The Curse of The Eternal Present

Commonplace Newsletter #75

In my last job¹ I worked in a care home for people with mental health issues and those with head injuries. It had a way of bringing out the philosopher in you, this job, if you were in any way inclined to such rumination. What does it mean to be insane, I would find myself thinking, or indeed sane? Who makes that decision? And who benefits from that decision?Further, is a life where all rent and bills are paid by the state, as well as you being given pocketmoney and staff to cook and clean preferable to one where you have to work and commute and pay utilities even if the former curtails many of your freedoms and the latter, at least in theory, has potentially limitless upside in terms of wealth, freedom and opportunity?

And so on and so on, perhaps a thousand speculations for the pondering mind.

But it wasn’t so much the quote-unquote insane that truly got me thinking. It was the head injured. A smaller subset of the overall live-in resident population. To think- one reckless driver, one misstep descending a staircase, one wrong look given to the wrong psychopath- and your entire life is irrevocably changed.

Now I mention all of that as prelude to discussing one particular case. See, the guy in question, only a few years older than me, was quite profoundly head injured- hit by an SUV as a teenager while picking up a piece of litter from the pavement. He was in a coma for over a year, but somehow he lived. Somehow he survived. Upon awakening from a limbo that I can’t even begin to imagine, he slowly relearned how to walk and talk. Perhaps in part things came back to him more spontaneously, I don’t know. But what I do know is that he now has poor vision, tremors and a rare condition which means that drinking too much fluid makes him whiskey-drunk. Even tea, even tap water. ‘I’m a cheap date’ he would joke.

More importantly, he has virtually no short term memory. Yes, the odd thing will pass through into his long term memory (he will remember your name eventually) but for him every day is a reset, sometimes every hour or so. He lives in a perpetual present. And this, despite what some modern, apparently well-meaning gurus might claim, is not all that it is cracked up to be.

And so, though I don’t want to use a mans tragedy as a means of fashioning a cheap metaphor, that is what I want to talk about today. The present as an existential space and how ‘now’ is unmediated by either the context of history or the hope of being able to remember then tomorrow itself can become nightmare-like. A living dystopia.

---

During last year- my last year on the job-I re-read several of the great fictional dystopias. In 2021- at least to my way of thinking- this seemed like a sensible thing to do. Chiefly because there were at least several billionaires and world leaders throughout that year who were seemingly using such literature as an instruction manual for changing the way our world works, so I wanted to be prepared- psychologically if not materially- for what was coming down the pipeline.

Whilst reading on my commute and on my off days, I started to form connections between what unites 1984 and a Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 and so on. The differences between these texts are fairly well known, of course, the differences between Orwell’s austere totalitarian regime and Huxley’s more bread-and-circuses pleasure-centred society of scientific management. And seeing as this is not an English Literature examination paper, I won’t bother to innumerate those differences here.

It’s the commonalities that matter for todays discussion, not the variations in how those alternate grim fictional futures kept their proles in line. At heart, each of those societies are all simply examples of different manipulative strategies and technologies being utilised to achieve the same end. Which is to have their citizen live in a perpetual memoryless present, in order to maintain a power devoid of responsibility.

Orwell’s 1984 has memoryholes (the erasure of narratives and information which contradict the party line), and newspeak (the changing of word definitions and the syntactical structure of language so that it is eventually impossible to even formulate and utterance that is counter to the wishes of the regime²). Huxley’s Brave New World has Soma (a placating pharmacological holiday that is as widely available as coffee. It is known to ‘raise a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and [the users] minds), and the feelies (a fully immersive, all senses tickling version of cinema that seems to prefigure what we would now call VR). All of these innovations then are means of either removing an intellectual and felt sense of lineage or making it impossible for such a thing to be cultivated. These inventions erase the past either literally, metaphorically or neurologically. Every day a reset. Every day the same waking up in the dark, the same ‘Where am I?’ followed by ‘I am here, the same as I always have been and the same as I always will be.’

And of course, it goes without saying that each and every dystopia features the suppression and the destruction of texts. Especially those inconvenient old ones that lend the lie to the layers upon layers upon layers of deceptions that the House of the Regime is built upon. ‘We have always been at war with Eurasia.’ and so on. Books and writing and private conversation are the things which memories are built from. They are the only things that can circumvent human death and so give context and solace and guidance to all of us, century after century after century.

This is why in dystopia they are dangerous. To have a memory is to be a threat. To not be solely tied to the perpetual present is to be a threat. 

