A thought thought is one thing, but a thought expressed is another altogether.
The idea of free speech mandates that you should be able to express your thoughts, however crude or vile. But in the current climate, the de-facto reality is that you cannot. If you happen to have thoughts not sufficiently aligned with what is deemed acceptable by the standards of the day, you run the risk of being socially rejected, or in modern parlance - cancelled. That has perhaps to some extent always been the case, but the situation today is that the window of acceptabilty is tending towards one moral extreme and is at the same time shrinking. What’s more, what you say can be instantly and inadvertently amplified on a fear-inducing scale. Navigating this climate is increasingly hard for someone who sees the value in a plurality of perspectives.
Granted, expressing your thoughts has always been associated with a risk of saying something unacceptable to those around you. As such, I have always had a high threshold for expressing myself, being anxious about how it would fly in the social environment I happen to be in. My psychological weakness aside, I have always valued being able to say what I think. I’ve perhaps become better at doing so with the years, but I now find myself increasingly holding my tongue and apprehensively choosing my battles. One misstep can make you not only socially unacceptable, but virtually unemployable and in effect unable to fully participate in society.
But silencing your thoughts in this way has consequences. It means you will only express them once they are so polished that they go through the world without any friction whatsoever. But we can not have such high standards for thoughts without killing the essential idea of being able to speak freely - so that a coarse thought may be polished and refined until it expresses something approximating truth or beauty. A seemingly stupid or innocuous thought can be the kernel of something profound. Just like a statue starts with a piece of quite uninteresting rock, it’s the act of chiseling that brings out the beauty. But unlike the artist, most of us are not skilful enough to shape our crude thoughts without the collective intelligence of those around us. Thus, one of the the most viable ways to chisel your thoughts to profundity and truth is by simply expressing them.
If there is one thing that is overrated in the modern way of life, it’s the practice of being ‘rational.’ As an illustrative example, let’s take a type you must know: that one-dimensional character that for whatever reason has identified rationality as the correct and therefore only mode of being in the world, and as such conducts their life squarely inside the confines of logical deduction; inside that secure bubble of risk-averse, calculated, rational behavior. They view life as a connected string of propositions, and the point of it is to figure out the optimal path through. As a result, their life-choices are as optimal as they are expedient. You can almost see it on their walking style: the translation of a body in space with a mechanistic flair, cold eyes fixated with intent on getting from A to B as fast and efficiently as possible. The scenery of life has no bearing on their choices, the people around them merely objects to be avoided or used. What’s more, you can almost be sure they don’t know how to dance: the idea of rhytmically flinging your limbs to music appears positively obscene to them.
That’s a caricature, I’m aware. This person scarcely exists, yet I’m sure you know someone that sort of fits the bill, because people embodying the gist of the above are not rare. They might even pride themselves with the label ‘rational,’ although people might reserve other words for them. What’s clear is that they’ve stepped over some invisible threshold and they’re often utterly unaware of it.
To be sure, to say that someone is being rational is often to pay them a compliment, but it can just as often be used as derision (think of calling someone too rational). The reason for this, I think, is that people have a correct intuition for what rationality actually means. The rationalists – if that’s what we should call them – on the other hand, has taken the term to its logical extreme and are merely sequentially executing the rational commandments, as it were, because that’s what follows, logically, when you do.
So what does being rational actually mean? Although no modern dictionary will give it away, the hint is in the name: the root of the term is ratio, which pertains to a relationship between things. In other words, a balance. The rationalist is in no way balanced, and that is his whole trouble.
Yet, the character persists. You could even argue that the worldview of his kind has increasingly taken over the culture. And it’s no mystery: the culture embraces the rational industry of science and reason above all else (arguably at the cost of all else). Indeed, it’s easy to get drawn in when it’s the water in which you swim. Or perhaps more correctly: it’s difficult to get drawn out of the water in which you’ve swam all your life. The air outside is cold and scary and, paradoxically, you’ve lost the ability to breathe in it. Like the sad characters in Plato’s cave, the ascent to the light burns their eyes, so they return to the safety of the cave.
The lure of the rational game is that it’s simple. It follows from a few axioms and all the decision trees can be deduced logically and with arbitrary precision, resulting in the stilted but simple life of our familiar rationalist. It’s all black and white. Behavior is purely binary: rational or irrational.
