Daniel Massett

Tag: philosophy

  • My Students Don’t Know What a “Community” Is

    Socrates, in Plato’s “Phaedrus”, says that there is a danger in learning to write. He fears that, with this new technology, people will lose their memory and will become less wise, seeming to be very wise for having read, but being in truth unwise for never having thought through anything on their own or through dialogue with another. Writing, in short, is bad. It is a technology best ignored.

    This is a famous scene from Plato, famous as to almost be a cliche reference. Yet, it should give us fresh pause here to note that something we don’t even consider a technology or to have any negative effects could once have been thought of as a danger, a thought worth lingering on a while. Most of us wish we read more, or that our children read more, or that our society read more. We hear Plato, but perhaps our mind immediately turns to what we’ve gained through writing–access to different cultures, history, the Great Books, empathy and compassion and understanding!

    Yet, did we actually lose our memory? Perhaps individually we have, and as communities, we almost certainly have. How many of us know our family history? Know the street our parents grew up on? Our grandparents? In losing our own ability to reflect and converse, our wisdom has been lessened along with our memory.

    This loss of wisdom through communal memory became apparent to me through an essay I assign each semester to my college freshman which tasks them with locating a problem within their community and researching a potential solution. Anxiety sets in immediately. Some look lost, hopeless even.  I’m not trying to be dramatic or overwrought–they really don’t know how to begin this assignment, which is the largest grade of the semester. Inevitably, when I approach these students to ask if they have any questions, they tell me they don’t understand the assignment.

    “Well, what’s your community?” I say.

    “I’m not sure.”

    “Where did you go to school? Church? What town did you grow up in? Who are the people you’ve grown up with and known all your life?”

    Some are able to step off here, and I have received some great essays written about local communities. Essays about the need for walking spaces, essays about basketball courts in disrepair. But many still cannot. Instead of being prompted by these questions, they shrug. They still don’t know how to move forward. With this type of student, I then say, “What about a community online? Maybe you’re part of a video game community, or a community of people with similar health problems, or whatever.”

    These students then light up. “Oh! I can write about that?”

    I tell them yes, and they’re off to the races.

    They don’t have a local community. They have an internet community. 

    Do you see what has happened? Technology–here, the internet, social media, and so on–have robbed these students of something once an obvious part of human life, namely, the fact that everyone lives their life around others and shares a life with them. Those people are your community. Technology that, yes, plugged my students in with people who share an interest, has also completely disconnected them from an actual flesh and blood community of the people who live on their street, go to their school, their church, their parks, their restaurants, their grocery stores. They don’t even realize it has happened. They don’t know another way. Technology that was forced on them from childhood robbed them of something essential to human life.

    This is but one example. And the fact is, far more frightening technologies, ones with very little obvious good and much obvious bad, are right around the corner with AI and the new Transhuman technologies headed our way. AI has destroyed my students’ ability to write and their ability to think. Perhaps “destroyed” is the wrong word, as that implies it was there to begin with. Rather, they were robbed of it. AI came out in their prime learning years of middle and high school, and by the time they reach college, they perhaps have not set down their own words in years. They also don’t want to do research–after all, the AI can summarize research for them! But of course, they lose the strengthening of the mind through deep reading and interpreting and correlating facts. It’s as though they’ve only eaten baby mush–if presented with a steak, they find it distasteful because they no longer know how to chew. One day, perhaps they’ll see nothing wrong with their jaws being removed from lack of use. “Don’t give in to AI!” I tell them. “I teach you writing not so that you can get an A in a class, but so that you can write a Maid if Honor speech for your sister, or a letter to a friend going through a hard time, or a eulogy at your father’s funeral.” But to many students, I fear such examples are too abstract, too far away, and the allure of the easy A and a night spent smoking pot and playing Fortnite and scrolling Tinder are so real and so tantalizingly close….

    We have come, I think, to the place CS Lewis saw in his masterpiece, The Abolition of Man, where we have begun to give up the very things that makes us human, to cede over our humanity and the humanity of the future to technocrats, CEOs, Silicon Valley, the powers that be. 

