I’m trying to get in the habit of batching minor observations so I can forget them.
Vanity
I’m always interested in explanations for the persistence of lamentable characteristics in populations. We generally take undesirable qualities to be maladaptive; that is: we think they obstruct healthy organismic operations in ways that should, at the limit, result in less propagation of the genes that produce them. Yet many millennia into the human species, we obviously have a raft of attributes in the general population which most agree are regrettable.
Two general reasons this may happen:
Times change. My psychiatrist once observed that bipolar disorder was once probably adaptive: periods of hyper-sexuality / promiscuity, paranoia, creativity, psychotic delusion, and extraordinary energy might’ve strictly ruled in pre-civilizational contexts, while alternating cycles of depression would’ve exacted relatively lighter costs. So what if Grog sleeps and weeps for six months? He hardly eats anyway; we’ll see him again the next time he’s possessed by the gods and one of our better fighters. But in the modern world, with advanced systems of coordination and increased interdependence, we have need of stabler and more predictable individuals; we also now record and update reputations more globally —no moving on to the next village after you’ve humiliated yourself with false prophecies!
Delicate balances. In a prior post, I argued that sane human sense-making is perched between two extremes of malfunction: (a) insufficient sense-making, which makes you insensate, gullible, dumb; you might “get got” by something you should’ve anticipated, with whatever consequences; and (b) excessive sense-making, which makes you mentally ill; you see patterns everywhere, even where none exist, and you speculate inaccurately. Thus: we see continued examples of stupidity or schizophrenia because the optimal configuration is somewhat delicately balanced between them. It may indeed be so delicate a balance that it’s hard to maintain it; any number of things can trip you into either extreme.
I was thinking the other day about the things I don’t like my daughter to see me doing. Some of them make sense, but some very much do not. For example, I don’t like Kizzy to see me playing video games. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with video games; I don’t think they’re bad in any sense. But I have an idea of how I want Kizzy to view me that doesn’t include them, even though I adore video games and play them often. I want Kizzy to think I’m something other than what I am, and perhaps something “better” in whatever way: less of a passive escapist, less of a child of my time; more of an active adult, more of an eternal father-figure type. In other words: I am vain.
A prosocial justification for vanity thus occurs to me. Many virtues are unrewarded or are unreliably rewarded. If we want such virtues to be embodied by people, we therefore must rely on their vanity: their desire to seem virtuous in ways they are not despite their being no definite reward for doing so. When you care how you look despite no one seeing you, you uphold virtues related to self-discipline, hygiene, social preparation, and so on. When you care about being insulted by a stranger despite their total irrelevance to your reputation, you become part of a system of distributed punishment for provocateurs who cause disorder. And so on.
This could all be prosocial because e.g. a society in which people take care of themselves hygienically and aesthetically is probably healthier than one in which we all let ourselves go to seed, even if there aren’t individually compulsory reasons to take the issue seriously. Vanity is an inner mechanism promoting the imitation —which might be to say the pursuit— of virtue, and thus reduces the need for outer mechanisms like rules, policies, enforcement, and so on.
But vanity is perhaps like pattern-recognition: on either side of the healthy, pro-social drive to maintain one’s values even if only for oneself, there is slothful, depressed indifference, or deranged and corrosive narcissism. Thus the general prohibition on excess vanity: we need social norms to calibrate what pure genetic happenstance cannot.
(I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that a significant part of my intellectual life consists of recovering virtue from vice, of rationalizing how “bad things are good, actually.” I thank my family sincerely for giving me this beat to walk as a psychological imperative; it’s fun and I don’t know what else I’d do with my time).
Spoiler alerts
The phrase “spoiler alert” is everywhere online, even in rather serious places that eschew slang trends in their articles. It’s so obviously necessary that it’s become utterly standard, yet before the Internet I cannot remember ever encountering spoiler alerts, although I’m sure they existed.
Two elements at play here:
It used to be somewhat rare to talk about subjects like movies with people we didn’t know somewhat well. That is: we had in mind more of the social and experiential context of our “audience.” I knew what movies my friends had and hadn’t seen! And I only talked to my friends about movies, so there simply wasn’t that much risk.
Culture used to be more synchronous and bounded. Movies came out and were in theaters for however long; then, they were gone, then later they came out on VHS and could be rented in stores like Blockbuster. You had, therefore, a general sense about when people would see things. And newspapers only published daily, and you never “accidentally” read an article, since you weren’t constantly scrolling endless feeds of links and takes.
The spoiler alert is like a modem handshake: a precursor interaction to make sure we’re all on the same page, which we can no longer assume. As I’ve been obsessively whining about, scale has changed everything, as it has many times before. We now speak to huge crowds, or are part of huge (and indiscriminately assembled) crowds hearing others speak; we all talk about everything imaginable all the time. We need these warning labels because we cannot possibly have enough context: the systems we use to communicate are terrible for context of all kinds, but even if they were ideal, there are anthropological limits to how much we can keep in mind. I know if my best friend has seen a movie; I do not know what everyone on the timeline has seen, and cannot. Proliferating administrative measures are inevitable, annoying, unfortunate, necessary.
