7 Comments

anyway, i archived this page on Wayback Machine :)

Expand full comment

loved the article. I recently read “on the advantage and disadvantage of history for life” by nietzche and he seems to think that people actually spend too much time remembering or trying to learn for the sake of learning and not living their lives. I think he’d agree with a lot of the stuff you have here, though he certainly frames it a bit differently. It’s funny to think that even back in the 1800s he thought the people around him were reading performatively, just to be in the know, as opposed to thinking about what they read deeply. I’m curious if you’ve found any specific ways to make your own reading more deliberate, because I often find myself just trying to get through things even if I enjoy them. Being distracted by phones or simply the next book on the shelf seems to be a problem for many of us, though I’m not sure it’s entirely a modern problem.

Expand full comment

What a thought-provoking read. And I did read it on my phone, right down to the footnotes.

One thought (among many) is that the cult of mindfulness (the most recent iteration of the "opiate of the masses") seems designed to cut its practitioners off from any context, whether of time (elevating the present moment above any concerns about the past or the future) or of society (in the sense that it places responsibility for coping with an unbearable reality on the person experiencing it, rather than on those that created it or on a society that allows it to continue). For that reason, I have always found mindfulness slightly sinister. At least with most organised religions, you know what you're getting yourself into.

And another thought: Is Theuth actually Zeus with a lisp?

Expand full comment

P.S., the book "Finding George Orwell in Burma" (by Larkin in 2005) is a great, investigatory read about his time there and the effect it had on his writings, even as he tried to sweep his experience under the rug.

Expand full comment
Jan 16, 2022Liked by Thomas J Bevan

There's a lot to unpack in here Tom, but I'd say that in the end, meaning is historical; There cannot be meaning or growth (personnal or as a civilization) without a conscience of the past. Let's imagine what heaven (or hell) would look like, as a place where time does not exist and all is eternal: nothing "becomes", nothing changes, everything "is". A perpetual present without purpose. But unlike the other animals, humans are defined by their conscience and thus, by the ability to grow and evolve. If we suppress what gives us the means to evolve, what is left? That's not surprising that the first step of most totalitarianisms is always to "lock up" the culture and rewrite history. It's less to impose their truth than to suppress the historical element that allows us to conceive meaning. Without it, you're forced to take everything at face value, and you're unable to even think another way could be possible. You're just going through the motions because you can't know better, because they've taken that from you.

I don't want to sound like an old hag, but that's in part what technology took from us. The more you use your computer, the less you know how to write by hand, which is perhaps one of our oldest traditions. The more you have access to 24/7 "content", the less your mind is able to separate the wheat from the chaff; every piece of information becomes just another information among the rest of it, without hierarchies of importance. And since you don't have an historical view of the world - since you have no past anymore - you don't know how to create a future and even worse, you don't see the point in wanting that anymore. Imagine a gang of scholars that would comment Plato without ever reading him, and base their books only on the approved commentaries published by their teachers. It seems absurd, but it's already how most phDs have been earned for the past 20 years. I'm not particularly pessimistic by nature, but I don't see this trend evolving in the right direction, especially with the young generations who already have their attention span totally fried and are more and more graduating from elementary school not knowing how to read.

"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 (...) Every day a reset". A culture is supposed to follow some kind of direction; it has qualities, values, and a vision of its future. But the current culture doesnt even qualifies as one; it's a strange and sometimes fascinating patchwork of many disparate pieces often contradicting themselves glued together and wandering around like a drunk automaton. Even our overlords profiting off it don't know what to do with it and don't really care as long as it keeps everyone shilling a buck. The silver lining in all of this is that I see more people nowdays checking out of it and looking for meaning elsewhere - in the past. People looking for old movies, reading or re-reading classic works of litterature instead of buying the latest trend pushed by Amazon, etc. These people are still the minority (and will always be), but beautiful things tend to happen when a purposeful minority grows in size. And all it ever takes to change the world is a few thousands determined individuals, so there's still hope.

Always a pleasure to read you Tom.

Expand full comment

Oh wow, this was so great and really sped me off into other areas of thinking. . . like how strange there is no index for the internet, which you address in your last footnote. . .but to think of walking into a library and knowing a book exists and having the librarian say "there's no guarantee you will find what you are looking for, but it is in this building." Also, obviously, the first section of your article about the choice between freedom and having your needs satisfied reminds me of the matrix, but more than that it reminds me to reframe the challenges and sufferings of life. . .ie remember, you'd rather be living in a tortured reality than in soft and satisfied fantasy - it was a good reminder. Great read on so many levels, thank you!

Expand full comment