Bertrand Russell Reveals the 4 Human Desires That Make Our World: Acquisitiveness, Rivalry, Vanity & Love of Power

Con­trary to Aris­to­tle, the emi­nent logi­cian, philoso­pher, and activist Bertrand Rus­sell believed that virtue and moral­i­ty play lit­tle part in polit­i­cal life. Rather, what most dri­ves us to action, he argued, is self­ish desire. Rus­sel­l’s polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy could seem almost Machi­avel­lian, most notably in his Nobel Prize speech 1950, in which he pro­claims that “all human activ­i­ty is prompt­ed by desire.” (Hear Rus­sell read an excerpt above.)

There is a whol­ly fal­la­cious the­o­ry advanced by some earnest moral­ists to the effect that it is pos­si­ble to resist desire in the inter­ests of duty and moral prin­ci­ple. I say this is fal­la­cious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be duti­ful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or prin­ci­pal­ly, their mate­r­i­al cir­cum­stances, but rather the whole sys­tem of their desires with their rel­a­tive strengths.

Russell’s argu­ment about desire admits “there is no lim­it to the efforts that men will make, or to the vio­lence that they will dis­play” in the face of per­ceived scarci­ty, and his obser­va­tions recall not only the realpoli­tik of Machi­avel­li, but the insights of that most promi­nent the­o­rist of desire, Sig­mund Freud.

Man dif­fers from oth­er ani­mals in one very impor­tant respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infi­nite, which can nev­er be ful­ly grat­i­fied, and which would keep him rest­less even in Par­adise. The boa con­stric­tor, when he has had an ade­quate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs anoth­er meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this. 

Rather than libidi­nous instincts, how­ev­er, Rus­sell names four main polit­i­cal desires that can­not be sat­is­fied: Acquis­i­tive­ness (“the wish to pos­sess as much as pos­si­ble), Rival­ry (“a much stronger motive”), Van­i­ty (“a motive of immense poten­cy”), and Love of Pow­er (“which out­weighs them all”). We may note the tremen­dous degree to which all four desires seem active­ly at work in shap­ing our cur­rent world. All four of these qual­i­ties greet us every morn­ing on our smart­phones and nev­er let up, day after day. But it has always been so to one degree or anoth­er, Rus­sell argues. The impor­tant thing is to be clear­sight­ed on the mat­ter. Although self­ish polit­i­cal desires can and large­ly are destruc­tive, they need not always be so.

Polit­i­cal desires like the love of pow­er may “have oth­er sides which are more desir­able.” Schol­ar­ly and sci­en­tif­ic endeav­ors may be “main­ly actu­at­ed by a love of pow­er.…. In pol­i­tics, also, a reformer may have just as strong a love of pow­er as a despot. It would be a com­plete mis­take to decry love of pow­er alto­geth­er as a motive.” “Rus­sell,” writes Maria Popo­va, is “a thinker of excep­tion­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty to nuance and to the dual­i­ties of which life is woven.” He cau­tions that we can­not sim­ply dis­miss our most pow­er­ful motive as “a whole­sale neg­a­tive dri­ver.”

The real prob­lem, as Rus­sell sees it, lies in “cir­cum­stances in which pop­u­la­tions will fall below self­ish­ness, if self­ish­ness is inter­pret­ed as enlight­ened self-inter­est.” The phe­nom­e­non we observe of peo­ple “vot­ing against their inter­ests” is for Rus­sell an occa­sion “on which they are con­vinced that they are act­ing from ide­al­is­tic motives.”

Much that pass­es as ide­al­ism is dis­guised hatred or dis­guised love of pow­er. When you see large mass­es of men swayed by what appear to be noble motives, it is as well to look below the sur­face and ask your­self what it is that makes these motives effec­tive. It is part­ly because it is so easy to be tak­en in by a facade of nobil­i­ty that a psy­cho­log­i­cal inquiry, such as I have been attempt­ing, is worth mak­ing.