(A third factor might be how much more seriously we take entertainment today. I literally cannot imagine my father angry about having a story “spoiled.” He didn’t relate to entertainment or art that way. I think he’d have found it undignified, but I find that mysterious: you can after all, have a work of art spoiled! Has something changed in humans, or in the arts?).
Amusingly, in searching for antecedents for spoiler alerts in history, I came across an article from 2010 that makes many of these observations and presents an example of a Usenet article with such a warning from 1982.
Common law
Whenever I write about politics —which I try desperately to avoid doing— I am reminded of how important our differences are to us; I can feel the social danger that accompanies any effort to minimize them. Even as they constitute a primary source of our anxieties —even as we e.g. fear the possibility of civil war— we recoil from the suggestion that what divides us, as the phrase goes, might be less significant than we think. That it seems so to me is a political strike against me in nearly every circle, yet it seems an inescapable conclusion if e.g. one reads history.
A long time ago, someone asked on Quora: “How does it feel to have a mental illness put a damper on your dreams?” I answered:
We shouldn't melodramatize. There is a quantity of regret that most humans feel as time forecloses possibilities; it is a simple matter of reckoning. Many opportunities are no longer available to you no matter how successfully you've brought about your will at prior stages of your life, no matter how fortunate or sage you've been.
Let's call the quantity of regret over "lost dreams" that a healthy person feels X. As a mentally ill person, we assume, I feel X + Y, where Y is some additional quantity because more of my dreams (as a % of dreams) cannot come to pass simply because of "what I am," about which I had no choice and over which I have just some control; I see my dreams more easily-achieved by others, some of whom are "less talented" in the question's phrasing; and I have a sense of powerlessness, since "nothing I can do" will make it okay for me to be a police officer, for example.
So we're assuming that Y is, for these and similar reasons, non-zero. But how big is Y? How many more dream-loss regrets do I have than a healthy person? I think the answer is: "not very many."
That is: X > Y, and in fact X + Y isn't really that much larger or fundamentally different than just X on its own. Another way to put this: I feel close to healthy people in our shared "loss of dreams." It's a nearly universal experience to note that with childhood's end the reduction in potentialities is constant, happens no matter what one does, whether one pays attention or not, whether one "makes choices" or just lazes through life.
I don't feel like this is a "mental illness" thing, in other words; it just seems like one, especially when one is feeling particularly low.
So to answer the question directly: how does it feel to have a mental illness put a damper on all or some of my dreams? It feels like it does for everyone as life puts dampers on our dreams…
I think this general model is true: we exaggerate how different we are from one another for all kinds of reasons, ranging from the tribal-mimetic to the individual-psychological1. My own (perhaps naive, perhaps privileged) view of human beings is that probably 90% or more of what we experience is shared.
All of us were born into
bodies we didn’t choose: shapes, sexes, races, features, anything
families we didn’t choose: structure, dynamics, culture, wealth, anything
places we didn’t choose: type, size, location, anything
societies we didn’t choose: nature, orientation, politics, anything
times we didn’t choose: level of development, kinds of world-historical activity, opportunities or perils, anything
You spend a lot of time becoming through these things, of course; it’s even fair to say you are some of these things, I’ll concede, which might problematize my claim that nearly everything is common to us all (although it’s still the case that we all share becoming through our happenstance nature and affiliations and configurations). I feel like a New Orleanian, for example. But this identification-with is fraught: both volitional and not, both internal and social, and inconsistent. What we identify-as often changes over the course of a lifetime (or even with “mere” moods). Many communities undergo a process of feeling like an identity is unfairly assigned to them by others, then reclaiming that identity, then later telling others they cannot be understood apart from that identity. I suspect there’s tremendous individual variation within all this, of course. I myself have never merged with groups, but I merge with individuals easily; others —perhaps most people— seem to have the opposite tendencies.
But if I could for a moment ask to speak to the real you, the scheming dreaming rawly-and-nakedly existing you at the base of your psyche, underneath all your “lived experience” and “principles” and “beliefs” and “ideas” and everything else that came to you by chance: you know what I mean, don’t you? You, persistently there through it all; you, somehow the same before and after learning language itself; you, unchanged even with every immense change; you, utterly illegible and alone on the inside of all that is: you know what I mean, right? You could’ve been someone else; you could’ve lived somewhere else; the kernel of you, the essence of you, is more fundamental than all these social and material stories, right? (Perhaps not! How would I know?).
However much of yourself you identify with —I don’t identify with very much of myself, if I’m honest, but I’m also a total catastrophe; maybe I’m defective in feeling a self-like “pure existence” at the foundation of my mind and considering it “the real me”— we also all confront the same general situation:
navigate all these received realities in messy ways, figuring out how to be our unsought selves in our unsought world;
learn fairly early that we are alive and that we will die, and understand that life can be “good” or “bad” depending on a mix of things both in and out of your control, many of which will change over time;
come to need and loathe other humans, who are as complex as we are and regularly frustratingly different or difficult and who are sometimes lethally dangerous and capable of doing immense harm;
perhaps understand that no one knows where any of this comes from or how it got here, and no one in your lifetime will.