    Why is this happening? I think, for one, those in power wish to create the Homo Deus, to reference Yuval Noah Harari’s work of the same name. This is, I think, the great modern project, one dreamt if in Comte and Nietzche and Feurerbach and in the minds if countless scientists and technologists and businessmen who could profit from it. These are the very same people who now run our world. It is the secular project to create the man who is forever young, beautiful, to finally cast off the yoke of religion which they see as tied only to our fear of death and psychological need for an afterlife. If we live forever, then we need not worry about these things. They have encouraged us to think this same way. We worship celebrities who don’t seem to age. We turn to gurus like Dr. David Sinclair who promise eternal life on this earth (even as he begins to appear more and more sickly, more and more wasted away). We try to keep up with modern slang as though we’re going to be here always to use it. We all study STEM, being so certain there is no future in the Humanities and all future in perfect health and new technology. If we could cure cancer, cure obesity, cure alzheimers, cure death itself. Pills pills pills. Botox and plastic surgery. This is the culture we are in. It’s the water we all swim in. If you don’t, it is because you actively resist. Dead fish swim with the current.

    It is also happening because of our wrongheaded idea of progress. We think of moving in one of two directions: forward or backward. Again, we are convinced from an early age that everything new is good. Of course we should perform trans surgeries. Of course we should perform abortions. Of course we should use IVF. And once we start, of course we can never stop. That would be Draconian! But we fail to see that we can not only move forwards or backwards, but we can also climb up or down, and this is a far more important movement to consider. We can grow colder, more violent, wishing evil on our political opponents. We can grow bitter, doomscrolling until we are certain everything is over. We can grow detached, thinking our lives don’t matter. Or we can grow bold, loving others, really loving them and looking them in the face and speaking to them. We can grow devout, going to church and thinking often of our God and if we are living up to His call for an adventurous life. We can grow happier, the rich, deep happiness of a life spent doing the right thing over the easy thing. 

    Every person has to look inside themselves every day and ask fundamental questions. Am I living the life I am meant to? How did I fail those around me who need me? How can I be better? Notice, these questions will not lead to top-down, idealistic and ideological solutions, the kind you will hear from the elites at the World Economic Forum or Silicon Valley. They will not lead to prescriptions everyone must follow. The answer to those questions will differ for all depending on their own lives and their own days, which are all we are responsible for. We may have to give up certain things we’ve grown accustomed to. I block the internet on my phone. I’m considering doing away with video games. I don’t drink except on the right occasion. Why? I want to be a present dad and husband. I want to be a great fiction writer. I want to read some books, because, though Plato is correct, books are a technology I think have benefitted me more than harmed me. Though I also don’t want to read too much, because I can become obsessive about reading and begin ignoring more important things. Simply, I want to live. I don’t want to live a life that is actually death in disguise. 

    We can give ourselves over completely to technology, and many do. Even hearing these arguments, many will shrug and say that it’s the way of the future–why worry or resist? It will certainly end up just fine. But of course, this isn’t true. Technology, especially this newer stripe, always promises us more life but actually robs us of it. The alternative is that we reclaim ourselves, and when we reclaim ourselves, we can come to reclaim our relationships, and from our relationships, our communities, and perhaps then, for a time, our world. 

  • Fiction Writing and Conservatism

    Artists, it seems, are not typically conservatives. They seem to broadly fit into a lower-p progressive category, and indeed, it can often seem that most artists by and large despise the past.

    This is disconcerting as a fiction writer and something of a conservative, certainly of the lower-c order, of having a deep, abiding love for the past. I love the ways people have learned to live, the traditions, big and small, weird and wonderful, that have hung on. I love ritual and pageantry and holiday and leisure. I love that someone one hundred years ago may have read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a boy and passed it down to his children, who passed it down to their children. I love that, not to get into the academic debate around the facts, a blind man named Homer spoke a poem called The Iliad thousands of years ago, and we have retold that poem ever since. It’s something like magic, something like proof that we have a soul, something like a “golden thread” connecting every single person in the West.