Rather than virtue or moral­i­ty, pol­i­tics most requires “intel­li­gence,” Rus­sell con­cludes, “a thing that can be fos­tered by known meth­ods of edu­ca­tion.” These are not the forms of edu­ca­tion we gen­er­al­ly receive: “Schools are out to teach patri­o­tism,” he says, “news­pa­pers are out to stir up excite­ment; and politi­cians are out to get re-elect­ed. None of the three, there­fore, can do any­thing towards sav­ing the human race from rec­i­p­ro­cal sui­cide.”

The Cold War threat of nuclear anni­hi­la­tion hangs heavy over Russell’s speech. As long as humans are gripped by hatred and fear of oth­ers and held in thrall to polit­i­cal delu­sions, he sug­gests, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of mutu­al­ly assured destruc­tion remains. On the oth­er hand, if we were hon­est about our desires, and “if men were actu­at­ed by self-inter­est,” Rus­sell writes, “which they are not.… if men desired their own hap­pi­ness as ardent­ly as they desired the mis­ery of their neigh­bors.… the whole human race would coop­er­ate.” Read the full text of Rus­sel­l’s Nobel speech here.

via Brain­Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Cours­es

7 Nobel Speech­es by 7 Great Writ­ers: Hem­ing­way, Faulkn­er, and More

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Bertrand Rus­sell: The Every­day Ben­e­fit of Phi­los­o­phy Is That It Helps You Live with Uncer­tain­ty

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

New Yorkers Can Now Stream 30,000 Free Movies, Including the Entire Criterion Collection, with Their Library Cards

Image by Andrés Nieto Por­ras, via Flickr Com­mons

A quick heads up for the 8+ mil­lion peo­ple liv­ing in New York City. Accord­ing to The New York Times, any­one “who has a New York Pub­lic Library or Brook­lyn Pub­lic Library card can now watch more than 30,000 fea­ture films, doc­u­men­taries, for­eign-lan­guage films and train­ing videos.” This includes the entire cat­a­logue of films in The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion (think Felli­ni, Lynch and Kuro­sawa), and also com­plete lec­ture series from The Great Cours­es.

The films can be viewed streamed any­where, any­time, on smart­phones, tablets, PCs and smart TVs.

New York Pub­lic Library mem­bers can get start­ed here. And Brook­lyn Pub­lic Library fans can do the same here.

Please some­one, beam me back to New York.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

120 Artists Pick Their Top 10 Films in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets You Down­load 180,000 Images in High Res­o­lu­tion: His­toric Pho­tographs, Maps, Let­ters & More

100,000+ Won­der­ful Pieces of The­ater Ephemera Dig­i­tized by The New York Pub­lic Library

Food­ie Alert: New York Pub­lic Library Presents an Archive of 17,000 Restau­rant Menus (1851–2008)

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

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When Mistakes/Studio Glitches Give Famous Songs Their Personality: Pink Floyd, Metallica, The Breeders, Steely Dan & More

Before the advent of dig­i­tal stu­dio tech­nol­o­gy, a degree of impre­ci­sion nat­u­ral­ly result­ed from the record­ing process. It may now be too easy to erase and cor­rect per­ceived errors. As Bri­an Eno has point­ed out, “the temp­ta­tion of the tech­nol­o­gy is to smooth every­thing out.” Per­haps that’s why so many of the famous songs con­tain­ing mis­takes in pop cul­ture lore come from a pre-dig­i­tal age. In any case, such lore abounds. Some of it spec­u­la­tive, some anec­do­tal, some apoc­ryphal, and much of it clear­ly evi­dent in close lis­tens and con­firmed by the musi­cians, engi­neers, and pro­duc­ers them­selves.

A recent Red­dit thread com­piled 500 com­ments worth of dis­cus­sion on the sub­ject. One promi­nent exam­ple is Ella Fitzgerald’s 1960 “Mack the Knife,” in which she for­gets the lyrics to the cho­rus and impro­vis­es. “Talk about fail­ing grace­ful­ly,” writes user Bleue22. The album, they note, went on to win a Gram­my.

