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.

Leszek Kołakowski, quoted by Cornel West. This is not to say, of course, that all arguments have equal validity: only that arguments of some coherence -which I tend to call internal coherence- can be adduced for any position. An argument is internally coherent when it unfolds logically within a system of rules and axioms. It is common for arguments to seem quite absurd from outside of such a system, and it is just as common for interlocutors to question an argument’s validity without understanding its systematic context. As an example: if you believe axiomatically that there exists some deity exempt from all ordinary physical and historical laws, the mind of which is revealed in immutable texts, it is logical enough to believe that evidence to the contrary is fraudulent, planted by enemies of the deity described in those texts, and that physical evidence cannot be more persuasive than textual evidence.

That does not mean it is true! But it is hardly a question of logic. The logical relation between each step of the argument -from its systematic axioms, which establish epistemological rules about sacred texts and physical laws, to any individual datum, like a fossil or a sedimentary deposit- is often valid. The problem is in the axioms of the system.

This is all fairly straightforward. The trouble is that competing systematic worldviews have their own arbitrarily posited axioms. For example: there is no defensible argument for why we should consider scientific conclusions “true” in any logically-compulsory way. They are predictive; they are internally coherent; the correlate, in some cases, to our unreliable perceptions of the world and explain those perceptions, but so have previous paradigms. As to “truth”, however, there seems to be no sound connection to it at all. The most common argument, and the one that implicitly persuades our civilization, is that the efficacy of science demonstrates its validity. But, Kołakowski notes, 

“…when we invoke the efficacy of science in order to legitimize its more or less codified criteria of validity, our appeal has no epistemological relevance and leaves intact all the skeptical arguments about the fundamental unreliability of all criteria of truth, even if we set aside the well-known difficulties of properly defining the principle of verifiability and are satisfied with the general guidelines of scientific empiricism. There are no transcendental or logically compelling grounds to take the efficacy of knowledge (its predictive power and practical applicability) as a mark of truth in the sense just mentioned. We may certainly define truth by reference to the criteria of efficacy; such a definition is not self-contradictory and does not lead into an infinite regress; nevertheless, it is arbitrary; to accept it requires an act of faith and therefore the principle credo ut intelligam operates over the entire field of knowledge; this is hardly more than to say that we are incapable of producing an epistemological absolute or that our intelligence is finite: not exactly a world-shaking discovery.”

But if all systems, all epistemologies rest on essentially arbitrary definitions, the Law of the Infinite Cornucopia brings us into significant trouble: arguments can be made for anything, and it is likely that past a certain point persuasion simply isn’t possible. The systems within which arguments are made are as arbitrary as the arguments themselves, and there is nothing transcendental, nothing beyond those systems, with which we might evaluate the validity or truth of any one of them.

One solution: to admit that this, and similar discussions of relativism in both moral and epistemological senses, are simply reflective of the perhaps painful fact that the expected isomorphism between logic and science does not appear to exist. As such, to discuss one in terms of the other is, as the man says, like “dancing about architecture.” We might go so far as to disambiguate “truth” as a logically-compulsory superordinate concept from “true,” the latter meaning only that something is “the case,” that it happened, or that the proposed logical operation is valid. This strategy would accord well with Karl Popper’s epistemology, which asserts that knowledge need only be considered tentative and improving.

We should be honest about what such an admission means, however, particularly with respect to moral philosophy and the possibility of proposing meaningful, arbitrary axioms about it. Kolakowski asserts: “Dostoyevski’s famous dictum, ‘If there is no God, everything is permissible,’ is valid [both] as a moral rule [and] an epistemological principle.” Perhaps epistemology is, along with “truth”, soon to be deprecated, and we will simply await results from the laboratory of the real: scientists watching an experiment rather than authors of meaning.

Saul Bellow, in a letter to a friend.

Is this true? If it is the case that what is anti-poetic is unfaithful to human reality, are materialist sciences unfaithful? Is it to the arts that we turn because their poetry is more faithful, has greater fidelity, is truer to humanity in some sense? Does literature, for example, give us a better, a fuller sense of what it is to live, love, fear, betray, long, and so on, than the DSM-IV? Do you expect the DSM-V to remedy this?

And if art is more faithful to human experience, if poetics exceed sciences in their depth, if stories constitute better knowledge of the experienced world than catalogues of facts and reductive physical explanations, then what epistemological objection can we have, if any, to the stories of religion? Why do we call some stories meaningful art and others illegitimate lies?

(These are all questions; I do not ask them with answers in mind).

Leszek Kołakowski, quoted to me by my father. What is the value of this dignity to which men like Kubrick allude when they say things like, “However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light”? It isn’t, after all, a matter of darkness and light; light we can synthesize; we cannot synthesize moral purpose whose terminus is not our own fallible imagination. Will our manufactured meaning not always be, at most, a consoling story we tell ourselves against the backdrop of immutable oblivion?

And if so, what difference does it make whether one story is empirically valid or not? As Kołakowski notes and every reader of fiction or lover of art or anything else knows, “There are no transcendentally valid criteria of meaningfulness and no compelling reasons why the meaningful should be equated with the empirical, in the sense in which modern science understands this term.”

Is there any defensible justification for the putatively heroic stance of the existentialist hero, bearing “the impersonal game of atoms” with what he calls dignity? Is there any reason to consider empirical validity a criterion by which to judge our stories?

William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Elsewhere in the lectures, James touches on a central idea of most religions: not only that they “minimize the darker aspects of the objective sphere” of the world, but also that religious theories recontextualize them so that they are no longer to be perceived as purely “dark”; in their tendency to do the same, many political ideologies likewise perform a quasi-religious task: they animate, give meaning to, and absolve us in various senses, and transform the dark into causes for hope (I think particularly of how politics attempts to redeem violence done and violence suffered).

