Most people think little
“Most people think little.” So Somerset Maugham observed in his quasi-autobiography, The Summing Up.
I was reminded of this recently when a couple of people I was talking with made some casual remarks of a political nature. It was obvious that they were simply parroting something they had read in the New York Times, or seen on PBS News, or heard on NPR. Liberal platitudes, in other words.
The problem, of course, was not that the views expressed were liberal (one encounters the same thing with conservatives), but that they were platitudes. These were people who shopped around for ideas the same way they bought clothes: by patronizing reputable purveyors of information and opinion.
Unfortunately, what works when it comes to buying a pair of pants doesn’t work as well when it comes to furnishing one’s mind, if only because ideas are not something you put on, but rather something that you ought to arrive at, at least to some degree, on your own. Moving packets of received information about in your mind, as if they were pieces on a board game, is not what constitutes thinking.
But I must interrupt this train of thought. During a break in writing this column, I came upon a piece by Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books. Called “How We Know,” it’s a review of James Gleick’s new book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood.
Dyson is an extraordinarily lucid writer, and his review made me aware of many things I had not known. I had never, for instance, heard of Claude Shannon, nor did I know he was the father of information theory. Come to think of it, while I had certainly heard the phrase “information theory,” I can’t say I knew very much about that, either.
What I definitely had not realized is that “the central dogma of information theory says, ‘Meaning is irrelevant.’ ” What that means is that “information [can] be handled with greater freedom if … treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning.” Unfortunately, “the consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning.” And so, Dyson concludes:
It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.
The first thing this brings to my mind is that if, in Maugham’s words, “most people think little,” it may simply be because, increasingly, they have more to think about than they can manage. But a lot of information is redundant. One of the big stories as I write concerns the dispute between the governor of Wisconsin and that state’s teachers’ unions. Read one story about that, and you are likely to have questions that will just as likely not be answered by the next story you read about it, because the next story will likely simply repeat what was said in the first.
But the more I think about this, the more I am inclined to suggest a refinement to Professor Dyson’s metaphor. In real seas, we do not “create” islands; we discover them by first learning how to navigate the waters. The problem these days is not the ever-expanding vastness of the information ocean, but rather the decline of what we might call intellectual seamanship.
We could also call it the lack of a classical education. In his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, Albert Jay Nock gives a wonderful explanation of the value such an education provides:
The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest and fullest, most complete and most nearly continuous record we have of what the strange creature homo sapiens has been busy about in virtually every department of spiritual, intellectual and social activity. … Hence the mind which has attentively canvassed this record is much more than a disciplined mind, it is an experienced mind.
It is, in other words, just the sort of mind one needs in order to venture onto the sea of information, not get lost, and discover a few islands of meaning along the way.
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Well said. Very well said.
“The problem these days is not the ever-expanding vastness of the information ocean, but rather the decline of what we might call intellectual seamanship.”
So well said, Frank. Kudos for lucidity to yourself, as well.
It makes me think also of modern theories in education — the idea that although Bloom has put creative and interpretive thinking atop the learning pyramid, many teachers still see teaching as a mere spoon-feeding of information. Maybe that is where this intellectual laziness comes from. It is interesting that even the teachings of Christ are based on leading his followers to come to the conclusions themselves — as are the teachings of other parable-based wisemen of the ages.
On a lighter note, I love, under “Books-Words” on this site, that your title, “Most people think little” sits right above the title “I ain’t people.”
Chris
Your refinement of Dyson’s metaphor — “discovering”, rather than “creating” meaning — got me thinking (yeah!). My first reaction was “No! We don’t discover, but create meaning.” I’m thinking back to Homer: if the Odyssey had not been written, would we today have the (same) capacity to think? (See Bruno Snell’s “Discovery of the Mind” and that weird thesis of Julian Jayne’s in “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”). Continuing, could it be that literature itself points back to and retroacts upon the matter it is expressing, thus modifying it, “creating” a new world for us? Can it be that this “expression” is not just a passive manifestation, but rather an active, liberating moment of the spiritual process? Could it be that, in and of itself, the very “matter” being expressed is but an inert and ineffective cloud of meaninglessness? Is it possible that the only way man has taken possession of himself — the only way he can truly become human, the effective creator of his own acts — has been exactly through literary expression? Just some questions to get me thinking some more, maybe have a second reaction in the future.
Either way I think (there I go again) Maugham would have agreed with Dyson that the appropriate word to use, in this case, is “create”. Here is a quote from “The Painted Veil”:
“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos.”
Hi Fabio,
The focus of my refinement had more to do with the term “islands” than the term “create.” I think it is true that we create meaning. But we also encounter it. I do not create all meaning. In fact, I create very little, and the little I may create is grounded in all the meaning many others over time have. I also don’t think we create the meaning out of the welter of information so much as we discover the meaningful parts of that information. Though again, I concede — faithful Thomist that I am — that such a discovery has a creative component to it. Anyway, I suspect our two views complement each other rather than conflict.
Thanks for inviting thinking, Frank!
Shannon influenced the early school of cybernetic family therapists, of whom Gregory Bateson was the best writer and thinker. His last book “Mind and Nature” attempts to define what constitutes mind.
He says that in order to make sense of systems which operate with purpose, meaning needs to be broken down into useable bits, as chemists need the notion of atoms.
Bateson says that the smallest unit of information is : A difference which makes a difference.
To Bateson, meaning was not irrelevant.
There is discovered meaning, and there is created meaning. But perhaps never meaning created totally de novo or ex nihilo, as meaning is relational.
You are a teacher of intellectual seamanship.
Thank you!