But this exam­ple, you may object, comes from a live album—no sec­ond takes allowed. And Fitzger­ald sets up the error by say­ing before­hand, “we hope we remem­ber all the words.” (I’d guess she’s using the roy­al “we,” to which she’s ful­ly enti­tled.) Nonethe­less, her “Mack the Knife” may have no equal.

Still, we don’t lack for stu­dio exam­ples of mis­takes in great record­ings. If you’re a met­al fan, Metallica’s “Seek and Destroy” from 1983’s Kill ‘Em All like­ly holds a spe­cial place of hon­or in your col­lec­tion. As Kirk Ham­mett revealed in a 2002 inter­view with Gui­tar World after his induc­tion into the magazine’s hall of fame, his solo on the track was only a sec­ond or third take, with lit­tle rehearsal. “There were no frills, no con­tem­pla­tion, no over­in­tel­lec­tu­al­iz­ing,” he says. The result? Amaz­ing, right? But, Ham­mett con­tin­ues, “On a cou­ple of notes in that solo, I bend the notes out of pitch; for 18 years, every time I’ve heard that gui­tar solo, those sour notes come back to haunt me!”

Every gui­tarist has suf­fered through this expe­ri­ence while lis­ten­ing back to their records. Few make Gui­tar World’s hall of fame. The point is that great­ness and per­fec­tion are not always the best of friends. Anoth­er exam­ple of the kind of thing that might only haunt a musi­cian: In Steely Dan’s “Aja” from the 1977 Gram­my-win­ning album of the same name, drum­mer Steve Gadd plays “one of the best drum solos ever record­ed,” writes Michael Dun­can as Son­ic Scoop. Drum­mers for decades have sought to repli­cate the moment, espe­cial­ly an idio­syn­crat­ic click at 4:57. Turns out, it was “actu­al­ly a slip of his stick; albeit a well-timed one.” The solo, Dun­can notes, was done in one take.

Oth­er exam­ples may have had life-chang­ing con­se­quences for the musi­cian in ques­tion. It’s rumored that David Gilmour’s faint­ly record­ed cough­ing on Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” both­ered him so much that he quit smok­ing. In some cas­es, the mis­take can turn into a hook or a musi­cal state­ment, such as Cindy Wilson’s shout of “Tii­i­i­i­i­in Roof! Rust­ed” in the B‑52’s “Love Shack,” appar­ent­ly a mis­take on Wilson’s part. The phe­nom­e­non, grant­ed, tends to man­i­fest in gen­res that accom­mo­date all vari­eties of looseness—rock, blues, jazz, etc.—and the great bulk of exam­ples in the Red­dit mis­take thread come from such record­ings.  I couldn’t say whether it’s pos­si­ble to com­pile such a list in music with far stricter arrange­ments or reliance on elec­tron­ic instru­men­ta­tion.

I also couldn’t say whether mis­takes in, say clas­si­cal or elec­tron­ic music, would pro­duce such desir­able results. What often emerges in these dis­cus­sions is the degree to which mis­takes, unplanned impro­vi­sa­tions, or hap­py acci­dents can become essen­tial fea­tures of a song. Take The Breeder’s “Can­non­ball,” which inten­tion­al­ly incor­po­rates a mis­take bassist Josephine Wig­gs repeat­ed­ly made in rehearsals, slid­ing to the wrong note in the solo bass intro, then cor­rect­ing when the gui­tars came in. “We all just thought it was hilar­i­ous and thought it sound­ed real­ly great,” she remem­bered.  “It was clear to us at that moment that that was the right thing to do, to keep the wrong note in there.” Does it mat­ter that some record­ed mis­takes are inten­tion­al and oth­ers are not? That ques­tion may be fod­der for anoth­er 500-com­ment-long dis­cus­sion. Or we could heed the wis­dom of Bri­an Eno or Miles Davis and just go with it either way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bri­an Eno Explains the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

