Following in the spirit of my last post, I want to ruminate on one aspect of modernity and its place in our lives: streaming entertainment services.

---

Do you remember the feeling you had when you were listening to the radio and a song you loved came on? Perhaps you were hoping for it and the moment felt like a touch of fate, or perhaps you were not expecting it and the pleasant surprise brightened your day. 

Nowadays, however, most people do not experience music in this way. There is so much more control. People, myself included, select the songs they want to hear from an endless supply of music courtesy of youtube or various streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music. At best, they make a large playlist and just let the playlist run its course (although even this semi-controlled state is a stretch for most people). 

I ask you to think right now of the feeling you get when you are thumbing through song-after-song in your Spotify library, trying to find that perfect song for the 10-minute trip you are making; and for some odd reason, nothing sounds good. You click and click until something is good enough. What is happening? You have all the songs in the world at your fingertips, and yet you can’t find one you like, and when you do find it, you are thinking of what you want to play next after only a few minutes of listening, and you often switch the song before it’s even over. 

Consider also movies and television. Do you remember the feeling of going to rent movies from Blockbuster? Or the feeling of flipping through the channels and seeing a movie on that surprised you? Or, an even more distant notion, do you remember watching your regularly scheduled television series with your family? All of these experiences are a far ways off from our current solo-binge-watching Netflix culture, where one of the most common questions people ask each other is what shows are you watching right now?

Think also of that feeling you get when you are doing a Netflix night with your friends, but the plan was to select the movie together. How much time do you spend searching? How long until all the movies and shows just look somewhat uninviting and bland? For me, the ennui from this experience is so familiar. 

Similar parallels can be drawn to a variety of other services (porn, Amazon, the immediacy of google searches, food delivery, etc, but I will leave those to your reflections.) 

The key point that I want to make is that in chiefly these two realms of media — music and visual entertainment — we have sacrificed community, serendipity, and delayed gratification for isolation, control, and immediacy. And I think there is something sad about this, and that we ought to do what we can to prevent the wholesale loss of these qualities. 

Before I go any further, however, I want to anticipate an objection. 

Golden-Age-Bias: 

“But Aidan, you are engaged in Golden Age Thinking. You are pining after a past that is dead and viewing it with rose-tinted glasses. Everyone thinks the old times are the best, and you need to recognize your bias.”

To which I respond that this is a good point, but it does not apply to me here and now. 

Golden-Age-Thinking is very real, and I (like everyone) certainly have such a bias. However, all this bias demands of me is that I reflect carefully about my opinions in light of this, and that I exercise my cognitive abilities as best I can in order to correct for it. It does not mean that I am wrong — that would be to have an opposite bias, just as harmful, that nothing can ever get worse. I’ll call it the Gospel of Progress Bias.

Gospel of Progress Bias:

Some people tend to think that any change is necessarily for the better, and that nothing was ever better in its former state than it is now. This, obviously, is just as silly as the former view (that everything was better in the past). Imagine telling someone that their life wasn’t better when they didn’t have pancreatic cancer. Sometimes, changes are for the worse, and to deny this fact is irrational. For some people, I believe that the bias toward progress is far more active and influential than the former bias toward the past.

And particularly in the case of streaming entertainment services, I believe that the Gospel of Progress Bias is clouding more people’s judgments than the Golden Age Bias.

Furthermore, I don’t believe I am engaged in Golden-Age Thinking, because I use Spotify, Netflix, and I don’t want Blockbuster to come back into business. The world has changed, and there are many things that I love about these changes. But we must not let these changes morph us into some way of living which does not suit us in the deepest sense; we must make these technologies work for us in a way that will maximize our flourishing and our virtue as human beings with human hearts and human needs. We must demand, as E.F. Schumacher puts it, “technology with a human face”. 

I think when we look closely at our relationship with these streaming services, we can see that there is something amiss.

And this is where my key point arises:

More control and more freedom over these goods are not necessarily good, when the purpose of the very thing we are controlling (to entertain us) is, in the long run, not being achieved as well as it could be! This things are entertaining us and fulfilling us less than they would if, when considering how to use them, we adhered to other virtues like resignation, serendipity, and, yes, sometimes boredom. It is okay to be bored.