    Yet, a basic impulse of the artist is to long for the new. This is one of the reasons, I think, that artists flock to places like New York City, where a confluence of the entire world is always smashing together and breaking apart, and life always seems to find some new fusion, some new color, some new way of being that seems to offer unlimited potential for the creative, the artist of any practice, be it painting, or writing, or cooking, or building a building, or designing a dress. This is the raw stuff of creativity. The conservative artist may become too deeply distrustful of the present or future, and is then blocked off from this basic impulse.

    Or it is at least part of the artist’s basic impulse, though not all. The other part of it–it must be so–is loving the past. After all, why would you be a writer unless you had read something that moved you so deeply and so truly that you could not possibly find any other path forward in life but to write yourself? You must have loved someone else’s writing first, and then chosen to write. After all, you didn’t invent writing! You loved a writer, a work of fiction or nonfiction or poetry, and it knocked you so flat that when you arose, you had no choice but to pursue the very thing that left you horizontal. You must have loved food first, and then chosen to cook. You must have been inside one building and hated being there, then stepped inside another building and loved being there, and have been inspired to build a building yourself. You actually cannot separate yourself from that which came before. And in the same way, I find many great artists are those who stay put in their home, or whose writing stays put, and rather than examining the grand planned structures of a NYC examine the strange, well-worn yet illogical pathways of the small town, writers like Wendell Berry and Flannery O’Connor. I think of the image of Levin in Anna Karenina, who works his fields, which are a great mystery to him that he never tires of. Yet, I also love the NYC art, the bands like The Velvet Underground and The Strokes and Television, whom I saw live, and Geese, or a band like Vampire weekend, whom I’ve seen live twice, who seem to capture everything about modern life in a single song.

    The conservative artist, on the one hand, seems to always be attempting to recapture some past glory, or reimagine the past to be a place everyone should love the way they love, or explore some well-worn form. The progressive artist, on the other hand, seems to always be attempting to make the future through their art, either by creating utopias like those they would like to see, or at least, creating our world or future worlds or past worlds with progressive, utopian elements, or by ruthlessly criticizing our own contemporary world. Of course, there is much to dream of for the future, and there is much to be said for imagining into the past or criticizing the present, and it’s not a totally neat distinction, though it seems the distinction is there nevertheless.

    The issue, on both sides of the argument, is that we are looking at it all the wrong way. We must, like some strongman or superhero, straddling an enormous chasm, embracing two things which threaten to tear them apart, embracing both these impulses and looking beyond them. As Bob Dylan, always one to follow his own North Star, said at a political award ceremony as each side tried to claim him as their own, “To me, there is no Left or Right. There is only Up or Down, and I’m on my way Up.” What can this mean except that our own distinctions between Left and Right, progressive and conservative through the lens of politics or culture at large, are faulty in that neither constitute a real, three-dimensional, total worldview. They only mark what our two-party political system is pragmatically attempting to enact at any one place and time. This political worldview leaves no room for things too big for either party, like mystery, and love, and capital-T Truth, and capital-B Beauty, and right and wrong, and the rest.

    So, as with all things, the only way out is through.

    One has to read deeply and thoroughly–perhaps someone can enjoy Goethe and Geese–and also try to live their lives the best they can. This seems to be good advice for any person, and it is good advice for the writer specifically. Ideological thinking is one of the great generators of bad art. Ideological thinking is a combustion engine, and it fuels the writer down well-worn roads, none of which can will ever lead to the heights needed to write something that truly sees the whole picture.

    These roads lead only to specific sights, dependent on the place and time.

    Progressive art, at this moment, seems to lead only to sights of institutional racism, the evils of capitalism, the evils of men, the virtues of manlike women, the virtues of womanish men, the beauty of androgynous men and masculine women, the idea that all systems are only means of power, the benefits of throwing off the past, the destruction of old forms and the celebration of the new (how many short stories do we read that are in the form of a PowerPoint, or a job application, or a series of emails, or a baby name book, or a summary of every episode of Law & Order: SVU), and so on. We get art like Moonlight, or James, or The Rings of Power, or Everything Everywhere All At Once, or One Battle After Another. You’ll find that the progressive art considered great is always the thing made this year, or maybe a year before that, and it’s best if no one knows about it and it loses it’s cool when people do know.

