My husband and I were discussing some issue he has relating to other people intellectually and he arrived at an idea that is not necessarily original, but was new(ish?) to us at the moment. Hence this is something of a “brainjackin’” post, but I’m mainly using some of my go-to Philo 81 vocabulary to explain it. My dude had initially spoken of it in terms of semiotics, which is a field I’ve been petulant about learning, because I have the same prejudices as the bitch that “citation need”ed the shit out of the semiotics wikipedia page.
My man said that it seems the most foolish people are often thinking in the most abstract ways, which is an inversion of what you’d imagine foolishness to be. You would think foolery derived from simplicity in thought, but that it often comes from an advanced human ability to categorize. For example, how would a deer feel about a bear? It would recognize that as a dangerous animal and run away. How does a human feel about a bear? We immediately think of cultural images, which could well supercede our animal sense, and endanger our lives. A bear will eat you regardless of how you perceive it, and I’m not saying every person eaten by a bear thought they were pallin’ around with Yogi or Gentle Ben, but some certainly have. Even those who didn’t see the bear as friendly were still seeing it as a symbol rather than as a flesh and blood creature that will kill you on a lark.
When tapped for jury duty recently I had to watch a video giving a cursory review of unconscious bias, so I was in mind of it. Unconscious bias is how we categorize people and other things we experience as a shorthand for judging everything and everyone we encounter on an individual basis – an ability that is literally prejudice but does have some practical utility in preventing us from feeling overwhelmed by the world. Cultural icons and received wisdom can be direct sources of our biases.
What those videos don’t get into, because it’s unnecessary for their purpose, is that we can have biases about almost everything we do or experience. Routines that save us the effort of thinking can get to the point where they replace practical thought completely. If you know exactly what to say or do with every experience you encounter, sunrise to sunset, how prepared are you going to be for something outside your experience and understanding?
You meet somebody at a party that can easily talk with anybody about babies and relationships and work, but whose eyes glaze over when you mention music or art or filing for unemployment or how gender is a thing they are currently experiencing, or that you could go look in the corner of your bathroom right now and see a spider if you were so inclined, I dunno. If you’re even slightly unconventional in any way, and you go among the banal, you will find out the limits of their ability to think real fast.
My dude tried to run a book club once, and all anyone had to say about any given story put in front of them was the same shit. They sought the parts of the stories that matched certain expectations and hammered that button. One person, after reading Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? said “It’s a modern retelling of the Persephone myth” like prose is all about simple answers, and didn’t bother contributing much after that. The less people attended, the more pointless the book club felt, but the more people attended, the more superficial the treatment of the reading.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave proposed that what we observe directly before us was less than real, that it was all debased shadows of the perfect concepts of what is and what can be. That bear is a shadow of the ur-bear, the ideal bear who embodies bearness most perfectly. One could take that as an early striving toward scientific understanding, that he was really saying we experience only a fraction of bearness and that one could understand much more deeply by using science not yet available to him – dissect the bear, measure its bones, compare them to the bones of relatives living and extinct, overlay the results from osteology with a tree derived from genetic characters, place that bear in its evolutionary context, run cognitive tests on it, compare its gut flora to those of coyotes and deer, etc etc.
I think it would be more accurate to say he was getting at a mystic view of the world, where abstract concepts were more significant and important than the reality that is in front of you – reasoning more important than empiricism. But humans have a remarkable ability to devise cognitive shorthands that give us license to walk through life in zombie mode. Those cognitive shorthands are abstractions of observed or communicated reality, ignorant of the specifics of what is actually there and even superficially apparent.
It might be that Plato was, in a thinky way, reaching for the simplicity of walking through life freed from thought. If you have determined the ideals of how things are and should be, shadows can be dismissed as unimportant. Now, thousands of years later, we’ve perfected that art of abstraction. It turns out there is no truth to be found in ideals. The realities that abstraction helps people ignore are the exact places where the world is burning; the abstractions are where the memedog sits saying “This is fine.”
–