Ultimately, what I believe is happening is the ever-growing process of desensitization that we are undergoing in light of the technological changes of modernity. Our needs are expanding, and we want louder, bigger, shinier things, and we want all of them when we want them and where we want them. 

Compare this to the man from my previous post, who saw a comet in Boston in 1662 — what wonder he would have felt. Compare this to the feeling of taking a shower after a day of hard work. Compare this to listening to an album, in its entirety, that you stumbled across at a store and decided to buy. Is it really better to constantly be expanding our needs and engorging our desires?

But, the question remains, how can we resist this desensitization without giving up the objective benefits of these advances?  How can we resensitize ourselves to the life that we, as human beings, are meant to live?

One thing that comes to mind is a changed relationship to boredom. But, in all honesty, I’m still working on this part. However, even by recognizing this problem and the need for a solution we have made progress. And this, I think, is progress of the real kind — a progression toward something higher and more worthy.

-AW

I think Bertrand Russell is one of the greatest philosophers in history, deserving consideration among the ranks of the very best. 

My love for Russell extends beyond his great works of logic to his smaller, less-known essays as well. I’ve always found his mind and attitude toward life so exhilarating, and I hope in this article I can show you a little of what I mean.

Not long ago, I read through the Routledge edition of In Praise of Idleness, a series of essays by Bertrand Russell. I wrote this immediately after, but have since edited it to post here. The collection begins with the eponymous essay “In Praise of Idleness”, and is followed by a series of insightful essays that put Russell’s eclecticism on full display. After reading through the series, one stuck out to me more than the rest: an aggressively terse essay titled “On Comets”. 

I tried to find an online version of it to use for this entry, but since none appear to exist, I have transcribed the essay myself. Below is Bertrand Russell’s odd little piece, “On Comets”, followed by some thoughts that I had upon reading it. 

I hope that you enjoy it and that it helps you reflect a little on this lovely Sunday.

---

On Comets

by Bertrand Russell

If I were a comet, I should consider the men of our present age a degenerate breed.

In former, times, the respect for comets was universal and profound. One of them foreshadowed the death of Caesar; another was regarded as indicating the approaching death of the Emperor Vespasian. He himself was a strong-minded man, and maintained that the comet must have some other significance, since it was hairy and he was bald; but there were very few who shared this extreme of rationalism. The Venerable Bede said that ‘comets portend revolutions of kingdoms, pestilence, war, winds, or heat’. John Knox regarded comets as evidence of divine anger, and other Scottish Protestants thought them ‘a warning to the King to extirpate the Papists’.

America, and especially New England, came in for a due share of cometary attention. In 1652 a comet appeared just at the moment when the eminent Mr. Cotton fell ill, and disappeared at his death. Only ten years later, the wicked inhabitants of Boston were warned by a new comet to abstain from “voluptuousness and abuse of the good creatures of God by licentiousness in drinking and fashions in apparel’. Increase Mather, the eminent divine, considered that comets and eclipses had portended the deaths of Presidents of Harvard and Colonial Governors, and instructed his flock to pray to the Lord that he would not ‘take away stars and send comets to succeed them’. 

All this superstition was gradually dispelled by Halley’s discovery that one comet, at least, went round the sun in an orderly ellipse, just like a sensible planet, and by Newton’s proof that comets obey the law of gravitation. For some time, Professors in the more old-fashioned universities were forbidden to mention these discoveries, but in the long run the truth could not be concealed.

In our day, it is difficult to imagine a world in which everybody, high and low, educated and uneducated, was preoccupied with comets, and filled with terror whenever one appeared. Most of us have never seen a comet. I have seen two, but they were far less impressive than I had expected them to be. The cause of the change in our attitude is not merely rationalism, but artificial lighting. In the streets of a modern city the night sky is invisible; in rural districts, we move in cars with bright headlights. We have blotted out the heavens, and only a few scientists remain aware of stars and planets, meteorites and comets. The world of our daily life is more man-made than at any previous epoch. In this there is loss as well as gain: Man, in the security of his dominion, is becoming trivial, arrogant, and a little mad. But I do not think a comet would now produce the wholesome moral effect which it produced in Boston in 1662; a stronger medicine would now be needed.

