“To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum concluded in considering how to live with our human fragility. And yet in the face of overwhelming uncertainty, when the world seems to splinter and crumble in the palm of our civilization’s hand, something deeper and more robust than blind trust is needed to keep us anchored to our own goodness — something pulsating with rational faith in the human spirit and a profound commitment to goodness.
That is what Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) explores in the out-of-print treasure New Hopes for a Changing World (public library), composed a year after he received the Nobel Prize, while humanity was still shaking off the dust and dread of its Second World War and already shuddering with the catastrophic nuclear threat of the Cold War.
Bertrand Russell
Observing that his time, like ours, is marked by “a feeling of impotent perplexity” and “a deep division in our souls between the sane and the insane parts,” Russell considers the consequence such total world-overwhelm has on the human spirit:
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
And yet, with his unfaltering reasoned optimism, he insists that there is an alternate view of our human destiny — one that vitalizes rather than paralyzes, based on “the completest understanding of the moods, the despairs, and the maddening doubts” that beset us; one that helps mitigate the worst of Western culture — “our restlessness, our militarism, our fanaticism, and our ruthless belief in mechanism” — and amplifies the best in it: “the spirit of free inquiry, the understanding of the conditions of general prosperity, and emancipation from superstition.” He examines the root of our modern perplexity, perhaps even more pronounced in our time than it was in his:
Traditional systems of dogma and traditional codes of conduct have not the hold that they formerly had. Men and women are often in genuine doubt as to what is right and what is wrong, and even as to whether right and wrong are anything more than ancient superstitions. When they try to decide such questions for themselves they find them too difficult. They cannot discover any clear purpose that they ought to pursue or any clear principle by which they should be guided. Stable societies may have principles that, to the outsider, seem absurd. But so long as the societies remain stable their principles are subjectively adequate. That is to say they are accepted by almost everybody unquestioningly, and they make the rules of conduct as clear and precise as those of the minuet or the heroic couplet. Modern life, in the West, is not at all like a minuet or a heroic couplet. It is like free verse which only the poet can distinguish from prose.
This torment, Russell argues, is simply the growing pains of our civilization. When we reach maturity, we would attain a life “full of joy and vigour and mental health.” Building on his lifelong reckoning with the meaning of the good life and the nature of happiness, he writes:
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good. Unhappiness is deeply implanted in the souls of most of us.
[…]
A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams.
He offers a lucid and luminous prescription for attaining the good life, individually and as a society:
What I should put in the place of an ethic in the old sense is encouragement and opportunity for all the impulses that are creative and expansive. I should do everything possible to liberate men from fear, not only conscious fears, but the old imprisoned primeval terrors that we brought with us out of the jungle. I should make it clear, not merely as an intellectual proposition, but as something that the heart spontaneously believes, that it is not by making others suffer that we shall achieve our own happiness, but that happiness and the means to happiness depend upon harmony with other men. When all this is not only understood but deeply felt, it will be easy to live in a way that brings happiness equally to ourselves and to others. If men could think and feel in this way, not only their personal problems, but all the problems of world politics, even the most abstruse and difficult, would melt away. Suddenly, as when the mist dissolves from a mountain top, the landscape would be visible and the way would be clear. It is only necessary to open the doors of our hearts and minds to let the imprisoned demons escape and the beauty of the world take possession.
“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the measure of an unwasted life is not what outlives it but how it was lived — how much integrity and authenticity and creative vitality filled these numbered days, these unrepeatable hours.
Most of us will not leave behind a revolutionary insight into the nature of the universe, but we too forget that no matter what we do leave behind — a line of DNA, a great book, a hospital wing — it is only, in poet Muriel Rukeyser’s shimmering words, in the living moment that “we touch life and all the energy of the past and future”; it is only, in poet Mario Benedetti’s shimmering words, when we cease sparing ourselves and start spending ourselves that we come truly alive.
The most prolific diarist of all the Transcendentalists, Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) takes up the question of what that means throughout his voluminous notebooks. Between story ideas (one of which became The Scarlet Letter), tender records of raising his young son, and lyrical accounts of his rambles in nature, he keeps reckoning with how to live in order not to look back with “a lament for life’s wasted sunshine.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Fatherless since the age of four, so achingly introverted he was reported to duck behind trees and rocks to avoid speaking with townspeople, described by Hermann Melville (who wrote him passionate love letters and dedicated Moby-Dick to him) as a man of “great, genial, comprehending silences,” Hawthorne felt deeply the brevity of life and the urgency of filling it with meaning — nowhere more movingly than in watching his young daughter interact with his dying mother. He understood that the haunting proximity of death is precisely why we can’t afford to live a short distance from alive; that while there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, it falls on us to make ours beautiful.
In a journal entry from his early thirties, Hawthorne writes:
All sorts of persons, and every individual, has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not.