What Miles Davis Taught Her­bie Han­cock: In Music, as in Life, There Are No Mis­takes, Just Chances to Impro­vise

Jump Start Your Cre­ative Process with Bri­an Eno’s “Oblique Strate­gies” Deck of Cards (1975)

John Cleese on The Impor­tance of Mak­ing and Embrac­ing Mis­takes

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Senator Al Franken Does a Pitch Perfect Imitation of Mick Jagger (1982)

If Sen­a­tor Al Franken won’t run for Pres­i­dent in 2020, per­haps he’d tem­per fans’ dis­ap­point­ment with a repeat of his ear­ly 80’s turn as Mick Jag­ger, above.

The per­for­mance took place at Stock­ton State, a pub­lic uni­ver­si­ty con­ve­nient­ly locat­ed in New Jersey–what the late Tom Davis, Franken’s long time Sat­ur­day Night Live writ­ing part­ner and Kei­th Richards to his Jag­ger called “the Blair Witch scrub forests twen­ty-five miles north of Atlantic City.”

Franken’s per­for­mance is an immer­sive tri­umph, espe­cial­ly for those who remem­ber his best known SNL char­ac­ter, the lisp­ing­ly upbeat Stu­art Smal­l­ey.

His Jag­ger is the oppo­site of Stuart–butch, preen­ing, ath­let­ic … a less than sober stu­dent fan in the Stock­ton State crowd might have drunk­en­ly won­dered if he or she had acci­den­tal­ly bought tick­ets to the Tat­too You tour. Those lips are pret­ty con­vinc­ing.

The cos­tum­ing is dead on too, and Franken did not take the route Chris Far­ley would lat­er take, lam­poon­ing the male strip­pers of Chip­pen­dales. He may not be Jag­ger-rangy, but he’s cer­tain­ly fit in an out­fit that leaves no room to hide.

As Davis recalled in his 2010 mem­oir, Thir­ty-Nine Years of Short-Term Mem­o­ry Loss: The Ear­ly Days of SNL from Some­one Who Was There:

As we start­ed “Under My Thumb,” Franken came run­ning out as Mick Jag­ger, wear­ing yel­low foot­ball pants and Capezios and was so good, it was scary. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Franken and Davis at Stock­ton State nev­er sold very well… maybe it would be re-released if one of us became pres­i­dent, or shot a pres­i­dent.

Know­ing that Davis, who died five years ago, would like­ly nev­er have pre­dict­ed the out­come of the recent elec­tion, and that Sen­a­tor Franken, out­spo­ken as he is, is in no posi­tion to joke about the sec­ond option, we sug­gest truf­fling up a used copy, if you’d like to see more.

And for comparison’s sake, here are the orig­i­nals per­form­ing to an are­na-sized crowd in Ari­zona in 1981:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mick Jag­ger Defends the Rights of the Indi­vid­ual After His Leg­endary 1967 Drug Bust

When Bowie & Jagger’s “Danc­ing in the Street” Music Video Becomes a Silent Film: Can the Worst Music Video Ever Get Even Worse?

When William S. Bur­roughs Appeared on Sat­ur­day Night Live: His First TV Appear­ance (1981)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

What Happens When the Books in William S. Burroughs’ Personal Library Get Artistically Arranged — with His Own “Cut-Up” Method

If your Face­book news feed looks any­thing like mine, you wake up each morn­ing to a stream of not just food snap­shots and self­ies but pic­tures of books, whether stacked up, dumped into a pile, or arranged neat­ly on shelves. Why do we post dig­i­tal pho­tos of our print­ed mat­ter? Almost cer­tain­ly for the same rea­son we do any­thing on social media: to send a mes­sage about our­selves. We want to tell our friends who we are, or who we think we are, but not in so many words, or rather not in so few; a few of the books we’ve read (or intend to read), care­ful­ly select­ed and arranged, does the job. But what if, instead of assem­bling a self-por­trait through books, some­one else entered your per­son­al library and did it for you?