Being outside of this game is difficult. It’s a place where no clear answers exist. It’s where people exist with all their ambiguities and arbitrary behavior. It’s cold, not with calculating logic, but with immense existential suffering. It’s warm, not from the certainty of your deductions, but from the unforgiving illumination of the Sun. It’s the borderland between the real and not-real, time and not-time, life and not-life. It’s the place from which we derive the sacred; art; love; a zest for life. It contains our history, culture and tradition. It’s the well from which meaning springs. It’s why dancing makes sense.
But there’s no use revolting against rationality by fully embracing its opposite. That would be making the same error as the rationalist, only in reverse. What is needed, again, is a balance. This balance can be achieved by something we can call wisdom. Wisdom, construed in this way, is enacting the proper relationship – the proper ratio – between the rational and irrational; knowing when and to what extent one applies which mode of being depending on the context. Thus, knowing when to open up your mind to the irrational will make you more rational in the proper sense of the word.
I made a half-promise to myself that I would not write a post about writing itself, because it represents that inevitable phase of a writer with nothing to write about. But lately I’ve been questioning why I should be writing in the first place. And why do it publicly? (Although I’m reasonably sure I have a total readership of one at the moment, myself included.) What the hell is the purpose of putting stuff on the Internet, anyway? I’ll try to answer these questions here – more for myself than anything.
So, why write? There are many reasons, but the main reason I shall consider is that you engage in articulation; which is to say, you think your thoughts in such a way that they make sense in a sentence, or even paragraphs. Thinking in complete, coherent and cohesive sentences and paragraphs is not the normal way of thinking. Forcing yourself to do that has benefits to the outcome: what you think becomes clearer to yourself and perhaps even comprehensible to someone else. It doesn’t mean the thoughts are correct in some real-world sense, of course, but it gives you a clearer view of your own thought-landscape and can indicate where you need to do some landscaping or even if you need to rebuild completely. When you read out loud in your head the thoughts you’ve written down you’ll quickly be able to decide if they are coherent or gibberish, profound or silly. Most of the time what you discover is that the original thought was just a seed, and the final print may bear little resemblence to it, but owes to it everything. That would be the point of writing.
Another reason is that it’s a rewarding exercise in and of itself. Picking out the correct words and metaphors to paint your mindscape or communicate a point is just damned fun.
But why do it publicly? Because of what a somewhat cantankerous public intellectual has called ‘skin in the game:’ you expose the silly little products of your brain to the wider world. Your thoughts, or an approximation thereof, will be repeated in someone else’s head and you run the risk of that other head thinking the content of your thoughts completely ludicrous. Hopefully they will let you know that in some graceful manner, but probably not. Anyway, the knowledge that your thoughts can be read is there as you write and it keeps you sober. But there is a balance to be tread here. One does not want to filter oneself so much that it stifles the more free-roaming, semi-articulated thoughts. I mean the kind of thoughts that represent only the germ of an idea, trivial as it may be. Writing publicly, then, presents a risk of embarrassment, but the reward is that you can get feedback on your less thought-out thoughts and improve them in the process. Often that feedback comes from yourself as you anxiously ponder the fact that that half-baked thought you had on a Tuesday afternoon is forever scrutinizable by the full citizenry of the Internet. Skin in the game.
So why the Internet? And why this particularly lonely corner of it? Well, the beauty and horror of this place has always been that the bar for putting out content is nil. True, in places the content is increasingly being policed and censored, but the real Internet – the web sans social media – is still free. The first and last bastion of the web are personal homepages. In practice they are uncensorable. That’s partly why I’m here and not on some conglomerate platform. Besides, I like the calm. (Of course, the individual on the web still runs the risk of being ‘cancelled’ and ostracized, for which probably the only defence is anonymity.) A more personal reason as to why I’m here: I grew up on the web, so it only makes sense to dwell here still and reap the benefits of articulating my thoughts into the void.
Ponder modern architectural design. It uses a limited vocabulary to express itself: sharp corners; concrete; steel; glass; a color palette limited to gray, brown, white and black. With these ingredients, you know you’ll get something like a box with windows resembling a spreadsheet or a crystal-like monstrosity that destroys a neighborhood before you can say ‘modernism.’
Now, I embrace forms of minimalism in things like coding, writing and even design. But at some point, you’ve got to ask yourself, am I being minimalist because it’s called for or because I just don’t know any better? Think again of the modern architect, could he design a classic arched roman-style building? I think not. The best you’ll get is a kind of stripped-down vector-representation of a raster image. In the spirit of minimalism, he has been schooled to shed as many tools and traditions as possible. The symbolic language of historic architecture has been lost. What’s left is but a limitation, in essence an incompetence or illiteracy, informed and sanctioned by a cult of minimalism.
