On The Tyranny of Accidental Benefits

We are all Benedicts

I know a man, let's call him Benedict, who tutored his children in Latin with a whip at hand. He whipped them hard when they were slow in learning or when they got their declensions wrong. He whipped them and they bled; they cried.

When confronted as to why he tortured his children to learn Latin, he answered that he was only preparing them for life, knowing that one day Latin would save them. They learned Latin. But they died anyway, in the most horrible conditions, for not knowing Arabic.

As Benedict grieved and petitioned God as to why Latin did not save them, we were all curious as to why he was so sure that salvation abideth in Latin.

So he narrated to us that once he was abducted. And the abductors strapped a bomb to his chest. The bomb had a password (de)activated detonator.

Then one day, his captor got bored and decided to play a game. He gave Benedict a hint as to the bomb's password. He gave him a quote and said that the author’s name was the password. But it was in Latin. The captor probably did not expect Benedict to know Latin — it is a dead language. But seizing on his dusty knowledge of Latin, Benedict remembered the quote’s author: Cicero. I guess the captor was an ancient Rome freak. He typed it into the detonator and became free. I thought that the captor was really good-natured.

Realising how he would have been smithereens without Latin, Benedict went and reinforced his knowledge of Latin. And swore to Jove and Hades that he would not leave his children to wander in the world without the knowledge of Latin to save them when trouble looms.

And he succeeded in teaching them Latin. They could recite entire pages of Catullus from memory and translate it with such dexterity. But they died for not knowing Arabic. 

Benedict killed himself. Apparently Latin can not stop suicide. Curious.

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O reader, you have heard that good is the enemy of best. But Benedict’s story presents something else: success, advantages, benefits, and favourable outcomes are the killers of purpose. For the purpose of learning Latin is not to save yourself from captors. And we do not learn Arabic to avoid martyrdom. Nor do we attend universities so that we might secure the best jobs. Nor is it still the case that we let children play so that they might be prepared for the real world. All these benefits —salvation from captors, avoiding martyrdom, the best jobs, preparing children for the real world — as good as they come, are not the purposes for which these various activities exist.

But because of our hearts’ posture for the most alluring things; because we are not trained well to think, to parse, to delineate, we confuse the saliently incidental for the oft silently intentional. We celebrate the obviously functional parts of a thing and neglect the covert purposefulness of it. We grip the instrumental benefits tightly and forget their intrinsic qualities. We celebrate the university for the reason that getting a university education has enabled many to liberate their families from poverty. And ignore the purpose of the university — which is to be an Ivory Tower for acquiring and conserving universal knowledge. We say play is good because the sociobiologists produce hefty unreadable journals discussing how it is the safest way for children to explore the world; and outrightly forget that from the child’s point of view, that the purpose of play is itself.

We say readers are leaders. Because a host of men and heroes happened to be readers. For how could you get your young boy to read a book except by filling his ears with tales of Nelson Mandela, Benjamin Franklin, Adolf Hitler (that voracious reader), and Churchill? He is a vegetable on the matters of literacy until you energise him with tales of their reading — “Benjamin Franklin saved his lunch money to buy books.” But that is to merely celebrate advantage, not activity; you have merely pointed out that leading men read, not that reading is good in itself. Which safely hides the corpses of common men who also love to read and for whom reading has produced no glamorous benefits.

So, many of us think like my friend Benedict. He did not think the learning of Latin was a pleasurable thing in itself. He saw it as a get-out-of-captivity card. Which was only, in full perspective, an accidental benefit. Of which the proceeding tyranny is the human equivalent of the rat which keeps pressing the button that provides food, and in the case where pressing the button provides food only occasionally, the rat pushes the button even more often. Where the occasional reward reinforces the compulsion. The human psyche is taken captive by these rewards.

