Of depths and surfaces

When was the last time you complimented somebody for her depth?

Often times we say somebody is "deep" or has said something that's "deep" to mean the person is thoughtful or not superficial. However, on most occasions we don't know what we precisely mean when we use the word deep as a qualifier of human character.

David Brooks comes up with an interesting perspective on what constitutes depth in human character.

Depth connotes the bedrock or something that lies at the bottom. When navigators plumb the depths of the ocean, for instance, they plumb the ocean bed wherein are rooted, some say, the fundamentals of life as we know it.

What is the human analogy for the ocean bed? Is it the human unconscious?

Thanks to Freud, we now know that the human unconscious, like the ocean bed, is home to all those impulses, primary emotions and mammalian instincts that we try our best to tame and discipline with reason. 

Generally speaking then, the primary emotions constitute our depths, while the rationality makes for the top of who we are. By this definition, if a person is able to dredge up the primary emotions and live them out in her daily life, then that person is said to be invested with a depth of character.

How wrong we would we, writes, Brooks, to confuse our deepest selves with our unconscious.

When we attribute "depth" to a person, we are, on the contrary, alluding to the rational self, the one that a person has acquired through a life time of experience and "suffering", compromise and negotiations with the other self in us, which is the emotional and instinctive self.

Brooks says:

When we say that someone is a deep person, we mean they have achieved a quiet, dependable mind by being rooted in something spiritual and permanent [...] A person of deep character has certain qualities: in the realm of intellect, she has permanent convictions about fundamental things; in the realm of emotions, she has a web of unconditional loves; in the realm of action, she has permanent commitments to transcendent projects that cannot be completed in a single lifetime.

Depth is not a biological predisposition, but is something that we cultivate over time. "Our origins are natural; our depths are man-made, engraved by our thoughts and actions", writes Brooks:

So much of what we call depth is built through freely chosen suffering. People make commitments — to a nation, faith, calling or loved ones — and endure the sacrifices those commitments demand. Often this depth is built by fighting against natural evolutionary predispositions.

When the 19th century Romantic poet and philosopher, William Wordsworth said that the child is the father of man, he meant that children have greater depth than adults because, chronologically speaking, babies are closest to our creator spatially and temporally, and their minds are still filled with those "intimations of immortality" that our creator shares with us. These intimations or these sparks of depth get dispersed and weaken over time under the surgical knife of experience. 

Experience, said Wordsworth, severs us from our natural depths.

David Brooks says the opposite: Experience creates depth depending on how we as adults wish to live our lives. If we cling to our biological dispositions exclusively, then we are unlikely to acquire depth of character. In Brooks' terms:

Babies are not deep. Old people can be, depending upon how they have chosen to lead their lives. Babies start out very natural. The people we admire are rooted in nature but have surpassed nature. Often they grew up in cultures that encouraged them to take a loftier view of their possibilities than we do today.

Looking back, I now wonder why Captain Ahab, the one-footed, obsessive whale-chaser of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, resented Moby the whale so much for its depth. I had understood the root of Ahab's obsessiveness with hunting down the whale, as a quest for something humans are incapable of attaining--depth. The whale in Ahab's eyes didn't acquire depth, but was born with it by virtue of living in the depths of the ocean.

Ahab must have labored under misperception; he was by far the deeper entity in the tale.

Have cars made us stupid?

In a New york Times Sunday Review piece, A Stroll Around the World, Pulitzer Prize winning writer for the National Geographic Paul Salopek, blasts the motorization of human civilization, especially in the Global North.

Salopek is on a mission to travel the world on foot, as his goal is to stray off the beaten "paved" path taken by motorists and stroll those paths of the globe that human's have ambulated along since the Pleistocene age.

He struggles to put himself in a "Pleistocene state of mind." Such a state of mind is un recuperable with the advent and subsequent hegemony of the car. 

While strolling through Saudi Arabian deserts, Salopek experiences motorists with "car brain" and thinks of how unsuitable a car brain is for navigating the Middle Eastern terrains. Yet not too long ago, the ancestors of the species saddled with car brains were Bedouins, or nomadic strollers who had a different sense of space and time.

