Thanks for this piece. I've been mulling it (while repainting my office) for two days. So far, two takeaways. have coalesced.
The first (and obvious) one concerns the 'hyperobject' metaphor, and the eerie solidity it gives to our ever-present polycrisis. It can seemingly worm its way (uninvited) into every headline. For example, in opinion piece in today's NYT, Columbia historian Matthew Connelly wonders why the academic community didn't rally around Columbia as it has around Harvard. My first reaction was that the piece might well have been titled "On Haplessness." Connelly's complaint might be just, but -- from my considerable distance -- it doesn't change that when the hyperobject asteroid hit, Columbia resembled nothing so much as a dinosaur.
But my second thought relates the TED setting of your reflections, which tempts me to just the sort of cultural criticism that I usually denounce. You refer in this piece, as you have even more pointedly before, of our culture's lack of seriousness, its allergy to the biggest questions, its blindness to the possibility of "ends that transcend the world." But doesn't TED's very productization of ideas-as-entertainment reinforce this? This year's TED may have focused on "What are humans for?" -- seemingly a big question, but one with a sell-by date, a hook that TED's annual format must ineluctably replace with another. Transcendence might reach this year's top ten, but it remains hard to imagine how a culture based on evanescence could ground itself in eternity
I tend to agree precisely with what you are saying about TED. "seemingly big question" My issue is that if we don't start asking actually big questions we just don't have an adequate mechanism for renewal
I was at a game day with a researcher working in AI and he was oddly even more apocalyptic about it than me. He felt we were heading into dangerous territory which would end up with the majority of us losing our jobs. But he then offered the tokenistic, 'well, we'll have basic income and it'll be fine'. It struck me that he had not even thought about the idea that work is a good thing. That work is valuable as a practice as it is part of our essence. The crisis we are heading into is not simply potentially a financial one but one of the human soul.
I do think this omnicrisis we are emerging into is too big for any one person to fully grasp the sides of. There is also the notion that we simply keep on living doing our routines until they are infringed upon. I do at times wonder if we are too far gone, that values which used to hold meaning are now little more than a simulacra unable to hold anything in place.
It’s striking to me (though not surprising upon reflection) that you see the moment we’re in and call for discussion of human purpose in the broad sense. Sometimes I feel like I’m missing the point by trying to analyse motivations-from-meaning in a nuanced way when the political situation feels like it’s verging on emergency. Then I remember that short term thinking powered by a sense of emergency is part of what took us here. The broadest picture still matters.
it's strange how sense of emergency can actually be remarkably unhelpful practically. understanding the actual scale of something feels like the real game and fear doesn't help that much
Well said. It's a large part of my daily frustration, how unreflective most of those around me are. That may be unfair... Perhaps they are reflective, but they've lived in a world that costs them nothing if they don't act on those insights... That world may be changing, and if there's more rainforest in that world, then I'm all for it.
On a related note, someday I'll read or hear Sam make a truth claim. I look forward to that day.
I think there are two truth claims behind everything Sam says -- although they are usually not phrased in a way that strict positivists, say, would recognize as such -- which are (1) that humans have a basic need to feel and believe they are grounded in something larger than themselves, i.e., to be "transcendently grounded", and (2) that they live (and behave) sub-optimally when this need is not met. Note that these are anthropological claims -- claims about what people are like -- not metaphysical claims.
A year ago WoC hosted Charles Taylor on a podcast, and what struck me about that episode is that at least on that day Taylor, too, restricted himself to this anthropological claim that humans have this yearning for the beyond. I think btw this why philosophical idealism hangs around: not because it's true (I think it pretty clearly isn't), but because it gets us.
This is very well stated. Here's where I'd push. The line between anthropology and metaphysics is blurry—in fact I think that line is where one of the central questions of philosophy sits.
At very least if we define metaphysics as "study of being" we are making a provisional metaphysical claim anytime we are doing anthropology. Humans are like XXX.
But the much more troubling question is how many further conclusions can we draw about reality more generally from those observations? Antiquity is full of that kind of deduction—the microcosm, macrocosm vision in Republic for example but genuinely utilized almost everywhere.
Perhaps the defining feature of modern philosophy is a growing suspicion of that method. Why should we take human desire or intellect as being indicative of anything outside of us? That's Hume, Kant in his own way, and then especially sharp in someone like Feuerbach.
My own view is that those 18th and 19th c rejections were sloppy. You may not accept the movement but the question should trouble you. Is human psychology just it's own out of place entity detached from the world, or is it somehow intertwined with and therefore displaying with specific sensitivity actions and patterns that transcend us?
Understanding about half of that, I'd go with: it is "somehow intertwined with and therefore displaying with specific sensitivity actions and patterns that transcend us"
My point is that Sam is a Christian, and he's sitting on the one Truth claim that matters. I tease him because it's adjacent to his day job, and probably risky to just open with the answer, but all this beating around the burning bush is tiring.
This is an important set of issues, and oddly, it SHOULD be on TED’s radar, but you’re right, it’s transform or die. You might want to check Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Human Phenomenon” out as well, for the spiritual angle on the evolutionary pressures we are sensing.
