Aristotle with a Bust of Homer - Rembrandt
The continuously and consistently thoughtful man is a most exceptional being.
-Aldous Huxley
Thinking is hard.
Human beings like to do what they are good at, that which comes easily and naturally to us. When I was a religious lifter of weights, I would do squats because I was good at them. I avoided the bench press, because I was (am!) a weak bencher.
And thinking is among the most challenging things we humans have to do. Even sitting down to write, I become more focused, yes, but also warmer, a bit flush, more irritable, more vulnerable.
Persistent mental strain often results in wanting to “zone out” to mentally recover. We’re always looking for shortcuts, for automation, because engaging in the slow, deliberate, confusing process of thought is resource intensive. It excludes any other complex behavior. We cannot complete a difficult multiplication problem while speaking in front of a crowd. More baffling, thinking is somehow confusing - in searching for clarity, one has to enter into an undefined area of the mind, grasping for the material to erect the edifice of thought.
Thought is so challenging that our government and society nominally invest 12 years into each and every person so they can develop the capacity for it. At its best, education is an attempt to overcome our natural disposition: to avoid thinking entirely. This project is significant enough - for self-development, for humanity, or just for the labor market - that we’ve agreed upon the need to inculcate and nourish our collective capacity for thought.
And the more difficult the problem, the more likely we are to look for a shortcut. This is not a criticism: it is eminently rational for me to rely on others to say, design the engine of my car or teach Arabic at the local college. I simply don’t have the resources or time to learn these things, or even to develop the frameworks for thought that enable them. Others are more naturally suited to these mental tasks, or have better backgrounds, personalities, and training. These technical problems are daunting enough: complex, specific, and multifaceted. But at least they have a natural endpoint and orientation. There is such a thing as a working motor. Intelligible Arabic is easily identified by native speakers.
But thornier, wilder problems - “The Big Questions™” - are yet more challenging for human beings to solve or even apprehend. Humanistic questions about purpose, agency, and the good life resist tidy answers, regardless of the complexity of our calculations. It is not enough that Plato thought really hard about how to live. If we’re pressed on these questions, we don’t take it on faith that his answers were sufficient: otherwise, the discipline of philosophy would have ended 2000 years ago. At least we shouldn’t. But unless we are pressed, humans can subconsciously perform this outsourcing about virtually any important question.
The Big Questions are different from technical ones. We cannot ever truly know if we have arrived at the proper answer.
That open-ended nature of philosophy, coupled with the everyday tendency to avoid thought, suggests that “big questions” may be those we are most likely to seek shortcuts for. If I can’t design a toothbrush, how can I design my life? If I can’t build a model of inflation, how can I build a model of my values?
The division of labor is an intensely useful tool for economic organization. It makes sense for building physical items and solving discrete problems. And while it is likely more satisfying and meaningful to answer technical, directed challenges by our own labors, the solutions we arrive at do not change in character according to the degree of our own investment in their creation. I want to suggest that in approaching Big Questions, our investment matters deeply. It is the basis for the validity of our answers.
In other words, how we reach conclusions may ultimately have a bearing on their nature and success. I have no stake in the authorship of my car’s motor - I am happy it works, whether it is my design or someone else’s. The goals of thinking about engine design are easily defined: does it make the car go? Is it efficient? Can we make many of them at a reasonable price? And so on.
But our answers to Big Questions do have recourse to their authorship. A major component of determining values, philosophy, and purpose is that they are somehow ours. Answers to questions like why am I here? what am I doing? become more valuable in proportion to our personal involvement in them, or our agency in their integration. To have someone else tell you the purpose of your life is almost nonsensical. It is only through the development of our own answers, groping in the darkness of thought, that we can begin to rely on our conclusions.
But these are hard problems. So the temptation is to outsource them.
The structure of our culture and economy is designed to readily provide this outsourcing. One need not actually think about how to interpret, say, Iran attacking Israel. I can simply access prepackaged “thoughts” from the smorgasbord of available options. I am empowered to simply make a selection from those ideas provided to me by mass production. Once I’ve read the New York Times, watched Fox News, and consumed 4000 tweets on the topic, I can pick whichever “thought” suits me. I can trade the discomfort and confusion of thought for the entertainment and satisfaction of answers, all the while picking up fragments of values and philosophies and orientations. Before I know it I’ve picked up a whole worldview out of convenience and a desire to be well informed. All I have to give is a bit of my time - and certainly less of it than would be required by sitting down to think for myself.
This is depressing enough. Once we consider selection criteria, the problem becomes yet messier. When choosing a product from the options, I may indeed care about its truth. But just as likely, I select one based on its affective resonance, or its mood affiliation, or its contribution to my identity. I’m a tough realist, so I’m going to select option A. Or perhaps I’m a sensitive aesthete, so I’m going to select option B.
Now, humans are of course careful not to look too dumb. So we want to make sure the “thought” at least plausibly comes from some form of intelligence. That is, our primary truth criteria for outsourced thought is verisimilitude rather than veracity. Big Questions do not admit of a correct answer, so we need not concern ourselves with how close to one we have come.
To be clear, I am not advocating that all thoughts must come from some unknown inner place. I’m not sure if “authentic” or original thought is even possible. I’m also not of the view that values - the deeply embedded fundament of what we believe - can be simply or easily changed. Moreover, it is indeed rational, even necessary, to outsource much of our mental labor. But the character of thoughts around Big Questions changes as we become more involved in their formulation. It becomes richer, more agentic, more humane. Authoring, creating, or in some meaningful sense owning these thoughts heightens their value, even if their contents are equivalent to what someone else would have given us.
There are many pernicious effects of this process. I will leave you with one result that Huxley predicted below.
The mere standardization of ideas made possible by modern machinery is in itself another obstacle to culture. One of the blessings of machinery, as I pointed out, is that it enables human beings to move about the surface of the earth with an unprecedented ease and rapidity. Travel has been, and still is, a liberal education. But newspapers, the radio, and elementary education are making all human beings more and more alike. Once can anticipate a future in which men will be able to travel around the world without finding an idea or custom different from those with which the are familiar at home. In 3000 AD one will doubtless be able to travel from Kansas City to Peking in a few hours. But if the civilization of these two places is the same, there will be no object in doing so.
"...even if their contents are equivalent to what someone else would have given us." That's the whoa moment of this essay for me. That's some food for thought right there. The whole essay, actually.