In a sentiment Nietzsche would echo a generation later in his insistence that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Hawthorne observes that we must each make that choice for ourselves and find our own place, seeing past the values of our upbringing, the templates of our culture, and the permission slips of our epoch. To lose our “own aspect” in these imprints is for Hawthorne nothing less than “a mortal symptom of a person.” We can’t, he cautions, “use other people’s experience.” But in order to use our own, to learn from it so that our lives may broaden and deepen, we must first learn to trust ourselves, developing a “feeling within” of “what is true and what is false” without in order to have “the right perception of things.”
Because the mind is the crucible of experience and perception, there is no greater waste of life than the waste of mind. Admonishing against his era’s equivalent of scrolling a social media feed, Hawthorne writes:
The peculiar weariness and depression of spirits which is felt after a day wasted in turning over a magazine or other light miscellany, different from the state of the mind after severe study; because there has been no excitement, no difficulties to be overcome, but the spirits have evaporated insensibly.
A year into his thirties, not knowing he had already lived more than half his store of living, Hawthorne itemizes what it would take to have an unwasted life:
Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one’s genius.
In his time, the word “genius” retained more of its original Latin connotation, meaning not only one’s creative talent or intellectual prowess but one’s essential spirit. It is the body that trembles with aliveness, but it is the spirit that animates it with life. Hawthorne never lost sight of a fundamental truth our productivity-obsessed culture is continually negating at its own expense: What fortifies the spirit to do its work in the world, be it art or activism, often appears on the surface as wasted time — the hours spent walking in a forest and watching the clouds over the city skyline and pebble-hunting on the beach, the purposeless play of the mind daydreaming and body dancing, all the while ideas and fortitudes fermenting within.
Reflecting on one such period of his life, filled with tending to his vegetable garden, reading, napping, walking with his wife, picking white lilies from the riverside and scarlet cardinal-flowers from the edge of the pond, Hawthorne writes:
My life, at this time, is more like that of a boy, externally, than it has been since I was really a boy… My business is merely to live and to enjoy; and whatever is essential to life and enjoyment will come as naturally as the dew from Heaven.
[…]
I look back upon a day spent in what the world would call idleness, and for which I can myself suggest no more appropriate epithet; and which, nevertheless, I cannot feel to have been spent amiss. True; it might be a sin and shame, in such a world as ours, to spend a lifetime in this manner; but, for a few summer-weeks, it is good to live as if the world were Heaven. And so it is, and so it shall be; although, in a little while, a flitting shadow of earthly care and toil might mingle itself with our realities.
Friendship is the sunshine of life — the quiet radiance that makes our lives not only livable but worth living. (This is why we must use the utmost care in how we wield the word friend.) In my own life, friendship has been the lifeline for my darkest hours of despair, the magnifying lens for my brightest joys, the quiet pulse-beat beneath the daily task of living. You can glean a great deal about a person from the constellation of friends around the gravitational pull of their personhood. “Whatever our degree of friends may be, we come more under their influence than we are aware,” the trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell observed as she contemplated how we co-create each other and recreate ourselves in friendship. Her friend Ralph Waldo Emerson — whom she taught to look through a telescope — believed that all true friendship rests on two pillars. In his own life, he put the theory into practice in his friendship with his young protégé Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) — a solitary and achingly introverted person himself, who thought deeply and passionately about the rewards and challenges of friendship.
Henry David Thoreau (Daguerreotype by Benjamin D. Maxham, 1856)
Why should I speak to my friends? for how rarely is it that I am I; and are they, then, they? We will meet, then, far away.
Several months later, just before the Christmas holidays with their cruel magnifying lens of loneliness for the lonely, he rues his inability to connect openheartedly:
My difficulties with my friends are such as no frankness will settle. There is no precept in the New Testament that will assist me. My nature, it may be, is secret. Others can confess and explain; I cannot.
Thoreau finds himself pocked with self-doubt about his ability to connect, his sense of isolation at times swelling into punitive despair:
Nothing makes me so dejected as to have met my friends, for they make me doubt if it is possible to have any friends. I feel what a fool I am.
Over and over, Thoreau anguishes with the extreme shyness and reticence of his nature, longs for a confidante beyond the diary page, longs for companionship beyond the birds and the trees. On a beautiful spring Sunday, he despairs:
I have got to that pass with my friend that our words do not pass with each other for what they are worth. We speak in vain; there is none to hear. He finds fault with me that I walk alone, when I pine for want of a companion; that I commit my thoughts to a diary even on my walks, instead of seeking to share them generously with a friend; curses my practice even. Awful as it is to contemplate, I pray that, if I am the cold intellectual skeptic whom he rebukes, his curse may take effect, and wither and dry up those sources of my life, and my journal no longer yield me pleasure nor life.