---

What was immediately interesting to me about this piece, along with several others from this collection, is the way it runs against the popular conception of Russell as a simple Enlightenment materialist who is too obsessed with scientific and moral progress to be concerned with the loss of “The Old World”. Russell, often labeled as a humanist, communicates here a deep sadness about humanity. He opens his essay with the notion that humans are “a degenerate breed”‒ an uncharacteristically bleak perspective for Russell.  This stuck out to me, and I am not entirely sure of how to read it. 

This middle of the essay rings more typical of Russell‒ he details the way that scientific advancement has improved our understanding of the heavens and rid humanity of superstition. But then, as before, he seems to bemoan this event when he writes that “we have blotted out the heavens”. This leads to his conclusory statement: 

“Man, in the security of his dominion, is becoming trivial, arrogant, and a little mad. But I do not think a comet would now produce the wholesome moral effect which it produced in Boston in 1662; a stronger medicine would now be needed.”

This ending‒ I hesitate to call it a conclusion‒ leaves me with confusion. Is it hopeful? What “medicine” would it take to heal humanity?

This essay seems to run against Russell’s usual penchant for clear analysis and exposition, and for that reason I was particularly enchanted by it. Furthermore, as I grow older, I cannot seem to rid myself of the feeling that there is something being lost in our lives‒ something from the Old World. I often battle the sneaking fear that our progress and our comfort, desirable as they may be, are wreaking hidden damage upon something deeper and more fundamental. This may be a weakness; it may be an irrational fear, but I cannot help but think of it and feel that fear. Perhaps Russell, after seeing a comet, began to think the same.

–

As usual, send me thoughts if you have any.

-AW

In this article, you’ll find some writing about gender and grammar, and also a bit about how I like to investigate the random curiosities I have in life. Also, a little bit of Wittgenstein will slither in at the last moment. 

—

You know how there are some questions you ask yourself throughout the years but never feel the pressing need to actually investigate? Well, for me, one of those was why Spanish [the language that I had to learn in school]  had those annoying gender endings.

Now, obviously other languages have them too, and I knew that probably Latin had something to do with it, but I never really looked beyond that. Then, one night when I was out with friends at a bar, I learned that the Spanish word for “handcuffs” was the same word for “wives”: “las esposas”. 

Now that’s funny. But it also got me very curious, and I decided I wanted some answers.

Now, following the advice of a wise friend of mine, I never turn immediately to the internet to resolve matters of idle fascination and curiosity. I first interrogate my own mind; and, if after some time, nothing emerges, I then interrogate other humans.

Using only the resources of memory and critical thinking, my first guess was that people thought the universe could be naturally divided into things feminine and things masculine; and that historically, language often reflected this perceived metaphysical fact. So perhaps humans naturally think of things like “The Ocean” in a feminine way. But this obviously wasn’t enough. Firstly, there is plenty of disagreement between languages on the gendering of such words — for example, in English (a language with very little formal genderings), traditionally treats the Ocean as a “her”, while in Spanish it is Masculine “el Oceano” and the same with “el Mar” (the sea). Also, so much of the gender classifications appear totally arbitrary. Why would the eye be “el ojo” but the table be “la mesa”. And what about new words that enter a language, like “computer”? Well, it turns out it depends on what Spanish-speaking country you live in. 

Furthermore, I knew that some other languages, like German, have more than two gender classifications for nouns; and I was later informed that others, like Zulu, have up to fifteen different genders!

So, confused, I began asking my Spanish tutors and my Spanish-speaking friends. I would mostly get a response of hands thrown-up and the general exclamation that “language is weird”. After many such failed responses, and with my curiosity mounting, I was about to give in to the siren song easy internet access. But just before I did, I got one small answer during some of my philosophy pleasure reading.

In the book Quiddities, W.V.O. Quine considers the idea of gender in language from the perspective of an analytic philosopher interested in clarity. He asks us to consider the following English phrase:

He removed the manuscript from the briefcase and cast it into’ the sea

This is a perfectly fine English sentence, but it’s also unclear. What is the “it” referring to? Probably the manuscript, we think; but other than perhaps local convention, there’s no grammatical rule telling us this. Quine then asks us to look at the same phrase, but in French (a gendered language) :

II retira Ie manuscrit de Ia serviette et Ie (la) jeta dans Ia mer

In the French, we see that that the previous confusion about which noun “it” is referring to has been resolved by the fact that these nouns have different genders, and so the “it” that is used will correspond in kind to one or the other.

