Age of Cats and Shining Objects
In the cat age, we mistake the salient for the important; the sensational for the valuable; the fascinating for the life-changing; and facts for truth.
"Ever learning but never comprehending the truth."
Paul, the Apostle (2nd Timothy 3:7)
Watching cats chase light—preferably laser—reflections on the wall is an amusing sport. If you are bored and you have a cat please try it. It is a weakness for all cats such that even Puss in Boots could not refrain from making a fool of himself. Similarly, we human beings live like cats and we chase everything that shines on the wall. Only in our case, the light reflecting on the wall is knowledge and information.
In a cat age, we mistake the salient for the important; the sensational for the valuable; the fascinating for the life-changing; and facts for truth.
That “fact” and “truth” are used interchangeably is probably the most silent symptom of this age. Seeing that you can have all the facts on your desk and still make the most horrendous decisions, we should reconsider what these words mean to us.
Undoubtedly, we are witnessing an information abundance with a paradox following it; a paradox people ignore as if it does not exist, as if it does not bring its deterioration, and as if we have all the power. The paradox neuters the claim that knowledge is power and laughs at us when so much knowledge afflicts us with insanity. It emphasizes the unilateral point of classical ideals—we are unwilling to introspect.
The Problem of Endless Induction
The whole tendency of modern thought, one might say its whole moral impulse, is to keep the individual busy with endless induction.
Richard Weaver
I realised early enough that there is so much ground to cover, so many facts to take in, so much news, and so many books to read. If I finish a book a day, I will never be able to finish every book in existence if I were to live a thousand years. Yet, I must live just as if I knew it all. And I don’t mean this by hyperbole. You must go about your life as if you know every right move. You need a measure of certainty to step out.
If knowledge then is power, it is appropriate to think that by accumulating more facts as you go, you are increasing your power. Contrarily, this is not what we see. I see that a large portion of the facts we accumulate –including the serious ones; especially serious ones– have near-equal value to trivia. Nevertheless, we pride ourselves in this ‘trivia’ and feel next to empty whenever we meet a more triviaful person.
Knowledge is seductive, without a doubt. But rather than tell ourselves that we are enthralled by lady knowledge’s swaying seductiveness which is closer to vanity than it is fulfilling, we hold on to the rationalisation that knowledge is indeed power.
If knowledge is power, then ignorance is powerlessness; or weakness. No one appreciates being weak—weakness is a thing you hide to avoid being exploited by the powerful. To that end, it makes sense that we will fear being wrong or being exposed as ignorant. Knowledge then is the panacea. Hence, we read ourselves into paralysis. And this is the problem of endless induction – the compulsion for more facts in search of truth and liberation.
Blurred Lines
the shift from speculative inquiry to investigation of experience has left modern man so swamped with multiplicities that he no longer sees his way.
Richard Weaver.
If more facts mean more power, it follows that a technology that makes facts super accessible to us is even a greater kind of power as it is a source of another power.
So comes the Internet and the web changing the face of the world when it comes to knowledge. Here we are swimming in an abundance. Did I say swimming? I meant drowning. Unfortunately, wisdom and virtue are drowning in this abundance as well.
The very first problem this abundance of knowledge brings is that it blurs the line between knowledge and ignorance. People knew what they did not know. For example, without the internet, television, or a newspaper, you are sure to not know the number of casualties in the last Russian shelling on Ukraine. But now thanks to Twitter, you know the name of the little girl that had her limb amputated by Putin’s bomb. It only makes sense then that if you don’t know a topic you would have nothing to say upon learning about the topic for the first time. You would just stare and listen to the speaker who knew what he spoke about. You could say that this limited access to knowledge made charlatanism possible and allowed con men to be a societal staple. However, with the abundance we have now, charlatanism and con men are still here. In fact, they have multiplied. Then what?
The next blurred line used to be between useful facts and trivia. It is one thing to know stuff and it is another problem to classify what you know rightly. For example, “don’t cross a river that is more than four feet deep” is a useful fact, “each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history: spades—King David, clubs—Alexander the Great, hearts—Charlemagne, and diamonds—Julius Caesar” is trivia.
But in a world going mad with information, the easiest mistake we make with information is classifying trivia as wisdom; that is, valuing everything we know as valuable or as important information. Where wisdom is useful and practical, trivia’s feature is fun and sensational – the type that fascinates cats. Ninety percent of what you see on the news can be classified as trivia. But if you think that learning about every detail of the stock market as well as the war in Syria is something you can contain all at once because, well, they are valuable information, you should not be alarmed when you become a nervous wreck even if your local life is good.
I repeat that if you accept that everything that comes to you in the form of books, news, movies, and documentaries should be consumed, or else you will be missing out on a sliver of power, then I would be surprised if you are mentally healthy and not a wreck.
This poor differentiation between trivia and wisdom also explains the strain in leisure as you must squeeze out value from every fact and event in the world.
Lastly, the blurred line between trivia and wisdom leads us into a performance arena which is like a wrestling ring –like The Royal Rumble– where you must show yourself worthy. But the most insidious aspect of this is that people can no longer tell where a line should be drawn as it should be; as we have with inventing. That a technological intervention can be made does not mean it must be made.
Some Corrections and Changes of Outlook
Mental clarity is the child of courage. Certainty does not bring clarity. Everything becomes clear only after you have taken the leap.
There is a threshold to knowing. Where accumulating facts brings no positive change but instead causes you to decline. What then must you do? The answer is not new: be a man with chest.
Intellectual courage and epistemic humility are nothing new to men of virtue. That is so because contrary to Bacon’s dream of dominating nature, there is a different kind of domination that we should do which is the hardest of them all – the domination of self.
Because dominating the self is key, evaluating one’s volition is important. Ultimately, intellection follows volition.
What starts with a whiff of wonder goes on to shape our virtues. Your intellect needs formidable virtues to become substantial. Your search for truth is not a search for facts. It is a search for the things that transcend particulars.
Virtue bridges the dearth of superfluous knowledge. It calls the character of men who wield knowledge into question. This is where discernment enters the stage and takes command. It is where the right type of distrust is seeded. And distrust should not be mistaken for disparagement.
A distrust for technocrats is not the same as calling them ignorant. It is a matter of putting their volition into question. I don't question how much you know. I am concerned with what you do with all the things you know. Increasing knowledge serves, as a faithful slave. Intellection follows volition. And, you don't need murky books to tell you that someone's volition is wrong.
Since the time of Bacon the world has been running away from, rather than toward, first principles, so that, on the verbal level, we see “fact” substituted for “truth,” and on the philosophic level, we witness attack upon abstract ideas and speculative inquiry.
Richard Weaver
This shoddiness has survived for too long; that increasing quantity of knowledge and endless induction translates into quality wisdom and proper ethics. If anything else, endless induction paralyses. Also, the technocrats conflate to the world, their giftedness for ethics.
It is not what people can read; it is what they do read, and what they can be made, by any imaginable means, to learn from what they read, that determine the issue of this noble experiment.
Richard Weaver.
Cats chase the light. They don’t care for the source of the light. They just know that there is a drop of light or shadow on the wall. This light may illuminate the way for them or the controller may be catching fun. But one thing is certain: the controller will tire at some point, and withdraw the light. When that happens, the cat is left again in despair to wait for the next time. Until then, he is both without light or substance. Vale.
God save the Queen and have a great week.