Thoughts on Thoughts

Elliot -

So you are looking to do something that is physical and outdoorsy with smart and motivated kids. Have you considered a round of golf at the country club? Or perhaps a game of croquet? The point I'm making is that it seems you are missing an important requirement: you want to do something of value and meaning. This seems like something to point out maybe for the sake of your own "self-awareness." All the options you've listed below, especially AJWS, I think would meet my criteria for these three requirements.

You also might want to consider an internship at the Shalem Center. We both know who works there and it is certainly a leading institution. You can see the program here.

In regards to your thoughtful thoughts on my thoughts on thinking about blogging, I think it may be easier to address those thoughts in a numbered way, and in accordance with your bulleted post.

1)I agree. We should strive to maintain a blog that is substantive and not a regurgitation of conventional wisdom. Your reference to Nick Carr's piece in the Atlantic is striking to me because of how much it seems to have influenced our thinking on these issues. I think we are both inclined to agree with the articles thesis that the Internet is in fact limiting our ability to achieve more substantive forms of knowledge. The (overly ambitious?) intent of our blog seems to be to counter this disturbing trend.

In terms of your disinterest in TNR's blog, I admit similar feelings. I think it is largely a symptom of a common problem. Essentially, it's hard to write quality blog posts and also attract readers that can generate advertising revenue. Watch any cable news channel and you know how this can be true. It's probably also true with TNR, which is struggling to find it's niche in the world of online news.

I think this reality reinforces the need for independent and unpaid bloggers - like ourselves - who can try to write about the things that need to be written about, but that not everyone will see or even want to see. (Though it is always nice to get paid...)


2) I'm glad you called me out on how even the most self-aware of people can lack honesty or any form of moral guidance for that matter. I agree: self-awareness does not necessarily create the future Ghandis of our world. Just as mind control experts, impressive meditators, and excellent actors are not necessarily the most moral of characters. But barring the sociopaths of this world, it seems to me that self-awareness is an excellent place to start and realize our own moral character.

I think of self-awareness as an essential tool that can prevent dishonesty when combined with a person who is able and willing to pursue a life of integrity. So while self-awarness may not provide clear guidance on what to do with a strong mind, it should be a prerequerisite for a morally serious person.

3) So it seems here we may have something that we can really disagree on. If I seem "almost sure that offline interaction trumps an online interaction", than you seem the opposite. While I enjoy your anecdotes and even your idea of how this could be relevant to the world of social policy and mentoring, my inclination is that there is something profoundly superior about person-to-person interactions.

Still, I accept your point. If we were to develop a hierarchy of beneficial relationships an online relationship where people expressed themselves openly and honestly does seem better than a shallow and unproductive person-to-person relationship. (So maybe online mentoring programs are a good idea, if the alternative is poor.) However, I think that a positive person to person interaction is always better than an equally positive virtual interaction.

What do you think?

Happy 2010!

Z

ps I don't think we are alone here in criticiing the failure of our modern news system. Check out this new column from Andrew Cohen at the Atlantic Monthly.

Money quote: "Intellectual honesty and rigor, or reasoned, dispassionate analysis, is for wimps, public television and the occasional unscripted moment on the Sunday shows." Might he add the blogs of recent college graduates?

pps Two more years left for human civilization on planet earth. True or False?

Building, Awareness, and the Benefit of Online Chat

Zach,

I'd like to point out a few things I really enjoyed about your post:

• "As an inherently interactive blog, we can aim to increase our self-awareness"
  
  One of my qualms that I enumerated in my initial post is that blogs often broaden, and don't build, in the sense that we have scattered knowledge about a lot, but no deep knowledge about any one thing, which is essentially useless. (This was, as I remember, the central thesis of Nick Carr's article in The Atlantic). But here you signaled blogging as an approach to building: you write, "we can aim to increase our self-awareness."
  
  We're not just writing and hoping something develops. I don't think continued production works or means anything. (A favorite quote of mine, "We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.") That's why The New Republic's blog has lost resonance with me. It's just conventional wisdom commenting on other conventional wisdom. I don't think it serves to really educate, even though it does make us aware of political goings-on.
  