Artist Nina Katchadouri­an (she of, among many oth­er endeav­ors, the air­plane-bath­room 17th-cen­tu­ry Flem­ish por­trai­ture) recent­ly took on that task in the Lawrence, Kansas home of famous­ly hard-liv­ing and furi­ous­ly cre­ative beat writer William S. Bur­roughs. She did it as part of her long-run­ning Sort­ed Books project, in which, in her words, “I sort through a col­lec­tion of books, pull par­tic­u­lar titles, and even­tu­al­ly group the books into clus­ters so that the titles can be read in sequence.

The final results are shown either as pho­tographs of the book clus­ters or as the actu­al stacks them­selves, often shown on the shelves of the library they came from. Tak­en as a whole, the clus­ters are a cross-sec­tion of that library’s hold­ings that reflect that par­tic­u­lar library’s focus, idio­syn­crasies, and incon­sis­ten­cies.”

Kansas Cut-Up, the Bur­roughs chap­ter of Sort­ed Books, fea­tures such arrange­ments as How Did Sex Begin? Unin­vit­ed GuestsHuman ErrorMem­oirs of a Bas­tard Angel A Night of Seri­ous Drink­ingA Lit­tle Orig­i­nal Sin, and Amer­i­can Diplo­ma­cy / Phys­i­cal Inter­ro­ga­tion Tech­niquesIn the Secret StateThom Robin­son of the Euro­pean Beat Stud­ies Net­work describes Bur­roughs’ book col­lec­tion as “a selec­tion of large­ly Euro­pean works whose con­tents include para­noia, the­o­ries of lan­guage, pseu­do­science, mor­dant humour and drugs: in ret­ro­spect, it’s easy to imag­ine the own­er of such an idio­syn­crat­ic library pro­duc­ing the melange of Naked Lunch. Per­haps for this rea­son, it seems hard to resist reorder­ing the books which Bur­roughs owned in 1944 in order to empha­sise the most recog­nis­able ele­ments of the lat­er Bur­roughs per­sona.”

Some­times Katchadouri­an seems to do just that and some­times she does­n’t, but her method of book-sort­ing, which she explains in the episode of John and Sarah Green’s series The Art Assign­ment at the top of the post, bears more than a lit­tle resem­blance to Bur­roughs’ own “cut-up” method of lit­er­ary com­po­si­tion. “Take a page,” as Bur­roughs him­self explained it. “Now cut down the mid­dle and cross the mid­dle. You have four sec­tions: 1 2 3 4 … one two three four. Now rearrange the sec­tions plac­ing sec­tion four with sec­tion one and sec­tion two with sec­tion three. And you have a new page. Some­times it says much the same thing. Some­times some­thing quite dif­fer­ent.” And just as a rearranged book can speak in a new and strange voice, so can a rearranged library.

via Austin Kleon’s newslet­ter (which you should sub­scribe to here)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art Assign­ment: Learn About Art & the Cre­ative Process in a New Web Series by John & Sarah Green

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

The 321 Books in David Fos­ter Wallace’s Per­son­al Library: From Blood Merid­i­an to Con­fes­sions of an Unlike­ly Body­builder

115 Books on Lena Dun­ham & Miran­da July’s Book­shelves at Home (Plus a Bonus Short Play)

Dis­cov­er the 1126 Books in John Cage’s Per­son­al Library: Fou­cault, Joyce, Wittgen­stein, Vir­ginia Woolf, Buck­min­ster Fuller & More

The 430 Books in Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

People Are Planting Flowers in Potholes Worldwide: See the Creative Protest Taking Place in Montreal, Ukraine & Beyond

In 2015, Paige Bre­i­thart, an artist and stu­dent liv­ing in Ham­tram­ck, Michi­gan, had grown tired of the count­less pot­holes mar­ring Ham­tram­ck­’s streets. So she took mat­ters into her own hands, and drove around town, fill­ing the pot­holes with flow­ers, replac­ing the decay with sym­bols of growth and beau­ty. The sto­ry went viral, and Bre­i­thart’s aes­thet­ic treat­ment has since caught on. Look around Twit­ter, and you’ll find sto­ries about flow­ers fill­ing pot­holes around the Unit­ed States, and indeed around the world.

