A reminder to my U.S. readers: now that Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch is published here, you have an absolute moral and aesthetic obligation to buy it and read it. It is a magnificent book — and the first of a pair! (The second one is in progress.)
As we enter Holy Week and Lent draws to a close, I feel a certain relief; not just because I have given something up for Lent that I rather miss (in my case, beer), but because I find that Lent can quite easily become spiritually toxic – at least for me. It can turn into a purely human striving for perfection, of the kind that once became quite dangerous for me; it was, in fact, the scourge of performative spiritual perfection that was probably the single most dangerous thing I was exposed to at university. It was the one thing that nearly took me off the rails and risked turning me into something less than human, and I am thankful every day that I ultimately escaped it. Performative perfection is the besetting sin of people who define themselves, collectively or individually, as self-consciously devout; because once you make it part of your identity, you are socially locked into maintaining devout behaviour – or at least the appearance of devout behaviour, and that’s where the danger starts.
The [left hemisphere of the brain] is unreasonably optimistic, and it lacks insight into its limitations. The [right hemisphere] is more realistic, but tends towards the pessimistic.
— This from McGilchrist is especially interesting in light of my recent quote from Scruton’s The Uses of Pessimism.
I’m going in: The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist 📚
Bertrand Russell (1932):
Modern technic has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor necessary to produce the necessaries of life for every one. This was made obvious during the [Great] War. At that time all the men in the armed forces, all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or government offices connected with the War were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of physical well-being among wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance; borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The War showed conclusively that by the scientific organization of production it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If at the end of the War the scientific organization which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work had been preserved, and the hours of work had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that, the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.
This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous.
I started to blog something about this new Cal Newport essay, but then I thought: Why? Everyone already knows all this. If you haven’t changed your habits by now, are you likely to do so? Newport is right to say that there is precedent for a widespread transformation of American habits, but the difference between our current situation and the unhealthy-eating-no-exercise 1950s is that those previous bad habits weren’t nearly as addictive as the ones that are consuming human minds today.
Chatbots’ brains don’t have a right hemisphere.
My former professor Don Hirsch, who late in his career turned from literary theory and hermeneutics to education reform, is still writing about education — at the age of 98. I’m trying to decide whether I want him to be my role model….