The Prestige War and The Death of Leisure
Many things are beautiful and valuable in themselves until the quest for prestige and status arrives in the mix.
Hello there, you reading The Busymind Project; a site of irreverent learning where I write essays that are from my contemplation, interests, and curiosity. Here I test things and hold fast to that which is good. And it is my way of staying awake in a lulling world.
Although I publish every Monday, I am publishing this set of essays on a Tuesday because I believe that my readers — which includes myself — do not deserve my worst. So I put off the essays until they were ready.
These four short essays are mostly unrelated. If you find any common theme in them, take that to be the result of my mental boner which has a mind of its own. And if you enjoy them and wish to be a part of this Irreverent project, subscribe below.
A Librarian's Disposition
Let me show you a librarian's disposition; which I hope that you will assume. For if you were John Dewey or some prolific librarian — a Philip Larkin, Laura Bush, Jorge Luis Borges e.t.c — facing a cacophony of unstacked, unpiled, badly arranged textbooks, what would you do?
Myself — if I were at least a mediocre librarian, I shall begin by scanning the room and the books, to spot commonalities and differences among them, and then I will develop a categorisation technique for them.
For instance, if at my quick glance, I spot a number of mathematics textbooks, I will instantly conceive of a category designated 'mathematics textbooks'. I may do the same with fiction, and possibly Geography textbooks. You get the point. I have just made sense of a room filled with textbooks. We do this all the time and I want us to do it again.
I propose that we turn to sort the category “knowledge” such that we end the war between instincts that keep waging themselves in our arguments.
An instance of this war between instincts is evident in the contention between fiction lovers and non-fiction lovers. There seems to be a war between both camps fighting to come out on top as to what counts as superior knowledge. But I will simply say that this war — between fiction and non-fiction — is a simplified version of the contention between a useful kind and a non-useful kind of knowledge. There is a war among those who claim to love knowledge, and position one or their other interests as the superior one. That is only because we have not sorted everything called knowledge into its appropriate category. We have collapsed all the sub-categories into one unrecognisable entity. We have in our natural disposition committed the fatal intellectual sin of conflating categories.
Conflation is a sign of messy thinking. What we need is a librarian’s disposition.
The Prestige War and The Death of Leisure
Many things are beautiful and valuable in themselves until the quest for prestige and status arrives in the mix.
Fiction lovers love what they read and study. They enjoy it. But as soon as they have to prove themselves to readers who enjoy other things, who look like they do heavy lifting in reading, their esteem drops and they get defensive. The reverse may also apply (see “geeks” and “nerds”).
Although I seem to be waging a long war against the ceaseless expansion of the “usefulness” mindset, what I am more interested in is restoring leisure and learning for its sake to its rightful place in intellectual life. I am careful not to be “anti-x”; I prefer to be “Pro-Y.” However, in advancing Y, you may find yourself fighting X. It happens. And if at any point you are at war, you must be advised that in wars, warring parties establish alliances to aid with fighting. And some make allegiances. And some armies are simply mercenaries without loyalty. This realisation engendered another realisation in me that the “usefulness” mindset is loyal and allegiant to prestige hierarchies and status-seeking.
It is only natural as a Silhouette romance reader to feel a tad bludgeoned in your self-esteem when you find men like yourself chewing calculus and philosophy for breakfast. Certainly, calculus and philosophy are more complex and tedious to learn and anyone who chews them for cud should earn our respect. Silhouette romance is a snack compared to that — easy to make and probably messes with your health if you snack too much.
Nevertheless, the need to get defensive arises if Silhouette and calculus are shuttling for the same prize; which mostly, they are not.
Good honest men, who love learning, are stripped of their enjoyment of Silhouette romance books because they are competing with men of calculus.
Remove comparison and prestige and status-seeking from many things and they will immediately regain their beauty, their true function, and they will be enjoyable again. My wish for you is to cease all your unnecessary strivings and rest now.
Media as Epistemology
Tolu mentioned once that some Apostles of Jesus Christ like Mathias did not make any meaningful contributions to the faith. Her reason? That they were neither mentioned in the Bible nor did they have canonized gospels and epistles. This is media as epistemology.