In some cas­es, these gueril­la projects aren’t just dec­o­ra­tive, a sim­ple way to spruce up a neigh­bor­hood. There’s an activist ele­ment to them. In Bath, Eng­land, one flower pot vig­i­lante said:

In an area of Amer­i­ca there were a load of pot­holes filled in with pot plants, although that’s not what we are doing here. We think it’s a good thing to do but it’s more than about mak­ing peo­ple smile. Pot­holes are a real prob­lem and have the poten­tial to be death traps for bik­ers and cyclists and with cars there is an issue with blow-outs to wheels. The whole point is to raise aware­ness of them.

And local gov­ern­ments are tak­ing notice, though not always hap­pi­ly. Con­cerned that dri­vers might get sur­prised or dis­tract­ed by flow­ers sud­den­ly appear­ing in the mid­dle of a road, politi­cians are dis­cour­ag­ing this form of protest. But you can’t argue with the results. Once pro­test­ers call atten­tion to them, the pot­holes have a mag­i­cal way of get­ting prop­er­ly paved and filled. Quick­ly.

Below you can see a gallery of pot­holes around the world that have got­ten the flower treatment–from Mis­soula, Mon­tana, to Mon­tre­al, Bath, Bosnia and Ukraine. Maybe the artist from Chica­go (see image at bot­tom) is the one who got it right?

Wet­zel Coun­ty, West Vir­ginia

 

Mis­soula, Mon­tana

 

Mon­tre­al, Cana­da

 

Cor­ner Brook, Cana­da

 

Bath, Eng­land

 

Berwick­shire, Scot­land

 

Edin­burgh, Scot­land

 

Ukraine

 

Bosnia

 

Chica­go

via Twist­ed Sifter/My Mod­ern Met

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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How Information Overload Robs Us of Our Creativity: What the Scientific Research Shows

Flickr Com­mons pho­to by J Stimp

Every­one used to read Samuel John­son. Now it seems hard­ly any­one does. That’s a shame. John­son under­stood the human mind, its sad­ly amus­ing frail­ties and its dou­ble-blind alleys. He under­stood the nature of that mys­te­ri­ous act we casu­al­ly refer to as “cre­ativ­i­ty.” It is not the kind of thing one lucks into or mas­ters after a sem­i­nar or lec­ture series. It requires dis­ci­pline and a mind free of dis­trac­tion. “My dear friend,” said John­son in 1783, accord­ing to his biog­ra­ph­er and sec­re­tary Boswell, “clear your mind of cant.”

There’s no miss­ing apos­tro­phe in his advice. Inspir­ing as it may sound, John­son did not mean to say “you can do it!” He meant “cant,” an old word for cheap decep­tion, bias, hypocrisy, insin­cere expres­sion. “It is a mode of talk­ing in Soci­ety,” he con­ced­ed, “but don’t think fool­ish­ly.” Johnson’s injunc­tion res­onat­ed through a cou­ple cen­turies, became gar­bled into a banal affir­ma­tion, and was lost in a grave­yard of image macros. Let us endeav­or to retrieve it, and rumi­nate on its wis­dom.

We may even do so with our favorite mod­ern brief in hand, the sci­en­tif­ic study. There are many we could turn to. For exam­ple, notes Derek Beres, in a 2014 book neu­ro­sci­en­tist Daniel Lev­itin brought his research to bear in argu­ing that “infor­ma­tion over­load keeps us mired in noise.… This saps us of not only willpow­er (of which we have a lim­it­ed store) but cre­ativ­i­ty as well.” “We sure think we’re accom­plish­ing a lot,” Lev­itin told Susan Page on The Diane Rehm Show in 2015, “but that’s an illu­sion… as a neu­ro­sci­en­tist, I can tell you one thing the brain is very good at is self-delu­sion.”