Thanks for this piece. I've been mulling it (while repainting my office) for two days. So far, two takeaways. have coalesced.
The first (and obvious) one concerns the 'hyperobject' metaphor, and the eerie solidity it gives to our ever-present polycrisis. It can seemingly worm its way (uninvited) into every headline. For example, in opinion piece in today's NYT, Columbia historian Matthew Connelly wonders why the academic community didn't rally around Columbia as it has around Harvard. My first reaction was that the piece might well have been titled "On Haplessness." Connelly's complaint might be just, but -- from my considerable distance -- it doesn't change that when the hyperobject asteroid hit, Columbia resembled nothing so much as a dinosaur.
But my second thought relates the TED setting of your reflections, which tempts me to just the sort of cultural criticism that I usually denounce. You refer in this piece, as you have even more pointedly before, of our culture's lack of seriousness, its allergy to the biggest questions, its blindness to the possibility of "ends that transcend the world." But doesn't TED's very productization of ideas-as-entertainment reinforce this? This year's TED may have focused on "What are humans for?" -- seemingly a big question, but one with a sell-by date, a hook that TED's annual format must ineluctably replace with another. Transcendence might reach this year's top ten, but it remains hard to imagine how a culture based on evanescence could ground itself in eternity
genuine delight to have such careful readers
I tend to agree precisely with what you are saying about TED. "seemingly big question" My issue is that if we don't start asking actually big questions we just don't have an adequate mechanism for renewal
I was at a game day with a researcher working in AI and he was oddly even more apocalyptic about it than me. He felt we were heading into dangerous territory which would end up with the majority of us losing our jobs. But he then offered the tokenistic, 'well, we'll have basic income and it'll be fine'. It struck me that he had not even thought about the idea that work is a good thing. That work is valuable as a practice as it is part of our essence. The crisis we are heading into is not simply potentially a financial one but one of the human soul.
I do think this omnicrisis we are emerging into is too big for any one person to fully grasp the sides of. There is also the notion that we simply keep on living doing our routines until they are infringed upon. I do at times wonder if we are too far gone, that values which used to hold meaning are now little more than a simulacra unable to hold anything in place.
It’s striking to me (though not surprising upon reflection) that you see the moment we’re in and call for discussion of human purpose in the broad sense. Sometimes I feel like I’m missing the point by trying to analyse motivations-from-meaning in a nuanced way when the political situation feels like it’s verging on emergency. Then I remember that short term thinking powered by a sense of emergency is part of what took us here. The broadest picture still matters.
it's strange how sense of emergency can actually be remarkably unhelpful practically. understanding the actual scale of something feels like the real game and fear doesn't help that much
Well said. It's a large part of my daily frustration, how unreflective most of those around me are. That may be unfair... Perhaps they are reflective, but they've lived in a world that costs them nothing if they don't act on those insights... That world may be changing, and if there's more rainforest in that world, then I'm all for it.
On a related note, someday I'll read or hear Sam make a truth claim. I look forward to that day.
I think there are two truth claims behind everything Sam says -- although they are usually not phrased in a way that strict positivists, say, would recognize as such -- which are (1) that humans have a basic need to feel and believe they are grounded in something larger than themselves, i.e., to be "transcendently grounded", and (2) that they live (and behave) sub-optimally when this need is not met. Note that these are anthropological claims -- claims about what people are like -- not metaphysical claims.
A year ago WoC hosted Charles Taylor on a podcast, and what struck me about that episode is that at least on that day Taylor, too, restricted himself to this anthropological claim that humans have this yearning for the beyond. I think btw this why philosophical idealism hangs around: not because it's true (I think it pretty clearly isn't), but because it gets us.
This is very well stated. Here's where I'd push. The line between anthropology and metaphysics is blurry—in fact I think that line is where one of the central questions of philosophy sits.
At very least if we define metaphysics as "study of being" we are making a provisional metaphysical claim anytime we are doing anthropology. Humans are like XXX.
But the much more troubling question is how many further conclusions can we draw about reality more generally from those observations? Antiquity is full of that kind of deduction—the microcosm, macrocosm vision in Republic for example but genuinely utilized almost everywhere.
Perhaps the defining feature of modern philosophy is a growing suspicion of that method. Why should we take human desire or intellect as being indicative of anything outside of us? That's Hume, Kant in his own way, and then especially sharp in someone like Feuerbach.
My own view is that those 18th and 19th c rejections were sloppy. You may not accept the movement but the question should trouble you. Is human psychology just it's own out of place entity detached from the world, or is it somehow intertwined with and therefore displaying with specific sensitivity actions and patterns that transcend us?
Understanding about half of that, I'd go with: it is "somehow intertwined with and therefore displaying with specific sensitivity actions and patterns that transcend us"
My point is that Sam is a Christian, and he's sitting on the one Truth claim that matters. I tease him because it's adjacent to his day job, and probably risky to just open with the answer, but all this beating around the burning bush is tiring.
This is an important set of issues, and oddly, it SHOULD be on TED’s radar, but you’re right, it’s transform or die. You might want to check Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Human Phenomenon” out as well, for the spiritual angle on the evolutionary pressures we are sensing.