I routinely take a pause in what I am doing to reflect on my goals and what I’ve learned. I’m sure you do too. I had been listening to the recorded works of Jean Sibelius and Carl Nielsen, but am now on to Sir Edward Elgar and Josef Suk. Billie Eilish and Vampire Weekend didn’t last long. I gave up on my deep learning startup to pursue another, less abstract technology. I revamped this site. I put trail running on pause and have been lifting weights more. I shifted writing efforts to a new series centered on manipulating animal physiologies for war and espionage.
These pauses feel like taking an expansive stretch after sitting still for a long period; a reset of the mental apparatus that repositions the mind for a new phase. For me, one take away from recent events, up to and including the great pause of the coronavirus pandemic, is a reconsideration of the amount of silly and pointless content we absorb. Just a few examples: The drama of Twitter feuds among the glitterati and the political class, cancel culture, and shaming. The endless technology, photography, audiophile, fashion, and food reporting and communal commenting that serves to channel our engagement with products and services. Even the lightweight philosophizing that goes with critiques of tradition or society has the same basic set of drivers.
What’s shared among them is the desire for attention, an intellectual posturing to attract and maintain the gaze of others. But it does have a counterpoint, I believe, in a grounding in facts, reason, and a careful attention to novelty. The latter may be a bit hard to pin down, though. It is easy to mistake randomness or chaos for novelty. But facts take a special kind of perception, as well, since people are very easily fooled by their own biases.
I’ll dip into a few examples. In my investigations of what is going on in conservative intellectual circles, I encounter a few key ideas. There is obviously a desire to maintain traditions and to oppose change, but there is also a regular claim that education in the modern K-12 (and above) sense is brainwashing young people to upend social and religious traditions. This position appears to replace legitimacy by fact and reason with legitimacy by tradition in exclusion to the facts.
Concretely, there is the constant ringing of the bell that religious freedom should include protections for religious people to discriminate against gay people. Children are apparently being educated that being gay is OK in the modern world in the brainwashing machine of public education. But facts weigh heavily against the claim. Schools can’t discriminate and would be cruel to do so. Other facts rule against any notion of unnaturalness, from surveys of sexual behavior in the natural world to studies of genetics and societies through history. In opposition to this, there is nothing to educate children about other than a desire for certain scripture to be true, or an appeal that society was once better. So it becomes just a kind of obvious preference that educators and educational authorities separate out narrow, arbitrary, and oppressive ideas from factually justified and neutral ones. Indeed, the term brainwashing can only be reserved for the hidebound mind, not the one filled with facts and reason.
But let’s go in the other direction. What is factual and novel in a deep sense? What should hold our attention and what does it convey to us that is not merely designed to gather in our attention for monetary gain or social climbing? I give you mass. Yes, mass. We think we know mass. It’s the property of matter that turns into weight when gravity pulls on it. But it is crazy mysterious what exactly mass is. In fact, all of physics is crazy mysterious when you start asking hard questions. I’ll specifically pull out Ethan Siegel’s Ask Ethan column at Forbes, If Einstein Is Right And E=mc2, Where Does Mass Get Its Energy From?
Now here is something novel and factual. Most importantly, every little claim and bit of reasoning needed to understand the Standard Model, and the limits about what we know, is built on a giant, empirical mound of facts. The point-like nature of quarks within the proton bag. The energy-release profiles of converting mass to energy and vice versa. Attention has no real standing here, though individual physicists have been influential on the relative acceptance or rejection of key ideas in the short term. People are people, but the facts win out at the end of the day.
And, critically, it’s also novel. There is no reason why we should expect matter to be composed of sets of properties that interchange in such a manner, or that are interchangeable with energy. The novelty is breathtaking and strange, and beats anything that is derived from any kind of tradition or attention-seeking derivations of human posturing.
As I began: I like to pause and reconsider, especially when times are odd. I called ahead and picked up takeaway from a local microbrewery yesterday. Their seating was closed, but they set up a a table by the front door for pick up. I wanted to support them. Everyone was wearing plastic gloves. We kept a good distance between each other and talked about the post-apocalyptic vibe, like when my wife and I were in Paris during a garbage service strike and trash mounds reached stinking heights in midsummer.
It’s a great time for reflection about what’s important and what is designed to distract and attract one’s mind. Oppose the conspiracies, the traditions, the unending appeal of looking and buying. Focus on facts, on reason, and on that difficult tension of novelty. I think it’s time for Suk’s Asrael.