Months after publishing Walden, with its lyrical celebration of solitude, his loneliness deepens into a primal scream of longing for connection:
What if we feel a yearning to which no breast answers? I walk alone. My heart is full. Feelings impede the current of my thoughts. I knock on the earth for my friend. I expect to meet him at every turn; but no friend appears, and perhaps none is dreaming of me.
And yet this openhearted longing is itself the only real raw material of friendship — only by surrendering to it, with all the vulnerability this demands of us, do we become receptive to the longing of others, the mutual yearning for connection that is shared heartbeat of humanity. Thoreau quietly intuits this equivalence, so that when he does connect, when he does feel the warm glow of friendship envelop him, it is nothing less than an exultation:
Ah, my friends, I know you better than you think, and love you better, too.
At only twenty-four, Thoreau had arrived at a foundational fact of living — his own grand unified theory of human connection, which he spent the remainder of his short life trying, often with touching difficulty, to put into practice:
Friends are those twain who feel their interests to be one. Each knows that the other might as well have said what he said. All beauty, all music, all delight springs from apparent dualism but real unity. My friend is my real brother.
Pulsating beneath all of his uneasy reckonings is a deep-thinking, deep-feeling recognition of the essence of friendship:
The field where friends have met is consecrated forever. Man seeks friendship out of the desire to realize a home here… The friend is like wax in the rays that fall from our own hearts. My friend does not take my word for anything, but he takes me. He trusts me as I trust myself. We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.
This is our paradox: We know that uncertainty is the substrate of the universe, is the crucible of creativity, is the path to truth, and yet we spend our lives searching for certainty. The word auspicious derives from the Latin auspex — one who examines the flight of birds for omens and divinations of the future. Today, our birds are made of bits — wind-up larks of our own making we call algorithms — but they serve the same function: to let us believe that we can divine the future in order to respond to it; to sedate our anxieties of living by selling us the illusion of control over the unknowable.
All power structures are prisons we choose to live inside and all prediction technologies are power structures. Prophets have always been the true governors of empires, first counsels to kings, final ventriloquists of the future.
We can never break free from the uncertainties of living, for we ourselves are bright violations of probability, but we can break free from the prison of prediction in order to be more alive: The great mercy of life is that we can change, we can reroute, we can surprise ourselves — that our future is not the computational sum of our past and our destiny not a deterministic equation but an ongoing process constantly creating itself, the way a memory reconstitutes itself with each retelling. Every algorithm that tries to tell us what we will like or do next based on what we have liked or done previously is stealing our self-respect — the respect for the fundamental capacity for self-surprise that makes life worth living — and selling it back to us at the price of the product.
How to defend this vital aspect of our humanity, of life itself, from the merchants of prediction is what Carissa Véliz explores in Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI (public library) — a book that, in an epoch when it is difficult to say anything original about AI, offers a revelatory look at the prison we have chosen to live inside and a key out.
She writes:
The computer scientists of today play the same role in power and prophecy as the oracles of the ancient world, the astrologers of the Middle Ages, and the social scientists of the nineteenth century, as we will see… Prophets are merchants of prediction… Artificial intelligence is the new Oracle of Delphi. The likes of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Eric Schmidt sharing drinks with presidents and prime ministers is reminiscent of Nostradamus advising Catherine de’ Medici, and Rasputin counseling Nicholas II.
[…]
Predictions are often power moves disguised as quests for knowledge. Even when predictions are sincere, they can create currents of political influence that change the world. They become power moves.
She offers a fascinating history of how such technologies of power became possible, became desirable, became the norm — a history that chronicles the shift from the spiritual to the statistical, from faith to blind trust:
With God gradually moving into a background position, the grip of fate loosened. Along with worldviews that could make sense of and contemplate the notion that chance might play an important role in the world, the invention of printing with movable type in the middle of the fifteenth century facilitated the development of abstract numerical thinking, and with it, scientific inquiry and bureaucratic organization.
[…]
Trust in numbers was partly born out of distrust in people.
It was not only the Church’s disapproval that led to a decline in traditional forms of divination; common people were tired of depending on experts to catch a glimpse of the future. Reading animal entrails or the flight of birds is not obvious, and astrology is technical. The opaqueness of these methods facilitated fabrication, errors, and corruption. Divinatory lots such as dice are ways of potentially communicating with the gods in an open way, visible and readable to all. They also invite asking questions about randomness and probability, which might have contributed to probabilistic thinking. But dice were unfit for purpose in the Enlightenment and beyond. Games of chance were associated with gambling and vice, and leaving decisions to pure chance was counter to rationality. Statistics came to the rescue.
