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.

Artificial intelligence

A new novella by Ted Chiang, The Life Cycle of Software Objects, explores the inner lives of objects we categorize as objects of artificial intelligence.

The first chapter of the novella can be found here.

Hermit or thief

Today everybody is asking a question of the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, "Is he a hero/saint or a villain/narcissist?"

I ask a similarly polarizing question of Maine's "North Pond Hermit," Christopher Knight: "Is he a hermit or a thief?"

A bit of a background on Knight: He is a 49 year old resident of Maine and has spent 27 years living in the woods as a hermit. 

He sustains himself by stealing from other people's pantries. Over the last few years, Knight is said to have committed about a 1000 burglaries.

But, as the trooper in the video says, Knight isn't the traditional hermit in that he doesn't live hermetically sealed off from the world. He keeps up with the latest on the Kadarshians and reads People Magazine (how he is able to access these isn't explained).

Residents of North Pond are polarized about Knight's characterization. A portly elderly man calls him a thief because he has stolen other people's property. Knight, he says, steals selectively; peanut butter is his favorite, as are batteries and propane gas tanks. He leaves behind meat that he doesn't like. 

He has never stolen big items or money.

Others hail him as a hermit, who lives a life away from the stink of technology and the industrial bustle. He lives in the midst of nature, though one look at his abode and I could tell he is contaminating nature by bringing in the industrial junk.

A "hermit" is an anomalous label in contemporary America today, as is a "saint". The conditions for the production of hermeticism and saintliness simply don't exist in our society. Besides, what is Mr. Knight doing anyway? He has merely negated an established norm of living and is living off other people's stuff. He should've been a mendicant and instead of stealing, he could've lived off the generosity of other people's spirits. 

I have read of hermits in some of the Indian epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata: They weren't necessarily nice people, but had a disciplined body and mind and throve on the ability of other people to gift food to them. But those were radically different times, before the economy of buying and selling via currencies came into being. The gift of food was given to hermits/mendicants and hermits reciprocated with the gift of good will/blessings. Sometimes, a gift of food was given to a particularly powerful hermit out of a fear of upsetting him and earning a curse. 

The Maine hermit, isn't quite a hermit; he's just a delayed gratification-seeking narcissist who wants publicity, as the portly guy and victim of the hermit's peanut-butter-stealing-spree says.

It's human to err...

...Or, as they say, to screw up.

I just found out that I had screwed up my New York Times subscription: I have not eyed the details/fine print and had mistakenly assumed that in order to have free and complete digital access to the Times, I would have to opt for a home delivery of one kind or the other.

I opted for the pecuniarily lowest option--the Weekender (Friday-Sunday).

I was somehow confident that I was paying $15.25 every month for the total package.

...And I had made the mistake of not checking my account online.

One day I visited my account to see if the Times had credited money because of missed papers. What did I find? That for months I am being charged $35. My mistake, for sure: I had mis-assumed and hadn't read the details. I was paying for what one would say the "full-service."

Had I not the "mistake" of being assumptive--which a consumer never must be--I would have saved a considerable amount of money over the past few months.

But of course, I don't expect sympathy for my oversight. It's my mistake and I paid for erring.

Surely I deserve lambasting for this: In America people are held responsible for the mistakes they make and the consequences they suffer as a result of these mistakes. A majority of these mistakes have an economic consequence.

Nicholas Kristoff, a well-regarded humanitarian/Times reporter (ironic), has wisely offered a rebuttal to those who believe--harshly so--that people ought to take responsibility for their own errors:

[...] A civilized society compensates for the human propensity to screw up.

He writes about a friend who chose to work part-time in order to spend more hours on pursuing things that gave him pleasure. Since he worked part-time, making about 13k a year, he opted out of health insurance, as he couldn't afford to buy one.

Somewhere down the line, he contracted cancer, and couldn't pay for his treatment. Upon telling his story, he was boo'ed and jeered. Many--on the side of the Republicans, according to Kristof--called him foolish and stupid enough to make such self-destructive life-choices. Few blamed the system for not caring for one of its own--a citizen whose only fault was not to self-enslave himself to the rigors of full-time work.

Kristof asks us to be a little more civilized:

To err is human, but so is to forgive. Living in a community means being interconnected in myriad ways — including by empathy. To feel undiminished by the deaths of those around us isn’t heroic Ayn Rand individualism. It’s sociopathic. Compassion isn’t a sign of weakness, but of civilization.

I have erred--and paid. This unnatural view of human nature and society has been taken to the next level in case of Kristof's friend.

Good Writers Shine the Brightest Light on Literature

I like it when writers speak about literature. I like it because I learn.

An example: Upon asked what motivated her to explore the relationship between a mother and a daughter through the prism of money in a New Yorker short fiction, Appreciation, writer Rivka Galchen traces the motive back to her fondness for 19th century literature. And "the best shorthand for plot in those novels is just to follow the money."

Galchen says more:

Money is the prime mover [in 19th century literature]; it explains near on everything. But only near on. Sometimes it seems to fail as an explanation, to fall down into being just a description.

Money, according to Galchen, fails to explain the motives of a character like Lily Bart in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth:

She frustrates us because she doesn’t do what it would seem money as the prime mover dictates she should do; she seems to be made of a substance that suggests a need for a new physics.

Lily Bart illuminated!