Hello again.
It’s been a hell of a week. I hope everyone is keeping as healthy, safe, and sane as possible.
CURZIISM #2 shares my reflections on the last week’s chaos. My approach is, unsurprisingly, a bit philosophical.
Let’s get into it.
Disorientation and reorientation
I. On Whether to Give a Shit: Two Metapolitical Voices from Ancient Rome [Audio, 34 min]
As dominant narratives crumble and reconsolidate, society demands new thoughts and actions in response to the events of the day. But why care in the first place? On what basis might we choose or reject this civic responsibility?
I give my thoughts on the question, followed by brief readings from Seneca’s De Brevitate Vitae (On the Shortness of Life) and Cicero’s De Re Publica (The Republic).
II: The Hazards of the Eye
Perhaps the news media, when it’s working, can be thought of as a public-access epistemic instrument. When it’s not, it produces hazards for our vision-oriented species.
I. On Whether to Give a Shit: Two Metapolitical Voices from Ancient Rome
The audio piece, located above, is sort of experimental. It’s meant to be consumed as a whole, but if you want to navigate more selectively, it is divided up as follows:
0:00-8:06 - My reflections on civic engagement.
8:06-21:22 - A reading from Seneca’s On The Shortness of Life.
21:22-33:59 - A reading from Cicero’s Republic.
The Seneca translation can be found here, and the Cicero here. I enjoyed these translations. Buy the books! I will make no money on your purchase.
Image by Bradley Weber.
II. The Hazards of the Eye
Who in their right mind wants to comment on the events of the last week? Plenty of people, I guess - though who knows what states their minds are in. I can barely get a sentence out that I don’t hate. I opened an earlier draft of this post with the banal “Watching these events has been wild.” Eesh - dead in the water. Even were my glibness forgiven, there’s still an honesty problem, because it doesn’t feel quite right to say I watched these events unfold.
I tried to get access, to achieve some clarity, but though I looked, did I really see a thing?
I certainly engaged. I watched the news, scrolled through my Twitter timeline, ran a Twitch OSINT livestream in the background. I watched via chopper feed as people looted the shopping center where I buy pants. And I got an even more personal view when fires broke out in sight of my apartment window:
In this ugly information landscape, I tried to cross-reference sources, to account for damning evidence on this side and apologistic reinterpretation on the other. For once, my interest was practical, not just intellectual: I wanted to know, for example, if I’d have to bug out, or defend myself from people trying to grab my stuff.
But for all this sound and fury, I did not find clarity. And if anyone else thinks their explanations are clean, I hope they can back that up. On the societal level, I certainly expect a coherent narrative to emerge at some point, some socially acceptable simplification as We the People memory-hole loose threads and inconvenient contradictions. But social reinterpretation is not the same thing as an answer.
So I feel weird saying that I saw the events unfold. While I witnessed something from some angle, the aim of sight is knowledge, and knowledge is not what I received.
It’s not indirectness of access that I take issue with. Epistemic instruments - tools for knowledge - can be both indirect and veridical. Bring me a telescope, point it at the right chunk of sky, and I’ll happily agree that I saw Jupiter on the other side. The telescope’s causality is nice and clear: light bounces off Jupiter, makes its way to California, is magnified and focused by mirrors and lenses, and speeds down the eyepiece into my eye. I feel pretty good about this.
Should we think of the news media as a kind of public-access epistemic instrument? A big telescope, that we gaze into from separate viewing stations, to see the affairs of society unfold?
Like in the case of the telescope, the news media’s physical technology is advanced and precise. But if the overall instrument malfunctions, a technician will have no luck looking for gunk in the tubes or scratches in the lens. No, the Rube Goldberg machine of public truth contains not only physical implements, but social ones as well. The problems that assail it are people problems.
And yet this pernicious illusion of direct knowledge remains. It feels like we’ve really seen it. Perhaps the central conceit of our video-powered technological media apparatus is that what we’re seeing is what’s plainly going on. The full picture. The guy did the thing, the camera caught the light, the file flew through the internet, and here it appears on-screen; it is real, and that’s that! But as all liars know, a sliver of truth can be an instrument of deception, if the true picture depends on absent context. One rarely knows who’s holding the camera, what’s going on off camera, or why. For everything seen is some corresponding unseen.
This is a problem for mankind, the animal. The eye is our oldest and most powerful epistemic tool, so primordial that it can symbolize knowledge itself. Mystical insight is granted by a third eye, not a third ear or a second nose. The ear and the nose are sensing instruments in their own right, but the eye is far superior. The all-seeing eye is also all-knowing; we associate it with the Illuminati, but its original allusion is the all-seeing eye of God.
Given honest parts of an incomplete picture, we can see what we want to see. Looking through the same telescope, one man’s morning star is another man’s evening star, and our wise men and astrologers are all up in arms. Debates descend into a mess of dubious conjecture, personal preference, and ideological flourish.
And so ultimately, though there is truth to what is shown on screen, it gives rise to a sense of epistemic isolation. We see a part of the whole, and are offered no path to the right conclusions. There’s no paucity of data, but a contaminated sea of it, ugly quantity making up for absent quality. The roiling waves add little in the way of coherence or dependable orientation.
What is to be done?
They say that in his quest for wisdom, Odin traveled to the roots of the World Tree in search of Mímir’s Well, whose waters contained great wisdom. When Odin arrived, he was asked for a sacrifice, and so cut his own eye out and dropped it into the water. In exchange, he drank deep, and found another kind of sight.
Perhaps the old Norsemen are reminding us of this: the path to wisdom is indeed costly. For knowledge, we must abandon the path of ease. We must abandon the hope that quick glances at complex things will yield real understanding. Because while our eyes are powerful, they can’t tell us everything we need to know.
Sight itself, the most penetrating kind, is more an act of mind than an act of eye.
2. On Whether to Give a Shit, & The Hazards of the Eye