A Little Less Conversation
I recently came across an interesting essay in the New Atlantis by Kit Wilson entitled Reading Ourselves to Death. It notes how the sheer quantity of text that we consume has increased almost exponentially in recent years, and that this may be having unforeseen consequences on our brains. Simply put, reading and writing is a form of abstraction — a way of imposing a structure on our experiences — and can sometimes blind us to the messy realities of everyday human existence. It can make us expect patterns that are not really there, or ignore those things that do not easily fit the framework. We can become obsessed with the rigorous clarity of the written text, often at the expense of the real world it is supposed to describe.
There’s a lot to be said here about how language shapes our reality, or the tricky relationship between words and objects, and other big philosophical topics like that. But I was particularly struck by the idea that reading too much might actually make you a bad person. And because I do read too much, it reminded me of the eighteenth-century philosopher and clergyman Joseph Butler.
Like many of the great thinkers of his time — David Hume, Adam Smith, Bishop Berkeley — Butler was something of an amateur psychologist. In his Analogy of Religion, he writes the following about the cultivation of good moral habits:
Resolutions … are properly acts. And endeavouring to force upon our own minds a practical sense of virtue, or to beget in others that practical sense of it which a man really has himself, is a virtuous act. All these, therefore, may and will contribute towards forming good habits.
In other words, actually making yourself do something is a more effective way to form a habit than just thinking about it. And that seems pretty uncontroversial.
But Butler actually goes further than this: not only is doing better than thinking, but that thinking alone may even be detrimental to forming good habits:
But going over the theory of virtue in one’s thoughts, talking well or drawing fine pictures of it, this is so far from necessarily or certainly conducting to form a habit of it in him who thus employs himself, that it may harden the mind in a contrary course, and render it gradually more insensible, i.e. form a habit of insensibility, to all moral considerations.
The more you think about it — ponder it, chew on it, turn it over in your head — the more accustomed to it you become, until it loses all of its force and vivacity. In the same way then that all of those action movies and violent video-games from my childhood desensitised me to violence, so too can all that hand-wringing and petitioning and #ThoughtsAndPrayers on twitter deaden your capacity for genuine human empathy.
Now that’s something worth thinking about.