In the second chapter of Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman, Media as Epistemology, Dr. Postman wrote that: “[epistemology] is a complex and usually opaque subject concerned with the origins and nature of knowledge. The part of its subject matter that is relevant here is the interest it takes in definitions of truth and the sources from which such definitions come. In particular, I want to show that definitions of truth are derived, at least in part, from the character of the media of communication through which information is conveyed. I want to discuss how media are implicated in our epistemologies.”
For starters, there are, living among us, people who take mainstream news sources as gospel. And I understand the sentiment — you want to take your information from an entity that has built trust and credibility in their business. And non-mainstream sources do not help as well with their exceptionally coherent conspiracy theories. But that is not the problem.
The problem I see is that by deriving truth and verification from these sources without question, you risk losing what they do not give you. You miss the stories they refuse to cover and the pictures they declined to paint. You miss the part about “what are they hiding?”
The other problem adjacent to being totally oblivious to what the media is not showing you is the problem of emphasis; which is my main deal. This is the problem of conflating the vivid with the truthful; the sensational with the urgent; the lurid with the correct; the unobserved with the unobservable; the unquantifiable with the irrelevant; and the unnarratable with the incoherent. This is an epistemological problem.
Who said that fame and prominence are the only measures of relevance or impact? And what if Bartholomew doesn’t get an epistle in the canon? Does that mean he, after the event at the upper room, went down to the lower room and drank himself into uselessness and irrelevance? Is there not a chance that outside the canon, Simon the Zealot did good work, and laid a sound foundation for others, slaving away in opacity for the gospel? Is there not? It is brain rot to assume that what is not pronounced or documented has not played a part in reality. It is a heavy distortion that should sadden anyone who has boasted of doing great thinking.
By measuring impact with mentions, engagements, and storytelling, we obscure our own minds and undo our ability to think past what we are given. It does not get more Trumanish and Matrix-esque than that.
If you say “oh it is not happening because CNN and their buddies haven’t broadcasted it yet,” then I would beg everyone who knows you to begin to treat you like you are losing it; because frankly, you are.
I guess it is the good ol’ “if a tree falls in the forest and we did not hear it fall, did it really fall?” You know the answer — even though philosophy bros may have something to add — “yes the tree fell; we just didn’t hear that it did.” There is something beyond the scope of what you know. And it may in fact be very important.
Resisting ‘Evolution’
Yesterday, in church, the preacher asked us to go around and greet someone we have not talked to this year. So, I turned to my left and immediately shook hands with a lady who instantly said "but we have talked this year." I was shocked. My mind went "no we have not." But she wasn't wrong; we had exchanged messages on Whatsapp. And so, in my usual get-carried-away style, I thought of how "talk" has expanded beyond oral face-to-face communication to include texting and instant messaging. In this way, we can say the word “talk” evolved.
This legitimate phenomenon of the evolution of language then has provided the foundation of the Motte and Bailey tactic that people who want to control thought by controlling language use.
Because, whenever you assert that language doesn't have to change (as in the indiscriminate pronounmania in the United States), or we do not have to adapt to the raging thing, the maniacs hit you in the face with the argument that language evolves.
Speaking of evolution. Evolution as a heartthrob of science has resonance which Neil Postman described as “metaphor writ large.” It has sprung out of its original position and placement in the Biological Sciences, and now prances up and down other domains. However, in many cases, we humans simply kidnap the term, idea, and concept of evolution to appropriate it to do our bidding.
The argument then that "language evolves, why resist the change?" allows cultural smugglers and utopians to sneak their interests into the public culture as if it was inevitable.
That we moved on from speaking Shakespearean absurdity does not mean we have to allow the pronoun-maniac monstrosity. No, it is not inevitable. And in a related fashion, that a type of technology that came before was good for our flourishing does not mean the next one will be necessarily better. This is just a fetishistic love of change; neophyting without a value system.
It is not inevitable that I should swap all I have learned and that I can prove is still relevant just to accommodate the vacuous whims of fellows among us. Certainly, change is real. Evolution happens. Both these things are real and true. But one other thing that is real and true and that gives me the authority to accept and reject is that I am human, with a mind and a culture, and I am equipped to make judgments.
No, you are not zeitgeisty. Perhaps you don’t have any walls or membranes. That’s okay. I do not want to change that. What I object to is for anyone to in their histrionics, play the evolution card. Have a nice week.
Here is a meme showing a good man:
