Commonplace Links #1

Background to this experiment in link-sharing here.

Photo credit: Buzac Marius

Photo credit: Buzac Marius

To kick things off, James Shelley wrote a helpful essay on the nature of sharing. Channeling Cicero, Shelley writes:

Nothing that is truly beautiful can be left unshared with another. It is in sharing and co-experiencing that the beautiful becomes manifest. Nothing worth possessing is worth having to oneself alone. It is only by partaking and participating in life together that joys and sorrows of life make any sense at all.

This sentiment is one of many reasons that pushed me to share more of the things that I'm thinking about. If I can do the work of integrating something into the hierarchy of my personal knowledge and at the same time share the opportunity of insight with others, that's a worthwhile effort. With that said, the moment these laudable ends are no longer the focus of sharing is the moment I reevaluate what I'm doing.

As we grind the gears of the new year, I found this dense essay valuable. While I didn't agree with everything in the piece, the closing paragraph resonated with me:

Accepting the fatality of our situation isn’t nihilism, but rather the necessary first step in forging a new way of life. Between self-destruction and giving up, between willing nothingness and not willing, there is another choice: willing our fate. Conscious self-creation. We owe it to the generations whose futures we’ve burned and wasted to build a bridge, to be a bridge, to connect the diverse human traditions of meaning-making in our past to those survivors, children of the Anthropocene, who will build a new world among our ruins.

Relatedly, this Wait But Why post is a heavy dose of perspective about how we spend our time:

It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.

I believe that we should spend our time carefully. One immensely valuable source of thought on how we spend our time is a writer I've followed for many years, a professor named Cal Newport. His approach to academic work has been very helpful to my life as a student. Recently, he wrote about a commmitment to living what he calls a "deep life," one that involves three key pieces: 1) training your ability to focus, 2) building your schedule around pockets of employing that focus on important work, and 3) respecting your attention. Read the post for how these elements might take form.

Finally, I can't help but share this wonderful blog post from my mother, writing from Malawi. I read it almost as mindfulness poetry. The title itself, "It was a quiet day...full of noises" is pure music to me.

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pang'ono pang'ono

Sometimes, your world of ideas networks -- and you don't even realize it. There's a phrase that I kept coming across while I was in Malawi: pang'ono pang'ono. Slowly; little by little. So much of our development of our selves and and our ideas comes pang'ono pang'ono. Recently, what struck me was a slow cook of ideas centered around intellectual kindness.

I listened to an episode of OnBeing with Adam Gopnik. The interview was a rewarding one, especially towards the end. Within a few days of listening to episode, I then came across Maria Popova's article on his book Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. I've since added it to my now overwhelmingly long book list, but Popova's reading pointed out a key excerpt of Gopnik helpfully dissecting Darwin's rhetorical talent in the art of "sympathetic summary" on display in The Origin of Species:

A counterargument to your own should first be summarized in its strongest form, with holes caulked as they appear, and minor inconsistencies or infelicities of phrasing looked past. Then, and only then, should a critique begin. This is charitable by name, selfishly constructive in intent: only by putting the best case forward can the refutation be definitive. The idea is to leave the least possible escape space for the “but you didn’t understand…” move. Wiggle room is reduced to a minimum.

This is so admirable and necessary that it is, of course, almost never practiced. Sympathetic summary, or the principle of charity, was formulated as an explicit methodological injunction only recently.

Darwin's tactic of "sympathetic summary" is the admirable next step in the approach of persuasion that I advocate for in my essay Looking Across the River. First, understand the nature of a disagreement. Then, address the most powerful thrusts of any counterargument.

Just a few weeks ago, I had jotted down a journal entry about kindness, lightly edited to as follows:

I've noticed my own evolving understanding of the different dimensions of kindness. There's the outward expressions of it; for example, the small moments of external caring where you can turn the present around for someone else. Perhaps because I trade on knowledge, I've also started to see the increasing importance of intellectual kindness. By intellectual, I mean the whole spectrum of intelligence, from abstract ideas to emotional understanding. From the ideas perspective, I have to do the work to properly be aware of what an idea really is, and what it is not. More important to the interpersonal realm, I have to have emotional intellectual charity and only assign to malice to what I know to really be malice.

I've worked and I am working very hard to improve my own practice of what I'm calling intellectual kindness. I don't think it's more or less important than those more outward expressions of kindness, but I think it's an often under-explored space of every-day living. Developing honest vocabulary and capacity for kindness is a worthy pursuit and will only make life richer and more authentic.

It wasn't until I read the BrainPickings article that I became aware of this small network of my own writing, Gopnik's book, the podcast episode, and my journal entry. The more I read and listen and actually grapple with what the various mediums generously leave me with, the more I see just how many hidden connections lie beneath like the roots of a forest of trees.

Clearly, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to wrestle with ideas and what should be the etiquette for working out our disagreements. So much is at stake in the way we answer questions that arise in these contexts. I'm getting better at flexing my muscles of intellectual kindness, looking across the river in earnest and doing my best to sympathetically summarize. That's not to say that it's by any means easy. Pride and ego weakens those muscles, as the openness required to flex them exposes you to the risk of being wrong. I advance and stumble, slowly. Pang'ono pang'ono.

Looking Across the River

The following essay was published on The Caesura Letters on November 11, 2015 in response to the following prompt:

Write about Oliver. Not any Oliver you know personally, of course, but a fictional guy named Oliver. Any of the following might be true about Oliver: he might believe something radically different than you do; he might appear to you be completely unable to critically assess his own beliefs; he might be what you consider ‘dogmatic’ or ‘brainwashed’ or ‘fundamentalist’; he might have reasons for his beliefs that have nothing to do with being reasonable or logical as you define ‘reason’ and ‘logic’. Now, how are you going to have a constructive conversation with Oliver? Why does Oliver think the way he does? Why is Oliver invested in his beliefs? Introduce us to your Oliver, explain your differences, and show us how to move a dialogue forward.

Imagine you are standing on a corner with a clipboard that clearly marks your purpose: voter registration. There’s an upcoming election and you want to make sure everyone has the chance to participate. A young man — let’s call him Oliver — heads in your direction. Seeing your clipboard, his face contorts into a grimace. You steel yourself.

“Good morning! Are you registered to vote?” you ask.

“I don’t vote,” Oliver shoots at you.

The moment freezes. You repeat Oliver’s statement in your head. I don’t vote. Immediately, your mind meets a torrent of frustration and outrage. In this moment, the two of you couldn’t be further apart: a non-voter and a volunteer helping people register to vote.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume Oliver’s position as a non-voter is wrong: voting is an essential component of what it means to be a citizen and it is the only way a system like democracy can function. After all, as the United States Supreme Court noted in the landmark case of Reynolds v. Sims (1964), the free exercise of the franchise is, “preservative of other basic civil and political rights.” Put another way, voting is the scaffolding upon which our society is built.

Given the strong case for the value and importance of the individual’s vote, your intuitive response to Oliver is understandable. However sympathetic we might be to your response, there exists an important distinction between Oliver’s position and the path to that position. To understand how to engage in a dialogue with Oliver (and ultimately, to convince him of the merit of your viewpoint), we have to put in the effort to understand the nature of his position, including how he arrived there. There are many trails to the position of non-voting.

Could it be that Oliver believes that there is no daylight between the parties in competition, meaning elections present meaningless choices? Perhaps, from Oliver’s viewpoint, there are no real consequences to elections and the systems in which we live in are controlled not by the government but other forces? Does Oliver feel like his vote doesn’t count given the demographics of the area? Did he arrive at his position by way of a particular ethical framework?

Each of these different trails leads to the same position: Oliver is not a voter. However, the work of moving Oliver from this position is radically different depending on which path he took to arrive there. For example, it is easier to convince Oliver that there are real differences between the candidates — say, one supports universal health care and the other doesn’t — than it would be to change his mind about our responsibilities towards others within a particular ethical framework.

Regardless, the key to changing Oliver’s mind is to meet him where he is. Persuasion is an art of building bridges. When we build a bridge, we invite someone to cross the river — to change their position — to the other side. It’s only when we exhaust questions about the nature of someone’s understanding that we can locate where to build the bridge. In that process of location, you also do two important things. First, you garner trust with the person: even though you still stand across the river from them, at the very least you see where they are on the other side. Second, you might find that you’re not up against the demon that you thought you first encountered upon hearing their position.

In a speech in Paris, Teddy Roosevelt famously proclaimed, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena” (1910).

We can go further than Roosevelt: it’s not the critic who counts, nor the man in the arena, but the man in the correct arena. The Oliver in the encounter above can come in many forms in our day to day. No matter Oliver’s position, we must remember that in the battle of ideas, where we choose to stage the battle is important. Today, remember that true persuasion requires that we explore how we arrive at our deeply held positions, not just the positions themselves.

The Stoic Activist

The Stoics (a school of philosophy in the 3rd Century BCE) often used the image of the 'Stoic Sage' as a way of imagining their ideal philosophic practitioner. While recognizing that it was an unattainable ideal, the Stoics found it one nonetheless worth contemplating. Through this contemplation, the individual aims him or herself towards the blissful state of tranquility in which the Stoic Sage resides. This end -- ataraxia -- is very much about the individual and their state of mind. Ultimately, however, Stoicism has much to offer those interested not just in tranquility for themselves but in providing the opportunity for tranquility to arise in others. Put another way, one particular iteration of the Stoic Stage might be the 'Stoic Activist', a vision of Stoicism in the trenches of every day life, taking part in the shaking and moving of history.

A student of Stoicism might give pause here, doubtful of the link between Stoicism and activism. After all, trying to shape the story of the world is bound to lead any Stoic away from the path towards tranquility and into the underbrush of frustration. We can begin to address these doubts by looking to the lives of the great Stoics themselves: a prisoner-in-chains to renowned philosopher in Epictetus, a political advisor and an investment banker in Seneca, and the ruler of the known world in Marcus Aurelius. Certainly, these Stoic thinkers did not sit by idly as the world passed them by; they were change makers, fiercely engaging in the story of a transforming world through their ideas, politics, and governance.

Consider the thoughts of one of these Stoics in particular, Marcus Aurelius. Marcus recognized that in the morning it might be easier to stay under the covers, lingering in the pleasant warmth. Despite this, he counseled himself that to do so was folly: man must do the work of man. And what, then, is that work? Marcus answers, "I am bound to do good to my fellow-creatures and bear with them" (Meditations 5.20, trans. Staniforth, 1969). Even though as he steps out of bed Marcus reminds himself that he will be met with all the awfulness of humanity throughout the coming day, he reaffirms his commitment to others because man is a social animal and to connect is to be human.

Now, then, we can set aside the seeming paradox of the Stoic Activist and imagine what she might look like. The Stoic Activist actively visualizes all sorts of mishaps -- organizing snafus, shifts in public opinion, or more timely matters arising -- and, in doing so, is able to navigate around some and prepare for the cases where they are unavoidable. The Stoic Activist constantly evaluates what is within her control, focusing her energy entirely on what is and not diverting any attention to what isn't. At the end of the day, following one of Seneca's practices, the Stoic Activist reflects on the steps taken to make sure they were in line with her principles. That pause of reflection grows the space of tranquility from which she can be the most effective advocate. Finally, when the cause meets failure, the Stoic Activist is not slowed down by the shortcoming but energized by the existence of any awareness of the issue in the first place.

You might not consider yourself an activist. The word might have all sorts of connotations that you feel do not apply to who you are. Whether you like it or not, though, the world is changing on every level, every day; each rise of the sun you have the chance to exercise whatever control you have, to be part of the unfolding story. To choose not to engage is still a choice. You are an activist, in one form or the other. Today, will you act as a reflective, contemplative agent of change?

This essay was originally published by The Caesura Letters on October 22, 2015 as part of ongoing reflections on Stoicism. This submission marks my second published piece on the site (the first being The Adjacent Possible) and I'm grateful for the chance to share my writing more widely on such a wonderful site.

We Need More Animal Farms

I recently re-read Animal Farm. It's a short, compelling story that serves as a reminder of the pitfalls of perusing utopia. I think it has a lot of parallels to that of the tech world, but that's not the point I want to explore. (One could consider Dave Eggers's "The Circle" an attempt -- ineffectual, in my opinion -- to port Orwell's piercing satirical style to a book about a tech dystopia.)

I think we need more Animal Farms. We live in a world where the domain of facts is too easily manipulated. You have your facts; I have mine. Climate change skeptics are perhaps the most prominent example of this. Despite the overwhelming scientific consensus, climate change deniers are simply not seriously considering the immense importance of the issue of climate change. Even among those who don't deny it, what's at stake isn't fully in view. For example, I think only one Democratic presidential candidate on the stage really got this question right.

The skeptics are suffering from epistemic closure ("closed systems of deduction, unaffected by empirical evidence), a phrase I first came across from reading Andrew Sullivan They exist in their own universe where the agreed upon rules of logic, evidence, and reason simply don't apply.

How then, do we pierce epistemic closure? Stories. Trojan horses with all the logos, pathos, and ethos to break them free. Neil Gaiman, in a truly wonderful seminar at the Long Now, neatly captures this idea:

The reason why story is so important to us is because it’s actually this thing that we have been using since the dawn of humanity to become more than just one person… Stories are ways that we communicate important things, but … stories maybe really are genuinely symbiotic organisms that we live with, that allow human beings to advance.

(some more transcribed highlights here)

We need more Animal Farms. If we don't find a way to pierce the epistemic closure of others, or spread stories to inoculate the unaffected from those who already suffer from a narrowed universe, we might not have a future in which to share more stories. Or, at the very least, we will constantly be wondering about the road not taken. We need more stories.

Lincoln, reader

I'm slowly making my way through Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, which illuminates the sharp mind of Abraham Lincoln.

Early on, Goodwin explores Lincoln the reader, a cemented identity far before he came a lawyer and then a fabled American president:

Books became his academy, his college. The printed word united his mind with the great minds of generations past. Relatives and neighbors recalled that he scoured the countryside for books and read every volume “he could lay his hands on."

Lincoln found true power in text, I think. His mind was one domain of his life in which he could control regardless of his unprivileged circumstance. Goodwin writes a few pages later:

What Lincoln lacked in preparation and guidance, he made up for with his daunting concentration, phenomenal memory, acute reasoning faculties, and interpretive penetration. Though untutored in the sciences and the classics, he was able to read and reread his books until he understood them fully. “Get the books, and read and study them,” he told a law student seeking advice in 1855. It did not matter, he continued, whether the reading be done in a small town or a large city, by oneself or in the company of others. “The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places. . . . Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing."

At the time, "law school" meant apprenticing under a practicing lawyer. Lincoln just read the books. As I go through "rigors" of law school in the modern era, it's worth taking a moment and truly absorbing just how devoted Lincoln was before his rise to prominence. The advice Lincoln gave the law student -- "Get the books, and read and study them," -- is probably a good recipe for more than just law school (the full letter can be found here). I'm inspired by passionate readers and slowly, I'm awakening that part of my own identity and little tidbits like these add fuel to that fire to read carefully, widely, and well.

This is Water

I've read and/or listened (full; animated excerpts) to this commencement speech from David Foster Wallace many times in the last few years. I read it again recently and the capital-T Truth of it all hit me like a brick, as it always does. Maria Popova often calls the commencement speech the "secular sermon of our time", and this Sunday I soaked up the words of the preacher.

In the beginning, DFW states clearly the hard mental work of the every-day:

This is not a matter of virtue -- it's a matter of choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hardwired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

On the value of a liberal arts education, DFW points to the power of choice:

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things. Not that the mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.

DFW closes with some simple yet powerful truths that are especially important for me to keep close to my chest as I wade through law school (with all its trappings of prestige):

It is about the value of real education, which has nothing to do with grades or degrees and everything to do with simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

Personally, I've found that meditation is the best way to remind myself, "This is water." Regardless, we all need to find our way to some sort of awareness.