The comprehensive metaphorical and mythical reconfiguration of death, suffering, privation, and the inalterably reactive and restless tendencies of the human mind are the main value of religion so far as I’m concerned; indeed, even those who feel hostility to Christianity, say, often find the metaphysics of Buddhism deeply appealing, and among those who dislike all religions there remains the consolation of various other faiths: in progress, history, civilization, technology, justice, the personal, the private, the artistic. Rare is the person for whom there is nothing irrationally redemptive, and even among those of us who are atheists all manner of immaterial concepts assist in the rehabilitation of reality.

Note too the asserted connection between (1) being happier and being better to others and the world; and (2) the maintenance of an internal, subjective state and the articulation of an external worldview.

Simone Weil, quoted by Zadie smith as cited by Peter Santiago.

We have for some time lived in an age of personality. It is culturally valued above everything else possessed or exhibited by the individual. One’s moral choices, willed decisions, even one’s behavioral history are minimally important in comparison to one’s personality; our media care only for it, cater and serve it, allot fame by its catalytic effects on audiences.

Nothing could be more anathema to the spirit of our confessional, graphomaniacal, self-aggrandizing time than Weil’s opposition to the “I”. “What is sacred in a human being is the impersonal”: not in the age of the ever-personal, when reticence and self-effacement are deplored as dysfunctional.

Let us tearily confess to the viewers -how brave to share our emotions! We’ll speak our “selves”, post by post! And we’ll update our “statuses”: abbreviated, gussied fragments of interior monologue, evidence of the exchange between interior and exterior, the rise of personality and the decline of reflection. Status: the bleeping of a probe deep in space, beyond its range, updating unlistening engineers on its velocity, its energy levels, its functioning camera. Perhaps it can take a photo of itself.

Don’t listen to Weil! Think not of the impersonal but of “the way the camera follows us in slo-mo, the way we look to us all”! Or consider, at any rate, the possibility that our obsession with selfhood is somehow concomitant with the foreclosure of the individual’s avenues of transcendence: hemmed in by the reductive and denied the mythical, what else can one plumb for depth but the self?

Flannery O’Connor, quoted by SDS (from others) and described, accurately, as “Mills-bait.” That someone as deeply religious as O’Connor recognized that the religious impulse does not illuminate “concrete reality” is remarkable; it almost seems to suggest another Gouldian magisterium: religion, science, art. Perhaps not.

In any event: what is beautiful about her assertion is not just that it accurately explains why those full of passionate conviction -religious or political, it should be stressed, if Socialist Realism and its ilk hadn’t made it clear how similar such forms of belief are in their effect on creativity (and otherwise, for that matter)- make bad art. More significant is her ingenious explanation of why. She doesn’t denigrate religion or suggest that it is not epistemologically valid, only that we “cannot approach the infinite directly [and] must penetrate the natural human world as it is.”

It is interesting that there seems to be a fundamental incompatibility between belief systems of any sort and the art of the novel. In the case of political ideas, which ruin novels as reliably as anything else, and ruin novelists too, it suggests that the realism of the novel -its penetration of “concrete reality”- yet exceeds any ideology, even those you and I consider axiomatic. Hence: the mysterious power of transgressive novels to exist beyond political and moral judgement.

Perhaps it is just that the author is concerned with what the world is, while religious thought attends to what the world’s ostensible essence beneath or beyond appearances is and political thought is concerned with what “should” be.

Barack Obama, in his Nobel speech, asserting that violence can be necessary to achieving peace. Contrast with much of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s thought, or that of Mahatma Gandhi; perhaps ahimsa is fine for weaklings fighting strong opponents but useless when conflict is “real” enough -whatever that could mean. Or perhaps power insists on its own use. I agree that some wars are just, of course.

I was reminded of Godwin’s Law, which is solely predictive: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” As with so many observations about the Internet, it is as true of the real world, but one rarely sees discussed why it is the case that the reductio ad Hitlerum occurs so reliably.

It seems clear to me that Obama and the rest of us cite Hitler because it is always at the extremes that propositions break down, problematizing their soundness and coherency in general; this is the case with moral, legal, and logical assertions, so it is only natural that one would frequently have recourse to cite one of the most extraordinary situations in recent history in order to expose the inconsistencies or disutility of an idea, particularly a moral one.

Long ago, I wrote a bit about Gandhi’s famous words to the Jews of Germany:

…suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

As I noted, one cannot talk of ahimsa without understanding Gandhi’s religious beliefs, which most Western atheists mock less than they do Christians’ ideas but which they nevertheless find implausible and surely insufficient cause for a race to submit to genocide. Indeed, I find that most dislike Gandhi’s letter a great deal: the Holocaust cannot be a ‘thanksgiving’ unless we believe that this life is less real than another.

The point is that pure morality is never concerned with outcomes; praxis is not part of its calculation; it considers only means and never ends. For the religious, the ends are understood in advance anyway. It cannot be problematized by logical puzzles about runaway trains or crying babies because it isn’t mathematical: it demands behavior only from the individual, and only behavior within his power.

This is why pure morality, like that of Gandhi or Jesus, is incomprehensible to us: at the extremes -when, after all, it demands the most- we reject it. And that is further why there is less of it in politics than most would like: it is too demanding in practice and it cannot be scaled to classes, nations, institutions, or armies. Mass morality can sound like lunacy: read what Gandhi feels non-violence asks of the Jews and ask what he’d ask of us!