Now, obviously, this benefit evaporates if the antecedent noun candidates are both of the same gender classifications — then we are right back into the problem of ambiguity that emerged in the English phrase. But this problem will arise something like half as often in languages with two genders, and even less so in languages with more.

After this, I did my internet research into the Proto-Indo-European origin of gender divisions and the way gender is treated linguistically in other, unrelated language systems like Swahili. It goes deep, and most of it is shrouded in mystery due to the irretrievable answers of how and why some of these divisions began. What folk cosmological beliefs caused languages to often refer to the moon as a woman? We will probably never know. So, I’m unable to know the full why, but I have learned one cool benefit that gender division in language offers. It provides a valuable means of clarity regarding pronouns and their antecedents. There’s obviously so much more, and I am woefully out of my depth here.

I still think the gender endings in Spanish are annoying, but I will say that I found new appreciation in Wittgenstein’s idea that to truly understand a single sentence, one must understand the entire language.

-AW

 

For my first post, I want to write about something that has become near and dear to my heart. It’s philosophy, but I promise I have done my best to make it palatable.

My chief philosophical interest this year has undoubtedly been the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I ignored him for so long– mostly out of fear, but partly out of allegiance to one of my philosophical saints, Bertrand Russell, with whom he had vigorous disagreements. This was a great mistake. While challenging, Wittgenstein’s works are incredibly rewarding. Today I want to share just a humble slice of one of his many great ideas.

Without going very deep into Wittgenstein’s history, I’ll say that he rose to prominence in the early 20th century during the birth of what would later be called Analytic Philosophy, and he got his start under the tutelage of the reigning king of analytic philosophy, Bertrand Russell. Wittgenstein was deeply saturated in the mathematical philosophy of the day, and he was obsessed with finding the solutions that the analytics all sought, which was nothing less than to understand and justify the foundations of mathematics and logic itself. Russell viewed Wittgenstein as something of a chosen one — the one to lead the next generation of philosophy in the quest for which Russell was getting too old. But Wittgenstein went to war, and, according to Russell, the war changed him.

Wittgenstein wrote his small but great work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, while a soldier in World War I, and sent it to Russell for publishing in 1921. The book is a truly magisterial blend of mysticism, logic, and language, and it’s as difficult to understand as it is humbling to behold. Wittgenstein even claimed Russell never understood it. To do any sort of justice to the ideas in the Tractatus, I would need to take much more time than I am willing to spend here (and probably even then I would do it no justice), so I will just be writing about one very important idea. 

In the TLP, Wittgenstein famously presents what has become known as the show/say distinction.

4.1212. What can be shown, cannot be said.

This distinction, Wittgenstein believed, was the key to healing our philosophical ailments. How? To get a better grasp of this distinction, we will briefly need to look into some of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language.

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein develops three categories that sentences may fall under. These are sense, senselessness, and nonsense. These categories connect, in varying degrees, to what some view as the crucial doctrine developed in the Tractatus and the subject of this article: the distinction between what can be shown and what can be said. To see how this is so, we need to look at some examples. 

Sentences with sense express thoughts and correspond to the world. These are the ordinary sentences of language‒ sentences like “He cast the ring into the fire”. It is a sentence which has something plain in the world that corresponds to it; and, by virtue of this fact, it says something. But, in addition to saying something, this sentence, by virtue of its well-formed structure, also shows something. But what could this mean? Let’s look at the so-called “senseless” propositions to find out. 

Other than sentences with sense, there are also sentences with no sense, i.e. that are senseless. These, according to Wittgenstein, are all the pure propositions of logic‒  propositions like p or ~p. These sentences say nothing but do show something by virtue of their form. For Wittgenstein, the “form” or structure of logic mirrors the structure of the world.

Lastly, there are the nonsensical propositions. These sentences fail by trying to express that which can only be shown. To this category belongs anything that matters in life, including but not limited to all metaphysical propositions, all statements about ethics, and any statements about the form of our logic or our language. So, for Wittgenstein, questions like “Does God love us?”, or “why is murder wrong?” ‒ or about pretty much anything in life which is of deep interest to the philosopher or the spiritualist or just the regular person ‒ are to be viewed as utter nonsense. That is, the questions or statements are nonsense, not the things or experiences in themselves. 