Like drivers everywhere, their frame of reference is rectilinear and limited to narrow ribbons of space, axle-wide, that rocket blindly across the land.

One suspects, Salopek would have prefered to meet the Bedouins on the backs of camels instead of Sheiks inside air conditioned cars.

To the placeholder of the car brain, the earth’s surface beyond the pavement was simply a moving tableau — a gauzy, unreal backdrop for his high-speed travel. He was spatially crippled.

Those with car brains, separated from those with plain brains, have an acquisitive attitude to space:

Cocooned inside a bubble of loud noise and a tonnage of steel, members of the internal combustion tribe tend to adopt ownership of all consumable space. They roar too close. They squint with curiosity out of the privacy of their cars as if they themselves were invisible.

Cars are without a doubt the defining artifacts of our civilization, having reshaped our minds in ways that we have stopped thinking about a long time ago, says Salopek.

Cars, Salopek acknowledges are indispensable and have in history built the middle classes. However, they have also severed a natural and limbic connection humans had developed with both the earth and fellow humans that reach back to the basement of time. 

The internal combustion engine has affected more drastic changes on human culture — flattening it through the annihilation of time and space — than the web revolution. Indeed, the century-old automotive revolution prepared the way for the rise of the Internet, by eroding the capacity for attention, for patience, by fomenting a cult of speed.

I wonder what Nicholas Carr would say to the discovery that a flattening of the brain had already been set in motion before we took on the habit of outsourcing our brain's primordial functions of deep thought and memorizing to the Internet.

How to be good and why?

The short film above, is a moving testimony of how good actions are a long-term investment, more valuable, or as valuable as, financial investment.

Human kindness might be the only recourse to solving the problem of health care. 

A Quote

We evolved in a world where our survival depended on an intimate knowledge of our surroundings. This is still true, but our surroundings have grown. We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth. We skim, we summarize, we skip the fine print and, all too often, we miss the fine point. We know we are drowning, but we do what we can to stay afloat.

Courtesy W. Daniel, Hillis, Physicist, Computer Scientist, Chairman of Applied Minds, Inc.; author, The Pattern on the Stone.

Humans can emulate nature

Breaking away from the usual mode of anthropomorphic thinking the following asks humans to be less like humans, and more like nature:

Spring is the torrential season. On a bright, blue-skied day in April or May, it can feel as if you’re standing in a river of biological change, whether you’re in Central Park or out in the country. Everything seems to be regenerating — every species of plant, animal and insect — all of them cued to the new light and the new warmth. It’s as though we’re living in three kinds of time at once: geological time, which is too slow for us to grasp, human time, which is just right, and tulip time, which comes and goes in the blink of an eye.
In all this change, we are the unchanging species. We don’t become vernal with new growth. We don’t blossom, nor do we contribute to the clouds of pollen that drift through the air. We don’t shed or nest or den. We are not the green men (and green women) of myth, vegetative humans who live by the cycle of the seasons. We go about our business and our pleasure. Perhaps, about now, the palette of our clothing shifts toward the pale and pastel. To all the beings that are rioting around us, we must seem like a remarkably stodgy species.
New Yorkers like to think of ourselves as 24/7. In fact, as a species we are even busier — and certainly never dormant. But there is also a constancy to us.
In the dark of winter and the light of summer, we remain more or less as we always are, a constancy so characteristic of our species that we don’t even notice it. It is useful. It is productive. But just once it would be nice to be budding out, breaking into leaf, bursting into blossom as the warmth of May approaches.

(Via The New York Times)

Modern Times in Three Cartoons

The cartoons from the current New Yorker (March 12) are simply evocative (and provocative).

This one gives me the chills, as I just deleted my Twitter account. 

Will I go the Gregor Samsa way?

And then, there is the emergence of the lobbyist as a lion that seeks
to bribe his way into the pantheon of Darwinism. But really, we all
know that Social Darwinism is a wholly engineered thingie, 

not "natural" as some would us think. If you don't believe that see
Andrew Niccol's grand movie In Time.

At least a few people showed up at the funeral of America's most
famous Salesman, Willy Loman. Nobody shows up at this one's
(except the lone figure of the wife), because in an era where 

you can mourn via the medium of technology, why bother to be
physically there at the service?