    Conservative art shows us the familiar sights of pure good triumphing over pure evil, the virtues of manly men and womanly women, arguments between Christianity and Atheism where Christianity always triumphs, the benefits of Capitalism, the pitfalls of Communism, the endurance of old forms, and so on. We get art like God’s Not Dead, or The Chosen or “anything by C.S. Lewis.” You’ll find that most great art people call conservative was made at least 100 years ago, though the further into the past, the better. Of course, this means that some progressive art eventually becomes conservative art as the passage of time makes the past’s revolutions seem quaint and comforting and familiar.

    In fiction, all the settings, characters, plot, and the rest must fall in with one of these two visions, these woefully incomplete visions, and the art must put forward these rhetorical ideas often at the expense of the beauty of the art itself.

    But there is another way! There must be another way! And there must be another way because the world is so much bigger than either of these visions, because the depths are so much deeper, because the heights are so much higher, because reality is so much more real! The great Tracy K. Smith pointed to this in a small Q&A I attended in college, where she said something to the effect of “Art is not the place for your opinions, the opinions you might share at a dinner party. It is a place beyond that.” Yes, the place is Beauty, a place of deeper, abiding vision, married to Truth, a place that does not grow old but ever-young, a place always waiting to be discovered a new and whose fields and mountains and prairies and cities and castles and desserts and chasms are always to be discovered by the artist who dares journey beyond and the audience who dares go along with them. Only with this can artist continue to meet their art in the present moment, where past and future and truth all collide in the various forms of creation.

    pictured: the cover art of William Basinki’s Disintegration Loops

  • Antigone, 12 Angry Men, and the Mystery of the Human Heart

    Once, at a teacher conference, a literature teacher summed up his ideas on teaching literature to me. “Literature,” he said, “is just philosophy that’s fun to read. That’s all it is.”

    Being young and not particularly quick-witted–after all, I’m only addressing this now, five years later, in an essay–I used one of my stock responses when something seemed to me at once true and false, either “Huh,” or “Hmm,” or “That’s interesting.” Perhaps I used all three, one after the next. But regardless of my response, what he said has stuck with me for years as I’ve worked through my two artistic endeavors–teaching and writing fiction.

    Before that point, I had tried for years to write fiction that would make people think. My process was something like this–settle on an image or story, settle on some theme, and work like hell to marry the two, like some crazed matchmaker bent on joining the two instincts of my mind. After all, I had loved literature classes in high school, and I majored in English in college, and much of what was done in those classes was trying to “understand” the texts, coming to some interpretation that one could write out in an essay or impress other students with during class discussion. When I began writing fiction, before I set the first words of a draft down, I was thinking about the interpretation of my story, what I wanted it to mean, what I wanted my reader to get out of it. And as a teacher, this is how I taught my students as well.

    But at the teaching conference where I was confronted with my peer’s pithy take on fiction and philosophy, it struck me as wrong, and I found I was uncomfortable confronted by something that I could have said myself only a year or two before. A few things had begun to happen. First, I had begun reading philosophy. I was struck by wonder at hearing, on several different occasions, friends having conversations that I was simply unable to follow. I recognized that they were talking about something, perhaps that something being everything, or certainly, that something being of utmost, life-or-death importance. And yet I stood as though outside a room, unable to enter, lacking the key. So I asked them what I should read, and they recommended Plato and Boethius as well as John Paul II. So my journey, long and arduous and ongoing, began, and I found that reading philosophy, with its highly logical, propositional arguments and deep reasoning, was really not like reading fiction at all.

    The next thing that began to happen was that I started reading the Bible. Or, more like it, I started having the Bible read to me by one Fr. Mike Schmitz, a testament to how technology need not be all bad. The Bible’s influence began to change and deepen my worldview, which, though it had been inspired by those who knew and loved the Scriptures, had never gone through this one true Source on its own. My faith was deepening, and I was trying to put it into practice.