Johnson’s age had its own ver­sion of infor­ma­tion over­load, as did that of anoth­er cur­mud­geon­ly voice from the past, T.S. Eliot, who won­dered, “Where is the wis­dom we have lost in knowl­edge? Where is the knowl­edge we have lost in infor­ma­tion?” The ques­tion leaves Eliot’s read­ers ask­ing whether what we take for knowl­edge or infor­ma­tion real­ly are such? Maybe they’re just as often forms of need­less busy­ness, dis­trac­tion, and over­think­ing. Stan­ford researcher Emma Sep­pälä sug­gests as much in her work on “the sci­ence of hap­pi­ness.” At Quartz, she writes,

We need to find ways to give our brains a break.… At work, we’re intense­ly ana­lyz­ing prob­lems, orga­niz­ing data, writing—all activ­i­ties that require focus. Dur­ing down­time, we immerse our­selves in our phones while stand­ing in line at the store or lose our­selves in Net­flix after hours.

Sep­pälä exhorts us to relax and let go of the con­stant need for stim­u­la­tion, to take longs walks with­out the phone, get out of our com­fort zones, make time for fun and games, and gen­er­al­ly build in time for leisure. How does this work? Let’s look at some addi­tion­al research. Bar-Ilan Uni­ver­si­ty’s Moshe Bar and Shi­ra Baror under­took a study to mea­sure the effects of dis­trac­tion, or what they call “men­tal load,” the “stray thoughts” and “obses­sive rumi­na­tions” that clut­ter the mind with infor­ma­tion and loose ends. Our “capac­i­ty for orig­i­nal and cre­ative think­ing,” Bar writes at The New York Times, “is marked­ly stymied” by a busy mind. “The clut­tered mind,” writes Jes­si­ca Still­man, “is a cre­ativ­i­ty killer.”

In a paper pub­lished in Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, Bar and Baror describe how “con­di­tions of high load” fos­ter uno­rig­i­nal think­ing. Par­tic­i­pants in their exper­i­ment were asked to remem­ber strings of arbi­trary num­bers, then to play word asso­ci­a­tion games. “Par­tic­i­pants with sev­en dig­its to recall resort­ed to the most sta­tis­ti­cal­ly com­mon respons­es (e.g., white/black),” writes Bar, “where­as par­tic­i­pants with two dig­its gave less typ­i­cal, more var­ied pair­ings (e.g. white/cloud).” Our brains have lim­it­ed resources. When con­strained and over­whelmed with thoughts, they pur­sue well-trod paths of least resis­tance, try­ing to effi­cient­ly bring order to chaos.

“Imag­i­na­tion,” on the oth­er hand, wrote Dr. John­son else­where, “a licen­tious and vagrant fac­ul­ty, unsus­cep­ti­ble of lim­i­ta­tions and impa­tient of restraint, has always endeav­ored to baf­fle the logi­cian, to per­plex the con­fines of dis­tinc­tion, and burst the enclo­sures of reg­u­lar­i­ty.” Bar describes the con­trast between the imag­i­na­tive mind and the infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing mind as “a ten­sion in our brains between explo­ration and exploita­tion.” Gorg­ing on infor­ma­tion makes our brains “’exploit’ what we already know,” or think we know, “lean­ing on our expec­ta­tion, trust­ing the com­fort of a pre­dictable envi­ron­ment.” When our minds are “unloaded,” on the oth­er hand, which can occur dur­ing a hike or a long, relax­ing show­er, we can shed fixed pat­terns of think­ing, and explore cre­ative insights that might oth­er­wise get buried or dis­card­ed.

As Drake Baer suc­cinct­ly puts in at New York Mag­a­zine’s Sci­ence of Us, “When you have noth­ing to think about, you can do your best think­ing.” Get­ting to that state in a cli­mate of per­pet­u­al, unsleep­ing dis­trac­tion, opin­ion, and alarm, requires anoth­er kind of dis­ci­pline: the dis­ci­pline to unplug, wan­der off, and clear your mind.