What ought we to do upon realizing this? According to Wittgenstein, we ought to abandon our attempts at trying to talk about or explain these things– which includes abandoning philosophy itself, the sole purpose of which is to clarify the language problems that Wittgenstein has, in this book, now solved once and for all.  

At the very end of the Tractatus, he writes:

6.54. My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

He then ends his book with the following proposition:

7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

~

After the publication of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein gave up his work at Cambridge and abandoned philosophy. He moved to Austria and became a school teacher– at least for a time. His philosophical mind would never rest, and he would eventually return to philosophy. And what a return it was.

To end, I want to leave you with a short poem. Not just any poem, but the very poem that Wittgenstein thought perfectly exemplified the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown. See what you think.

“Count Eberhard’s Hawthorn”

Count Eberhard Rustle-Beard,

From Württemberg’s fair land,

On holy errand steer’d

To Palestina’s strand.

The while he slowly rode

Along a woodland way;

He cut from the hawthorn bush

A little fresh green spray.

Then in his iron helm

The little sprig he plac’d;

And bore it in the wars,

And over the ocean waste.

And when he reach’d his home;

He plac’d it in the earth;

Where little leaves and buds

The gentle Spring call’d forth.

He went each year to it,

The Count so brave and true;

And overjoy’d was he

To witness how it grew.

The Count was worn with age

The sprig became a tree;

‘Neath which the old man oft

Would sit in reverie.

The branching arch so high,

Whose whisper is so bland,

Reminds him of the past

And Palestina’s strand.

Why did Wittgenstein think this poem showed something which could not be said? As you can probably imagine, he didn’t say.

-AW

Where It Came From

Nearly five years ago, I launched a blog called Dauntless Thoughts. I named it “Dauntless Thoughts” because the questions and ideas I was considering at that time were terrifying to me, and the thought was that if I was to seriously engage them, I would need to be dauntless. Plus, to be honest, I really like that word.

Since then, I wrote on pretty much anything that interested me, but the spirit of the blog remained the same; I was using it as therapy for my spiritual angst. Each post told the story of a young man who was lost and who was using his writings to find some solid ground. The public platform simply made sharing my ideas and feelings with my friends and colleagues all the easier. But now, however, something has changed: the spirit of the blog no longer matches the spirit of the man.

I don’t mean that I’m suddenly free from all existential angst −I definitely do not mean that− but rather that it no longer takes such a prominent role in my life. Five years isn’t much, but enough has happened to me and within me to make me feel very far from the man who began that blog. In fact, in my most recent post, something just felt wrong. I felt like I was an imposter, pretending to be Dauntless when in fact I was not. So, then, who am I?

The answer came to me during one of my classes last semester, where we were discussing Edmund Husserl, a 19th- 20th-century German philosopher. The professor referred to Husserl’s view of what constitute mental acts, and I thought hey, that sounds like Mental Axe! That’s really cool that those words sound similar. 

And, voila! Mental Axe was born.

Mental Axe was conceived without dramatics. And I think this communicates something closer to the tone I hope to strike in this new blog. I’m not so lost as I once was. I’m not using this blog as therapy. I’m here to write about things I think are cool and to share them with you.

That being said, Mental Axe is more than just a cool name; each word plays a role in what I want this blog to be about.

MENTAL:

I like thinking about intellectual things. I like thinking about thinking. I want to write about things that are true and good and beautiful. I want to talk about what I know well: philosophy, politics, religion, history, literature, education, and fitness; but I might also engage in those things I know less well or not very much at all: visual art, movies and television, music, nutrition, and popular culture in general. This will be a blog about the so-called higher things.

AXE:

I want to help others think about these things, so I plan on sometimes posting instructional, meta-content. Also, I’m a passionate person who doesn’t shy away from a fight, and I like the symbol of an axe to represent my general aggression toward ideas and toward life. To extend the symbol even further, I want this blog to be more precise, more careful, and to provide reading material that is as pleasant, easy, and informative as possible. I aim to sharpen the mental axes of others; but, as the Book teaches, iron sharpens iron. I expect to grow as a result.

My direction will become clearer as I begin to write, but I will say that while not exhaustive, these are my highest ranking goals:

• Produce intellectual yet accessible content
• Write to be read
• Post at least every month

I hope I can stick with it!

– AW