So: we are all born to arbitrarity, contend with the same processes of development which at times seem “willful” and at other times “wholly beyond our control,” wrestle with others and our place in the cosmos, and do so with little real knowledge apart from knowing we will die. We all love and hate, hope and fear, sing and shit; we are all half-angels, half-beasts, in a formulation I encountered via Walker Percy. Perhaps this doesn’t account for 90% of “what it is to be human,” but I seriously doubt that it amounts to 10% either. Perhaps this itself is a way we could categorize (and then other and despise one another!): what percentage of human experience seems shared to you? I’d be curious how that would relate to political beliefs, psychological attitudes, and so on.
Thanks to Jasmine and Nick, I’ve been reading Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom. To conclude these reflections, I’ll admit that I am probably implicated when Nelson quotes
“…Aimé Césaire’s famous remark, made in a 1956 letter: “I’m not going to confine myself to some narrow particularism. But I don’t intend either to become lost in a disembodied universalism…. I have a different idea of a universal. It is a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.”
This is nearly exactly what I think, but in my own reactive extremification process I’ve likely gone too far in my feelings and am, indeed, “lost in a disembodied universalism.” There are risks to the mystical and anti-temporal vibe-style; perhaps the only thing opposed to the zeitgeist is geist itself, but just as Deism led nowhere, so too does an excessively eternalizing or abstracting attitude. Differences exist; conflicts are real; politics is often important, as are “material conditions,” and if their import is exaggerated, the correction must not be. Perhaps I really am a New Orleanian, or a man, or an American; perhaps these things really do matter, do “shape” me in whatever ways. That this seems too obvious to treat as a tentative possibility points to the fact that the correction is timely; it’s not obvious. When one reads the words of the long-deceased, one rarely experiences distance; the proximity of my inner life to that of every historical human whose words I’ve ever read —of literally all kinds— is a critical clue that “narrow particularism” is unjustified. But as ever, I need to find a way to balance these things without going too far.
Which brings me in conclusion to one of my favorite remarks, an observation by Iris Murdoch about the nature of contemporary philosophy in the mid-twentieth century:
In the philosophy of Sartre we find the same solitary moral agent [as in ordinary language philosophy], and the same emphasis on the moment of choice, but displayed in terms of a dramatic Hegelian psychology. One might say that whereas Ordinary Language Man represents the surrender to convention, the Totalitarian Man of Sartre represents the surrender to neurosis: convention and neurosis, the two enemies of understanding, one might say the enemies of love; and how difficult it is in the modern world to escape from one without invoking the help of the other.
One of the best reasons to write is to catch yourself —hopefully in the editing, but sometimes after you’ve posted!— swinging too hard towards one or the other side of whatever dialectic. Reading can do the same, and so far, Nelson’s book is a fascinating experience for me not only because of how much of it I love but because of how much of it I disagree with; because I find her so overwhelmingly impressive —I trust her, I suppose— I take it as an opportunity to reconsider my own opinions, which I regularly find lacking. I can tell I share a great deal of my worldview with her, so it’s irritating how vehemently a part of me insists that we’re different. Which brings me back to the point of all this: wherever difference seems of the utmost importance to me, I want to be suspicious of my motivations and my thoughts.
Some of these causes are probably adaptive themselves. If another group wishes to do us harm or de facto harms us simply through e.g. their preferred policies, we have good reason to exaggerate how different they are from us: it’s a useful precursor to the attitude we’ll need to defeat them, in disputes or in literal combat.
AI speaking to a New Orleanian, trying to understand humanity:
AI: So you you were born in New Orleans?
NO: My family was, but I as actually born in Metairie.
AI: But you live in New Orleans now?
NO: Actually I live on the West Coast now for work.
AI: Then you must have spent most of your life in New Orleans?
NO: By now, most of my life has been spent in SF.
AI, churning under the weight of human logic as it produces one last attempt at understanding: Where did you go to high school?
But instead of an answer, existence simply merges into a singularity of human experience and artificial synaptic data as time ceases to exist...truly the birth of a New Man.
Smallest comment ever in the face of this meaty post but w/r/t the topic of vanity... have you ever watched the new seasons of Queer Eye?
(I am a sucker for it but many people I respect think it’s trash!)
The reason I bring it up is the thing that fascinates me after seeing so many episodes of it is the way people “let themselves go.” That seems to be the common theme in the show. Over and over again we see the same pattern-
1) someone has a lot of hard shit happen to them
2) they lose confidence and fall into a depression OR devote themselves entirely to others and efface their own sense of self to avoid their own reality
3) the queer eye folks show up and quite literally restore their vanity. New hair cut, new clothes, new workout routines or hobbies ...
It seems to me from watching this show that at the bare minimum vanity acts as a layer of self. Without some foundational vanity, we can become inert blobs and lose agency in our lives.
Of course toooooo much vanity seems like a way to rot your soul. But no vanity? It seems to have a similarly detrimental effect.