For anoth­er angle on this, you might want to check out Cal New­port’s 2016 book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Suc­cess in a Dis­tract­ed World.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Neu­ro­science & Psy­chol­o­gy of Pro­cras­ti­na­tion, and How to Over­come It

Why You Do Your Best Think­ing In The Show­er: Cre­ativ­i­ty & the “Incu­ba­tion Peri­od”

How Walk­ing Fos­ters Cre­ativ­i­ty: Stan­ford Researchers Con­firm What Philoso­phers and Writ­ers Have Always Known

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Free: You Can Now Read Classic Books by MIT Press on Archive.org

FYI. At the end of May, Archive.org announced this on its blog:

For more than eighty years, MIT Press has been pub­lish­ing acclaimed titles in sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, art and archi­tec­ture.  Now, thanks to a new part­ner­ship between the Inter­net Archive and MIT Press, read­ers will be able to bor­row these clas­sics online for the first time. With gen­er­ous sup­port from Arca­dia, a char­i­ta­ble fund of Peter Bald­win and Lis­bet Raus­ing, this part­ner­ship rep­re­sents an impor­tant advance in pro­vid­ing free, long-term pub­lic access to knowl­edge.

“These books rep­re­sent some of the finest schol­ar­ship ever pro­duced, but right now they are very hard to find,” said Brew­ster Kahle, founder and Dig­i­tal Librar­i­an of the Inter­net Archive. “Togeth­er with MIT Press, we will enable the patrons of every library that owns one of these books to bor­row it online–one copy at a time.”

This joint ini­tia­tive is a cru­cial ear­ly step in Inter­net Archive’s ambi­tious plans to dig­i­tize, pre­serve and pro­vide pub­lic access to four mil­lion books, by part­ner­ing wide­ly with uni­ver­si­ty press­es and oth­er pub­lish­ers, authors, and libraries.…

We will be scan­ning an ini­tial group of 1,500 MIT Press titles at Inter­net Archive’s Boston Pub­lic Library facil­i­ty, includ­ing Cyril Stan­ley Smith’s 1980 book, From Art to Sci­ence: Sev­en­ty-Two Objects Illus­trat­ing the Nature of Dis­cov­ery, and Fred­er­ick Law Olm­st­ed and Theodo­ra Kimball’s Forty Years of Land­scape Archi­tec­ture: Cen­tral Park, which was pub­lished in 1973. The old­est title in the group is Arthur C. Hardy’s 1936 Hand­book of Col­orime­try.

Through­out the sum­mer, we’ve been check­ing in, wait­ing for the first MIT Press books to hit Archive.org’s vir­tu­al shelves. They’re now start­ing to arrive. Click here to find the begin­nings of what promis­es to be a much larg­er col­lec­tion.

As Brew­ster Kahle (founder of Inter­net Archive) explained it to Library Jour­nalhis orga­ni­za­tion is “basi­cal­ly try­ing to wave a wand over everyone’s phys­i­cal col­lec­tions and say, Blink! You now have an elec­tron­ic ver­sion that you can use” in what­ev­er way desired, assum­ing its per­mit­ted by copy­right. In the case of MIT Press, it looks like you can log into Archive.org and dig­i­tal­ly bor­row their elec­tron­ic texts for 14 days.

Archive.org hopes to dig­i­tize 1,500 MIT Press clas­sics by the end of 2017. Dig­i­tal col­lec­tions from oth­er pub­lish­ing hous­es seem sure to fol­low.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Brew­ster Kahle and the Inter­net Archive Will Pre­serve the Infi­nite Infor­ma­tion on the Web

An Archive of 3,000 Vin­tage Cook­books Lets You Trav­el Back Through Culi­nary Time

Enter a Huge Archive of Amaz­ing Sto­ries, the World’s First Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine, Launched in 1926

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