To get to the core issue, we first need to differentiate between objects that are used as tools and objects that are not. Arguably, tools, to a degree, benefit from a minimalist design. Think along the lines of the Unix philosophy: a tool does one thing only, and does it well. This modular design enables the versatility and portability that is the Unix operating system (and its open source mimics).
But there is also something deeper and more entrenched going on. Sometime around the Industrial Revolution, our culture has emphasized the tooling impulse of our species to an absurd degree and increasingly thought of nature merely as something to be exploited by our tools, for our material benefit. This can be called the modern mindset.
Computing is perhaps the ultimate application of the modern mindset. In that context, minimalism: good. And as a self-contained endeavor, that’s all well and proper. But computing is just a tool, and what I’m trying to get at is that there are things in life apart from tools. What we seem to have forgotten is that those other things actually are the raison d’être of the tools themselves.
What those other things – the not-tools – are is hard to define. It’s the ineffable, esoteric stuff of all religions. It’s love, beauty, friendship, worship, meaning. It’s art. In the modern context, it’s what philosophy – as a tool! – tries to pin down, extract and use. But that kind of philosophy is just another application of the same mindset; in its most absurd form, it becomes a self-perpetuating system of people (read: machines) whose sole purpose is to make ever more efficient tools that enable them to keep making tools forever.
The point is this: when an object is viewed as a tool, its sole purpose becomes its function. Minimalism is a way to optimize for function. In the modern mindset, everything is but a tool. The architecture example is just one of many, but it is a very clear one: the place we call our home, which we formerly embellished with ornamentation and a kind of organic, non-minimalist design that expressed the raw beauty and meaning of life, has been replaced by the functional boxes of modernity, whose purpose is to contain us and nothing else. Our buildings are no longer homes or monuments to our existence; they are tools. What follows is inevitably a minimalist design: sharp corners, glass and concrete boxes. Tradition is shunned. Ornamentation and beauty becomes an afterthought or even a nuisance. The rich meaning and symbolism of the past is utterly lost. The self-alienation of man from his environment is complete.
Thus, minimalism is an anti-tradition. It preserves nothing, as it is fundamentally destructive to past knowledge and practices. As such, it ultimately strips life of its meaning and tries to recreate it in its own image: as a tool.
It’s a philosophy for making a hammer, not for using it.
Should one include hyperlinks in the body of a text? One can make the argument that links are the lifeblood – if not the point – of the web (it’s where the spindly metaphor comes from) but it’s also disastrous to the flow of a text, distracting the reader’s attention. What’s more, as is becoming more obvious as the Internet ages, links decay and “rot” as their content disappears or changes.
Just like poor writers abuse footnotes – or hyphens – they can abuse links (or parantheses for that matter). Every time a reader’s eyes traverse one, a decision has to be made whether to hover over it to see where it goes, to follow it, to read its contents, or to ignore it. It leads to a kind of attentional fatigue, where the amount of information potentially contained within increases exponentially with each blue-tinged pop-out to somewhere else.
Admittedly there are cases where links have their uses – e.g., providing source material or more in-depth information – but there’s a fine line between that and attention-disrespecting, lazy writing. With some effort, I hope, one can find that sweet spot of a text that is sufficiently sparse in links without losing depth or becoming verbose, all the while retaining the reader’s full attention and comprehension.
In contrast to citations in, e.g., academic writing, there are no clear rules for when a link should be produced, creating ambiguity as to why it’s there. Did they want to provide a source for what they said? Did they just summarize what is behind the link? Is there more, perhaps essential, information behind it? The reader is left guessing.
Then there’s the fragility of the web. Links rot and die, their content forever lost to the void. Content can also change unpredictably, either by the creator or some third-party censorship. In fact, this very blog post has been changed numerous times by myself after first publication; its location can also change on my whim. The point is: content on the web is transient and dynamic in nature, while the practice of hyperlinking assumes it is permanent and static.
So, when considering the style of this blog, I have three options. 1) do not highlight links in the body of a text, 2) provide a button to toggle link-highligting or 3) write in such a way as to not require links unless strictly necessary. As for 1), I think it produces the feeling that every word could be a link, which leads to a kind of unease in the reader. 2) takes some coding and perhaps even JavaScript, which I want to avoid. So in order to be maximally distraction-free and future-proof, I will work to self-contain my texts as far as it’s possible, without totally isolating them from the web.