“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 [1] in the New York Review of Books. Called “How We Know,” [2] 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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Frank Wilson [5]
Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts [7])
- An illusion of precision [8] - September 9, 2015
- Watching the passing scene [9] - October 28, 2013
- To see like a child [10] - June 26, 2013
- Riffing and digressions [11] - January 21, 2013
- Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another [12] - September 13, 2012