After getting a kick start from astronomers, statistics developed mostly thanks to bureaucrats who were responding to challenges in public life. It was a practical endeavor, not a scientific one. Merchants, bankers, farmers, militaries, and tax officials needed to count in standardized ways. Extensive trade needs prices and measures, and therefore extensive quantification. As bureaucracies grew, standardization and public justification were necessary. There was also the question of how to hide power struggles to make them look as rational as possible. Numbers, standards, and statistics make politics and power invisible. That’s convenient to anyone wanting to justify what they do as free from values.
Behind our trust in numbers is a closely related philosophical idea: that values cannot be derived from facts.
Which, of course, they cannot. None of the things we most value — not mountains, not music, not love — can be reduced to a set a facts. Numbers and figures can contour for us what the world is — truly or falsely — but they can never shade in how to live in it, how to share it, how to reshape it into the kind of world we want to live in. Statistical probability will never tell us anything about the reach of possibility. Probability theory pioneer Marc Kac himself recognized that all creative acts — those triumphs of our humanity — spring from “a world with its own passions, elations and despairs, and it is here that… one may even hear the voice of God.”
Véliz counters the cultural myth we have been sold:
The world is not inherently statistical; we made it so by quantifying it, the better to control it.
Statistics invented society. Since the statistical regularities in phenomena like crime and suicide could not be traced to individual actions, these patterns became attributed to “society” itself. Society became a living entity, above and beyond the individuals constituting it. From 1830, these numerical regularities were interpreted as the most compelling evidence of society’s existence. Statistics invented normal people too.
[…]
Probabilistic thinking changed our views of reality (our metaphysics), how we think about what we know (our epistemology), what we count as a good argument and an explanation (our logics), and how we think of the good life (our ethics). It might have even changed the way we think about how we think.
It didn’t just change us, it killed something essential of our nature — the shimmering irregularity that makes each of us who we are, a singular constellation of atoms and story unmatched in all the history and future of the universe. She writes:
The murderers were philosophers, gamblers, mathematicians, sociologists, insurers, and, above all, bureaucrats. The murder weapons were quantification, data collection, and statistical tools like the normal curve… The motive was power, understood broadly: from astronomers wanting to predict the skies for the purposes of navigation and timekeeping, to insurers wanting to make a profit, to bureaucrats vying for authority and wanting to have more control over the population. We killed individuals with names, personalities, and idiosyncrasies. We killed valuing people for who they are, without attaching categories, numbers, or, worse, rankings to them. We killed our confidence in free will, a topic to which we will come back in chapter eight. We killed trust in people and replaced it with trust in numbers. We gained order, but it came at a price. What we lost is rarely subject to quantification. But that it cannot be quantified doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist or matter.
We do things with words, other than describe the world. Predictions are not mere assertions; they are acts in the world, and that is a further reason why they are not facts. Predictions are speech acts: assertions that do something.
[…]
When someone makes a prediction, depending on the context and their methods, as well as their will to power (what they want), they might be doing very different things: expressing their degree of confidence about something, expressing the chances of something happening in the world, expressing what they want the world to look like in the future, trying to manipulate their audience into buying what they sell, or a combination… What they are not doing, however, is uttering a true statement about the world.
[…]
Predictive societies tend toward oppression through surveillance and self-fulfilling prophecies because predictions are speech acts that are closer to commands than to truth claims.
A prediction about people has reflexive qualities, acting like a magnet that bends reality toward itself. When the force of the magnet is strong enough, the prediction becomes the cause of its becoming true.
[…]
Predictions are commands disguised as descriptions… Predictions change the reality they purport to predict, and sometimes their accuracy is evidence not of knowledge or understanding but of despotism.
Our greatest frontier of resistance is to remember that we can be the makers of our own destiny with our choices, but our choices are driven by our beliefs, which are the easiest thing to manipulate and imprison in a power structure, and therefore the first thing that must break free. Véliz — who delves deeper into these questions in this excellent Where Shall We Meet interview — insists that the key is in our hands if we keep in mind — our gloriously fractal, wildly associative, defiantly illogical mind — a few truths about being human that the prophets of prediction try to obscure:
What we deem inevitable often never comes to pass, while what we thought impossible awaits around the corner.
Spaces of indeterminacy are where creativity, humor, and innovation flourish.
Allowing defiance is the right way to treat human beings, who are ends in themselves, with their own idiosyncratic views and preferences. Every life is worth living, every life a work of art to be created much more than discovered.
We shape our ideas and our ideas shape us
Reflecting on the tapestry of paradoxes threading through our yearning for control and our vulnerability to exploitation, she asks:
Unpredictability, arising from partial knowledge, social complexity and reflexivity, scientific and technological breakthroughs, flukes, and blindness, is never going away. Given this unsettling fact of life, how should we live?
The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)
ABOUT
CONTACT
SUPPORT
SUBSCRIBE
Newsletter
RSS
CONNECT
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Tumblr