It is the tyranny of accidental benefits, like a parasite in the brain, that advocates that the latest relevant subjects must find their way into the university curriculum — you know, “Why don’t they teach entrepreneurship in schools?” Such unstable way of thinking which lusts after the evident advantage that gaining a university education has spun over the years. And so we think that if we ship the latest course into the university syllabus as a type of MVP, we set up the children for the future. We say this of entrepreneurship as we say it of learning programming. But it is a tiring rat race, pushing buttons endlessly, picking and discarding, and writing off the more stable subjects which are the cornerstone of the university. Alas, not one nor two or three generations float around in the world ignorant of the fact that a university which abolishes its philosophy department is a refined vocational school. That a school which does not have the teaching of theology at its centre is as good as hollow grain. Unfortunately, the real vocational schools lose their status since one bigger than them shines in their place.

But like it was with Benedict’s Latin and his children’s demise at the hands of Arabic, so the tyranny is with us today: you learn how to code hoping that it is the secret to dominating the future. And just as you throw your academic hat in the air, Artificial Intelligence tells you your sheepskin is worth nothing. Everything new boasts and promises, laying its claim on the future, only for it to collapse and give way to something which promises better things. This way, the tyranny of accidental benefits resembles Ozymandias:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Of which we boast of such an accomplishment now, congratulating ourselves like dear Ozymandias of putting our forebears to shame by our latest inventions. But they are only temporary and we are sure to be reading the obituaries of these gigantic inventions soon enough. Thus, we are better fitted to write obituaries after obituaries than we are more fitted to celebrate that which endures.

With our minds of metals and wheels, we care only for things as far as they serve us for the moment. And we are always calculating for the next use of things. Our only matrix of value narrowing to become that of use; and nothing else. We cannot think of things except for how to use them. 

And perhaps you wish to vindicate yourself; to appear as if you are the one man who does not bulge under the tyrannical yoke of accidental benefits, I ask you to see for yourself what you think of the statement “no knowledge is lost.” One mind thinks of it as “keep learning any and everything, relevant and irrelevant; perhaps one day you will find an opportunity where the knowledge is just useful.” And the other mind thinks “Keep learning, even if you hate it; it might just turn out useful.”

But whichever mind is yours, I hear the ventriloquism of Accidental Benefit. That continuous gauging of knowledge and events which tortures its human subject to stay at it and teases him with occasional rewards to let him know that he is not totally wasting his time and to keep him tilling the soil. “No knowledge is lost,” we say, as we tearfully and with backs bleeding from Benedict's whip, go back to declining our Latin nouns.

However, this is not our fate. We are not condemned to it. We have the power to limit our calculations. We have even the appetite in us for the useless; of which the Sabbath is the religious expression. For the Sabbath year of which no land must be cultivated; of which the land is left to rest without exploitation, points to the posture that we must love growing things for their own sakes and in doing so, free ourselves from the yoke of benefits. 

The same way with learning Latin, or whatever your heart delights in. You save yourself from the urge to calculate the accidental benefits when you do a thing for its own sake. Perhaps one day the benefit will come. And they almost always do. Of which “no knowledge is lost” is true. But these are benefits that come even when we did not seek them—especially when we do not seek them; but just happen to come to those who have truly come to love them.

Today, you think chess is what will save you; imagining that your captors will be impressed that you are such a good player and then they set you free. And you go ahead to learn it vigorously. Just then, not knowing how to play Monopoly becomes the fatal arrow that annoys your captor and causes him to pull the trigger. 

You can, in case no one told you, enjoy just about anything without thinking yourself to death as to how it might be useful. You can learn to play the piano because music is sweet, ignoring that one day a church might need an emergency pianist. You can master chess, without thinking of how it is making you into Sun Tzu. You can read philosophy, knowing that it might never bring you money or girls; contrarily, reading philosophy might subtract from you money and girls. But you may do so knowing that it is part of the purpose of your soul to contemplate the most important questions about man. You can tend a garden because you love to see things grow; rather than explain how it is good for your mental health. You can cheer a baby’s babble, without even knowing why.

And just when you meet those snobs, who we otherwise call Philistines, who say to you “But philosophy breaks no bread,” do not tell them, William Vallicella advises, that “yes it does.” You should instead say, “Man does not live by bread alone.” Valete.