    Last, all the while I was attending Miami University’s MFA program, and I was learning quickly that ideological writing was not good writing. This is the kind of thing that I had heard many writers say, but that didn’t become part of my own way of being until I began to run up against how awful my fiction was when I was thinking more about themes, ideas, messages than things like plot, character, setting, details, sentence structure, and the like. My fiction was bad, and the only way to make it better became, in a creative breakthrough, to let go of the idea of writing essays disguised as stories, the “mongrel thing” that Flannery O’Connor refers to in Mystery and Manners. Suddenly, I found, I could write anything, where before, my stories by and large fell apart before I finished them, or ended dull, sterile, lifeless, lacking any mystery. I came to think that, while philosophy and fiction were connected, it was in a far different way than I had initially thought. Philosophy, or more broadly, worldview, is the stuff that stories are cut from. The fiction writer has a way of seeing, and that way of seeing comes through in the stories that they tell, through plot, character, and so on. The story is not a set of propositions that come to a logical conclusion, but rather, a series of events, of characters making decisions and facing consequences in certain times and places, that come together like a great tapestry and communicate something deeper than an idea, but rather, a whole way of seeing reality itself. The writer need not think about themes and ideas–they are working with something far more complex and mysterious that will come through all the more the less they consider it. You are dealing with worldview and also the deep mysteries of the human heart, things that philosophy struggles to deal with, particularly the latter.

    Two of the most logical, philosophical, dialectical works of art–Sophocles’ Antigone and Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Me–seem to actually prove this point. Teaching Antigone was a revelation, both as a writer and teacher. Antigone seems deeply philosophical and dialectical. Antigone seems to represent the Justice of the gods, true Justice, while Creon represents the justice of the state, a lowercase, flawed kind of justice. The two are at odds with each other and have several exchanges over which form of justice is knowable and must be followed. The entire thrust of the narrative is the thrust of this argument. And yet, as Antigone is sentenced to death, she gives this monologue:

    “Yet he who thinks will praise what I have done.
    Never, were I a mother and my son
    Lay dead, were I a wife and he that died
    My husband, never had I so defied
    My City’s will. Ye ask me on what ground?
    A husband lost, another might be found;
    Another son be born if one were slain.
    But I, when Hades holds my parents twain,
    Must brotherless abide for evermore.
    Therefore I did thee honour, and therefore:
    Hath Creon called me mad, my brother, yea,
    A doer of evil. And I am led away
    Unwed, unsung, robbed of the love that should
    In right be mine and joy of motherhood.
    Friendless, by fate accursed, with my breath
    Yet warm, they cast me to the House of Death.”

    Antigone doesn’t care about her logical arguments about Justice. She loved her brother. That’s all, and that’s what she was willing to risk it all for. She would not have done it for a husband, or her own child had she any. She did it for her brother, for never would she have another brother. It’s quite a strange and cruel, yet also true and lovely, sentiment, all twisted and gnarled. She seems to have used reason about divine Justice and the gods, merely as a cover-up to her true, strange, foreign intentions. Here, the mystery of the human heart is laid bare, and we can only step back in silent wonder.

    A similar moment is found in Twelve Angry Men. At the end of that film, only one juror, Juror 3, is holding out with a guilty verdict. Finally, he reveals why.

    “The whole thing about hearing the boy yell? The phrase was ‘I’m gonna kill you.’ That’s what he said. To his own father. I don’t care what kind of man that was. It was his father. That goddamn rotten kid. I know him. What they’re like. What they do to you. How they kill you every day. My God, don’t you see? How come I’m the only one who sees? Jeez, I can feel the knife goin’ in.”

    Juror 3 here is willing to sentence a young man to death because of his own fractured relationship with his own son. His heart is on full display for us, and soon after this pivotal moment, the movie ends. We have seen the human heart laid bare. There is little else to see.

    In each of these stories, and in any story worth anything, the human heart is laid bare, as is all of reality–in the movement of plot, in characterization, in sentence structure or shot framing, in how the story ends and how the story begins, all of it works together to reveal an entire way of seeing the world. This also, in part, explains why no two authors write the same story, even if the premise may be similar. The two authors have two ways of seeing the world by their two separate lives.

    I am sure in future posts I will address these issues one at a time, more specifically, but for now I can say that my writing and teaching has improved that I no longer teach literature as philosophy that’s fun to read, a statement which belittles philosophy and literature. After all, why read philosophy if fiction is more fun, and where does beauty go if all that matters is logical ideas?