Disquietude - James McBey
Aldous Huxley once wrote that “promiscuous reading can become a really pernicious addiction, like oversmoking or drinking.”
He was writing to his son Matthew. This advice, shocking enough in our day of limitless words and unyielding notifications, is particularly disturbing coming from Huxley who, having limited eyesight, once reported reading up to eight hours a day by magnifying glass. The writer, an infovore of broad learning and rich powers of allusion, surely could be called promiscuous in his literary production if not consumption, having covered every form of writing available. He wrote poetry and fiction, essays and treatises, and even created ‘a new literary form’ in philosophical biography. He wrote gossipy society novels, travelogues, and psychonautical explorations. He wrote about pacifism and historical accounts of demonic possession. He covered a lot of ground.
Perhaps he would later come to see this breadth as dangerous or unfocused, and so truly had Matthew’s best interests in mind.
On the other hand, one can hardly describe as promiscuous the intensity and focus implied in the image of the toiling intellectual hunched over a book, inches from his face.
Huxley’s advice has stuck with me. Probably because I consume (process? access?) information very promiscuously. Huxley was prescient. I’m beginning to notice that his warning to Matthew was a harbinger of our contemporary predicament.
To take my own case: beginning with ‘old fashioned’ formats: I’m often reading multiple books at once and give up on them freely. I rarely annotate or highlight them, nor do I take any real time in reflection, either during or after reading. In fact, sometimes I bring another book to bed, just in case I finish whatever I’m on currently. Then, with proper planning, I’ll lose not a moment of possible consumption.
I have podcasts fed to me through an app. They cover a huge variety of topics ranging from the trivial and comedic to the intensely philosophical. I have no fidelity to any of them. Bad title this week? Sorry, not listening to that. Of course, I have my favorites, but there is no regular episode I cannot miss. Occasionally, a new podcast will click with me and I’ll listen to a (comparatively) long series of serialized episodes. See: Revolutions. But this is aberrant; it is the exception that proves the rule. My listening habits are flitting and skin-deep. I hate audiobooks: I can’t finish them. Similar to my reading, I too rarely reflect on what I’ve learned, if I can say I’ve learned at all.
I could go on, but you get the point. I subscribe to a billion substacks. I look at link aggregators every day. My wife jokes that my goal is to cram as much information into my mind as possible. We have tons of information available, but I’m failing to leverage it effectively. My implicit theory of informational utility, the implied C.P. Production Function, looks something like this:
1. Take in as much quality information as possible
2. ???
3. Profit
This theory has not, sadly, borne as much fruit in output, understanding, and wisdom as I might wish.
We are all works in progress. Maybe I just need to read more.
But this model does give me feelings of momentum. Devouring as much as I can is intellectually stimulating, because novelty stimulates. But somehow my productivity is not purely a function of maximizing incoming information. My knowledge is shallow. I take in far more than is useful, and I duly forget most of it.
This issue of promiscuity applies, I think, for many people across their interests and the informational landscape. Clinton Ignatov recently wrote that we are “skittering along the surface our world of shiny screens and shallow, circular language for discussing the matter of technology.” The piece is about technology, but he could be talking about our discussions of politics, or gender, or culture, or almost anything else.
The whole essay is insightful and erudite. He’s striking at the vulnerability of shallowness, in opposition to informational promiscuity, when he writes, “To read old books on this subject would introduce depth to the understanding of our technology. Historical depth and technical depth. And depth, rather than surface, is precisely what electronic technology, aided and abetted by easy-to-use computers, obliterated from our collective sense making.”
Like wisdom, old books have to be sought out. To use them properly, we have to engage with and return to them, think about them, talk and write about them. Of course we can still discard them carelessly, like any old tweet or substack post!
Ignatov is using depth – by plumbing the annals of ancient philosophical literature (from the 90s!) – to erect a critique of shallowness. It’s clever because he’s using a component of his critique as the edifice of a solution. The argument simultaneously indicts the reader and redirects us to a devilishly simple solution: don’t get distracted. Read carefully. The information we need is already out there.
It’s fitting that Ignatov is an expert of McLuhan, a thinker who wrote about the fundamental relationship between information and understanding. Ignatov takes what is personal for me, for Huxley, and examines its social weight and technological acceleration. The pernicious addiction of learning without depth, of mere consuming, is perhaps more widespread than an individual problem. It’s still a problem for me.
The specific pathology of shallowness can be captured in plausible yet specious statements like “why would I read the book when I can listen to the podcast? I’ll become an expert in 40 minutes.” Or SBF’s “If you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should’ve been a six-paragraph blog post.”
Huxley would have been sympathetic to this argument.
In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies—the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
- Brave New World Revisited
It’s obviously gotten worse since 1958. We have (be generous with me) something more than universal literacy and a free press. We have fantastic access to whatever information we might want – all of it and more - or whatever might be presented to us. We have an eruptive, effusive mechanism always at our fingertips which is concerned in the main with neither verity nor falsehood, but with the limbic, the more or less totally irrelevant.
Paradoxically, as we reduce the cost of information, it becomes less nourishing. Junk food, even a great deal of it, does not satisfy.
The Man on the Rack - Piranesi
The irrelevance of information only exists in relationship to some goal or purpose. The limbic and impulsive are relevant to the superficial and indulgent, to the promiscuous. Retaining some goal or purpose outside of the titillating, fleeting, or obscurely enraging, and maintaining fidelity to it, is the antidote Huxley was suggesting.
The costs to timeless information are high, in part because we have to constantly orient ourselves towards some end. Being deliberate is harder than being suggestible.
Consider how relevant the below quote feels. In the words of Ignatov, “It’s strange how books from 100 years ago can feel more familiar and relatable.”
Agitation over happenings which we are powerless to modify, either because they have not yet occurred, or else are occurring at an inaccessible distance from us, achieves nothing beyond the inoculation of here and now with the remote or anticipated evil that is the object of our distress. Listening four or five times a day to newscasters and commentators, reading the morning papers and all the weeklies and monthlies nowadays, this is described as 'taking an intelligent interest in politics.' St. John of the Cross would have called it indulgence in idle curiosity and the cultivation of disquietude for disquietude's sake.
- The Perennial Philosophy
My implicit theory of informational utility is flawed. It is flawed because of the suggestions I’ve accepted from my environment. From this, I’m extrapolating. Idle curiosity - promiscuous taste – is too easily yet somehow never completely satisfied; it is always resurfacing.
To put in more contemporary terms, Luke Burgis writes: “It’s interesting that the instinct is to try to make sense of every new thing that happens in the world (now that is a hampster wheel) rather than to understand the things that will never change.”
This is profound in its simplicity. “The things that will never change” are worth hunching over a magnifying glass for the duration of full work day.
The hampster wheel cultivates disquietude, but I have fun on the wheel. It’s a really pernicious addiction.
Huxley, by David Low
I think I need to change my life. The recognition is painful. I read constantly but there’s no depth, no plan. I flit, dabble, and change direction randomly, like a bee at a large flowering shrub.