---

Now there are already several objections, exceptions or gotchas you may have devised to the above assertions. Chief among them being that by being a writer and also someone who is basing his argument on examples from books (storybooks, no less) I am overemphasising the importance of books and there centrality in society. I am arguing from a literate and a print-permeated worldview during an era that has seemingly moved beyond such things. People don’t actually read, you might say, and so the suppression and burning of books, though nauseating, may not make a great difference to the fate of our collective memory. If a tree falls in a forest, and so forth.

Besides, everything is now saved in ‘the cloud’. The internet is forever, as they say, a refrain that is trotted out whenever some poor soul is put through the contemporary scapegoating ritual³ of being mocked, memed, pilloried and fired for some poor taste tweet that they posted a decade ago. This cloud rebuttal is- like so many things surrounding the online world- ostensibly true but, in reality false. The internet itself may be forever but any one piece of information on it is as ephemeral and hazy as a drunken word whispered in your ear at last call. Several times a month, at least, I will try to retrieve some blogpost, some newspaper article, some tweet, only to find that it has been deleted or altered or that the website hosting hasn’t been renewed and the whole thing has gone.

The perpetual present. Every day a reset.

Some things do get backed up to online archive services such as The Wayback Machine, of course, but not as many as you would think. And even if you do have the presence of mind to take screenshots or save posts and articles as PDFs and store them on hard drives, how retrievable are they really? Even ignoring the fact that I doubt one in ten thousand people actually have the level of foresight (when does precaution become paranoia, by the way?) to actually perform such procedures, who actually goes back and reads such archives? I know a fair few people with hard drives full of esoteric PDFs, out of print book scans and saved blog archives. I don’t know anyone who actively engages with this squirrelled away material with any meaningful regularity. And such behaviour comes from those who would consider themselves to be readers, an elite subset of the present population. Out of sight, out of mind.

You see, literacy is a technological phenomenon. The literate world is built on the Gutenberg Press, on moveable type, on books. Physical print, graspable, shelvable books. The Enlightenment, Colonial America and the subsequent independence, the Modern World itself were all forged by the printing press. But that is not our world now. Screens and the interconnectivity afforded by Wi-Fi are a fundamentally different technology. Yes, you still read letters assembled into words and made parsable by punctuation, but you are not really reading when you take in words on a screen. The infinity scroll nature of social media, hyperlinks, the ability to open up 17 others tabs and listen to music and send text message while you ‘read’ mean that the discreet, sequential, linear nature of book-reading is lost. Which is why aggregate attention spans have plummeted since the widespread adoption of the internet and have plummeted further still since the turtlenecked Mr. Jobs first bestrode the stage and demoed the first iPhone. People stopped reading because they were distracted. Now they have been distracted for so long that the ability to read in the old fashioned sense, has largely been lost.⁴

This is a seismic change. And if forms the crux of this essay. From the dawn of language until the dawn of the printing press we lived in an oral culture. From the dawn of the printing press until the dawn of the smartphone we lived in a literate culture. Now we live in something else and we haven’t come to terms with this yet. 

---

At this point- to return to my earlier observation that I am perhaps blinkered by my personal orientation towards the literate way of being- I should state that reading doesn’t necessarily mean you are more intelligent. Nor does writing. Not necessarily.

Though much of our present reality (away from the screens) is built on the legacy of a literate, Gutenberg culture, an even deeper layer, the foundation layer is built on the preceding oral tradition. On stories and myths and information that has been transmitted from generation to generation through the spoken word. We still expect professors to lecture, we still expect artisans to teach their apprentices aspects of the trade that can’t be captured in manuals and examinations. We still expect there to be something valuable in the spoken reminiscences of an elderly relative that neither a contemporaneous newspaper clipping or journal entry could ever truly capture. This is why a perennial graveside regret at the death of an elder is that we should have taken the time to speak to them more. And more importantly to listen.

Wisdom, as opposed to knowledge or information, is an emanation of the spirit, of the voice. All philosophy, as the saying has it, may be footnotes to Plato. But how much of Plato’s own approach and worldview was gleaned from his teacher Socrates- a man who never wrote anything down? A man who famously denigrated the very act of writing as Plato recounts in the Phaedrus via a recounting to the Egyptian myth of the creation of writing. The creator was the god Theuth claimed that

‘This invention... will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.’

To which his interlocutor Thamus replied, on the contrary that

‘this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.’

I think nearly 25 centuries later this remains the best rebuttal to the superiority of typographic culture. And yes to contemplate its message does sting.

Over-reliance on the written word removes the concrete groundedness of our lived experience. It turns us, if taken too far, into abstractions, into floating brains disconnected from our bodies and our senses. And our contemporary internet world produces a further level of abstraction. If text is a ‘reminder’ or reality then the cyber world is a reminder of a reminder, a facsimile of a facsimile.