  Hopefully, a blog can have a trajectory that serves to deepen. And I haven't fingered my blogging trajectory yet, but I mostly know what it's not.
  

• "I think with awareness dishonesty becomes a lot harder and openness a lot easier, and that it ultimately makes for a much more interesting writer to read."
  
  I think this is a gorgeous point, but I don't agree with it. I see self-awareness as a tool (or force), that doesn't have a direction associated with it such as the honesty-dishonesty dimension. For example, in Zen in the Art of Archery, Herrigel became a master archer under the direction of Awa Kenzo. In order to achieve mastery, he had to cultivate a mental state that had much more to do with awareness than anything physical. After Herrigel returned to his native Germany, he became a Nazi. So the point is, how could someone who cultivated such great awareness go down such a wrong path?
  
  If you think about actors who are especially self-aware, you realize they are using their abilities to deceive or act. The beauty of Andy Kaufman's acts was that you were never sure whether he was faking it or being serious. Was he really traumatized by an audience laughing at him? He would make many believe so.
  
  Kerouac had a special style of writing. I remember his jive-talk in On the Road. But the stream-of-consciousness narrative style (I've got to read every book on this list) just has to be different from the psychological theory of stream-of-consciousness. William James' conception was that stream-of-consciousness refers to everything that is passing through the mind. Since much of what passes through the mind is pre-linguistic (all of these inarticulated thoughts), it would be very hard to record them all to paper. I won't say it's impossible to capture stream-of-consciousness to paper, and in fact, I think that's the benefit one gets from writing and meditating--capturing those fleeting thoughts and bringing them into reality through writing.
  

• "Personal interactions offer intangible human qualities that an internet community could never provide: a joke is always funnier with others to laugh with, and most would agree there to be a physical quality to loneliness"
  
  I think I can empathize with this point, because I can recall laughing so hard in person with friends. But I can also recall laughing during online conversation. I think that talking online, having the ability to leave your immediate time and place, and often communicate anonymously means that you don’t have to deal with a lot of social stigma or “layers.”
  
  You seem almost sure that offline interaction trumps an online interaction. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of Chris Langan, who demonstrated brilliance at an early age, but due to his poverty and the place where he grew up, he could not connect himself to the right mentors and professors. So he grew up, with IQ off the charts, working as a bar bouncer, finally married, and then spent his time in the rural country reading and working on a broad theory on physics, continuing to be cynical of universities and the general system (recall your paraphrasing of Obama who said we need to work within institutions...clearly it's bad that Langan had such a dismal outlook on universities as a function of his limited interaction with them).
  
  Or my good friend, I'll call her Tiffany, who found a chatroom on AIM in the 7th or 8th grade. She would come home after school and meet the same group of kids day after day. They were from all over the world. They developed deep friendships, had wondrous discussions, and their relationships persist to this day.
  
  Or my friend Katarina, growing up in rural Pennsylvania was turned on to fashion and books and movies from reading the Sunday New York Times. In an article one Sunday, the Times profiled a fashion blogger. So Katarina went online, found this blogger and discovered a whole community of like-minded people. Katarina's choice was to either follow fashion, music, movies, and discussion topics of her high school (to provide context, my public high school was generally into MTV and a culture of fake-toughness), or she could plug into this whole world of intrigue and humanism.
  
  The big point I'm trying to draw on is that online social networks can be a means of allowing people to express their inner beings. Maslow writes about the gap between "I want" and the "I am," which is to say that it is harder for us to enact the "I want" into the "I am" often because of our environment. We have not perfected dialogue through social networks yet, so the cases of Tiffany and Katarina are the exceptions and not the rule. But I think we can develop them to a point where our interests, wants, and needs can become better expressed, and through social networks we can find ways to help people bridge the "I want" and "I am."
  
  (This might be an interesting topic to draw on from a social policy perspective. One of the things I've heard Michelle Obama talk about is a need for more mentorship in society. It might be practical to reach young people through existing institutions. But consider that a large amount of young people's time is spent on Facebook and MySpace. If online social networks could better facilitate dialogue and a matching up of needs, I think it would be a key way to realize the need for mentoring.)
  

Elliot