know, wasted breath: preached to one’s own choir, comically or indignantly cruel to those one doesn’t respect, unlikely to change the behavior of anyone not already in agreement.

On the other hand! There persists the idea that culture arises out of the scrum of colliding perspectives, and that it is therefore a moral duty to remonstrate against stupidity, performative emoting, deceitful art, destructively banal fiction, and so on. If one doesn’t speak up, one cannot lament the triumph of moral and imaginative vacuity.

I think Percy puts the argument in favor of criticism quite well: “Who is going to protect words like ‘love’”? But one must recognize that he means one should be prepared to tell someone who believes in their love -the love they depict, assert, or experience- that it is not real, that they are abusing the language, that they are damaging the very idea of love with their foolishness! This will hurt them but is unlikely to persuade them. And it may be that one is merely giving in to the universal temptation to feel superior to others, anyway.

How is one to tell when it is appropriate to “attack, attack, attack,” as a writer or a person? How can one distinguish between worthy targets and those one ought to leave alone? Is attacking ever justified? Or is it statistically so irrelevant whether one shouts one’s judgment into the “Total Noise” that the discomfort or anguish one might provoke outweighs any benefit?

Percy says: “Attack the fake in the name of the real.” But the most pernicious sort of phoniness, and the most common, is that type which is unrecognizable to the person perpetrating it. Rarely do we know when we are fake; all of us have something of the performer in us; and all of us are so easily hurt. And does “the real” require or deserve our defense? If we abandon it, will it be subsumed by inanity, vanity, and falsehood? Is it the case that we mere advance our own fakery at the expense of others’ anyway?

I suspect my inability to answer any of these questions -despite writing about them often, as I did tangentially when I commented on Sarah Zhang’s post- has to do with deeper irresolutions about the value of human creations, from artworks to cultures to governments, relative to the subjective experience of the individual. One must believe, of course, that there are abstractions worth protecting, and therefore abstractions worth hurting others for, in order to criticize; and the endless repetitiveness of cultural history seems to devalue such abstractions as surely as bad art and cliche devalue words.

Arthur J. Cordell, “Preparing For The Challenges of New Media,” in The Futurist, March-April 1991, quoted and cited by my old pal Melanyouth.

1. This proposed time -when “‘truth’ will be defined as that which is easily available”- has already arrived; it may have arrived long ago. There is an anthropological limit to the investigations of the individual, though perhaps not to those of the species, and a person can spend only so much time on any given question before he must accept what he has learned as sufficient or resign himself to ignorance.

For reasons having to do with the accidents of economic and technological development as well as our organismic anxieties, we further lower this limit with each passing year: there is now less time for reflection, more pressure for immediacy in our utterances and decisions, and a greater inclination to favor that which is “easily available” than ever before. It seems almost quixotic to insist that some truths be pursued for much longer than it takes to read an article online.

2. This is the principle problem with the Internet’s structurally-imposed laterality, its disruption of deep focus and substitution of rapid, tangential thought: a medium which discourages uninterrupted, lengthy consideration demands that “‘truth’ [become] that which is easily available.” The selecting process for “truth” has, on a social scale, rarely been epistemically valid, but it presently has more to do with what is viral, accessible, scannable than with anything else.

The “truth” about any question -no matter how complex- is in competition with reductive blog posts edited in accordance with corporate directives to minimize substance, email forwards which rival the the vituperative, callow sloganeering of any pamphlet, and status messages which are not expected to elaborate on or substantiate their claims. Discussions, arguments, debates: these fall away into the wake of the surging now anyway.

3. This is not a new problem: what is accessible will naturally prevail over what is not in the deliberations of typical, harried citizens; whether accessibility has to do with information navigation or physical proximity to learning centers or the distribution of literacy and leisure time, it must inform what we believe. That accessibility is intellectually dispositive is what justifies, say, the mission of Wikipedia: what information isn’t present, free, and easy to parse online is increasingly irrelevant.

Indeed, what cannot be conveyed in a few paragraphs or an infographic strikes many as pedantic, abstruse, excessive. (Previously, it was what could not be conveyed on television). And perhaps it is! Vote with your attention. And consider the possibility that the reason the Internet raged at the departed entrepreneur who demanded a synopsis of Chinese politics in three sentences is because we recognized ourselves in him.

4. There is an incredible isomorphism —the shape of which is our zeitgeist’s geometry— between the gaming of our primary search engine by content farms and the gaming of our minds by content providers, from old media to new, from advertising to discourse, from games to social networks. A comprehensive exploration of this isomorphism would produce a sociology of the democratic information age: when we understood enough about psychological plasticity to recognize the damage done by systems designed to capture, hold, and monetize attention, but were powerless to do anything about it as those systems grew to be beloved by, controlled by, the masses they most exploit.

If “truth” has always been whatever is easily available, it is nevertheless the case that what is easily available has never before been, in technological form and gamed content, so subversive of deep, directed thought. And to combat these forms and this content is to be not only a raving, irrelevant luddite; it is to be anti-democratic, a curio arguing for attentive silence and editorial curation in the era of social chatter and audience-driven, audience-invoking, audience-involving culture.