If text functions as a ‘reminder’ then without it, without writing, the elaborate analytical means of categorising that it affords the user is simply not viable. All conceptual knowledge if it is to be verbalised, must closely refer to the actual immediate environment, to the life world of both the speaker and listener. Everything must exist at a human, local scale and be retrievable in the human memory. This is why oral art forms- poetry, parables, riddles, jokes, songs- use techniques such as repetition and rhyme. It is what makes them memorable and transmissible even if you can’t recall every last detail. They are all participatory in that every idea and story is revisable and collaborative. Conversation is a performative act for the talker and the listener both.    

And as with typographic culture it is a way of teaching, sharing, learning and being that is also being diminished by our ubiquitous screens. When you read and write you have a connection to humanities past. When you speak and listen in person with other engaged and attentive human beings you have a connection to the pasts of everyone in the conversation. But when you scroll and scan and swipe you are trapped in the perpetual present, memoryless.

---

Someone once told me (or perhaps I read it somewhere) that to present a problem without at least hinting towards a possible solution is a type of tyranny. There is something to this. Why use the force of evidence and rhetoric to rile someone up if you are not going to then point that generated emotional energy in some direction? Which is not to say that things cannot and should not be enjoyed as a purely aesthetic experience. But. In this instance to say all of the above and then not even attempt to provisionally stumble or at least nod towards a course of action seems like a form of bad manners. Of bad sportsmanship almost.

So.

The problem- to quickly summarise- is that this era of internet enabled devices has created a culture that is neither oral or literate in its orientation. In terms of outcome it is a middle ground between the two and as such it has the disadvantages of both without the consolations of either. Living a neck-craned screen-bound life you are trapped, disembodied, in the perpetual present. Every day a reset. Little if anything transfers from short term to long term memory when everything you ‘read’⁵ was written that day. And when you stop and think about it this is what a lot of screen readers do. Todays news, todays content, todays feeds and streams and broadcasts. As immersive, ephemeral and ultimately as meaningless as a trip to the feelies or a half gram of soma before bedtime. Here today, gone tomorrow. This is why so many online posts disappear over time, because they are simply discarded and ignored. They are neglected due to collective lack of interest, no matter how much any one individual may have valued them. That is if they were ever able to actually locate them in the first place.⁶   

This online life then, is a middle ground problem and the solution is to choose a side, or oscillate between the two. When reading truly read and gain the advantages of being literate. When talking really talk- face to face, with gesture, tonality, eye contact and presence, and gain all of the advantages of orality.

Easier said than done, I know.

But then what solution to a societal problem isn’t?

Until next time,

Live well,

Tom.

1. When I say ‘last job’ I mean this in both the sense of ‘my previous professional role for a company’ and also ‘the last means of employment I will ever have that doesn’t involve me working for myself as a Professional Man of Letters’. Hopefully. Please like, subscribe, comment, etc etc etc. 

2. When it comes to Orwell’s contribution to political thought and our understanding of power and totalitarianism it is generally considered to be a toss up between 1984 and Animal Farm as to what is his most penetrating and insightful analysis. But I would make the case that his essay ‘Politics and The English Language’ could be considered his true masterwork on this topic.

3. Being a scapegoat, as Rene Girard reminds us, doesn’t necessarily mean that you are innocent. It is perfectly possible for a figure being scapegoated to be guilty of the crime they are accused of. What makes it an example of scapegoating is the collective catharsis and subsequent group cohesion that comes as a result of this ritualistic killing (whether literally or in the more figurative sense of the above example of an online mob).

4. To address the elephant in the room- yes I know you are reading this on a screen right now. However I wrote this essay without using the internet (or even listening to music) and further I have included zero hyperlinks or distractions in the main body of the text. It also includes long paragraphs and sentences when needed. So you could say that I have tried to be as faithful to the nature of the traditional reading experience as possible. And the fact that you are this far in, and reading a footnote no less, means that you are almost certainly the exception that proves the rule re: online readers not being ‘real’ readers in the sense I have laid out above. And as such I trust you are intelligent enough to take my use of such generalisations in the spirit in which they have been offered.

5. Perhaps earlier I should have coined a term or used a particular phrase to distinguish between reading from paper and reading from a screen. Something like ‘scanning’ would be a good candidate for the screen-based imbibing of text. But I have a bit of an aversion to such techniques. Maybe I am still haunted by those undergrad classes on Heidegger with all of the ‘Dasein’ and ‘Being-Towards-Death’ and all the rest of it.

6. There is a separate but related diatribe to be written about how the quality of search engine results has been in a steady decline for years now. Perhaps I will leave that up to someone with a deeper understanding of algorithms and search engine optimisation techniques to investigate.