It's All Relative
How the information we consume shapes the experience of our existence.
A Distant Mirror
If my wife weren’t in medicine, she would probably be a history professor … for fun, she’ll read 800-page books about the 14 Century. Specifically, I’m thinking of one of her favorites — Baraba Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror,” or sometimes she’ll choose something with a little creative flourish, such as the historical fiction of Edward Rutherfurd — she’s recently read his book on Paris from 1261 to 1968. Now she’s on to his work about China from 1839, at the dawn of the First Opium War, through Mao's Cultural Revolution, up to the present day. I tend to spend more time with contemporary non-fiction, so I appreciate the frequent historical discussions prompted by her reading that offers much-needed context for our present.
This is undoubtedly one of the most significant benefits of this kind of study — framing the present in context to the recent (and less recent) past reminds us of how far the human race has come.
You start feeling grateful that we have moved past the point where a marauding gang of huns could ransack your village and that we are safe from the many ways you’d likely come to face early death, disease, or destruction. Now it is far more likely you’ll live into your 80s, and you worry the most about supporting your kids (who will also likely live into their 80s) and how to save enough for a comfortable retirement.
This appreciation for progress is the main idea behind Steven Pinker’s book “The Better Angles of Our Nature,” an equally daunting 800-page book smart enough to rival Tuchman’s masterpiece, which attempts to remind and persuade readers to recognize that today we are actually living in the most peaceful time in human existence (despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism).
The work poses a fascinating paradox worth exploring. Despite the omnipresence of violence in the media and our collective consciousness, the data suggests that humanity has made significant strides toward a more peaceful world.
Which prompts the question: How much of our reality is based on truth or evidence, and how much of our existence is shaped by what is relative to our experience and the information we consume? (It is important to remember that the work of Pinker and Tuchman is readily available, but our collective attention spans often prefer the company of 30-second videos to the dense (and enlightening) work of the world’s best scholars. That this is a choice that we make — and it is also capitalistic exploitation by media conglomerates) However, I will acknowledge that some of these media sources are pretty helpful and do contribute to the intellectual discourse — such as organizations like TED — where you can see Pinker make his case in less than 20 minutes if you follow this link.
Drawing from historical records, archaeological findings, and comprehensive statistical analyses, Pinker reveals a remarkable decline in various forms of violence. He examines the decline of interpersonal violence, such as homicide rates, which have significantly decreased in most societies. He explores the transformation of institutionalized violence, including the fall of slavery, the abolition of cruel punishments, and the waning frequency of warfare. He also highlights the reduction in violence against marginalized groups, such as women, children, and minority populations.
Pinker argues that this steep decline in violence is due to the following:
The rise of the nation-state, with its monopolization of violence and establishment of legal systems, has played a crucial role in curbing violent tendencies.
The spread of literacy and education has fostered empathy and critical thinking, encouraging peaceful resolutions to conflicts.
And the expansion of commerce and globalization has created interdependencies between nations, making violent conflicts less economically viable.
Trick Mirror
“My experience is what I agree to attend to” — William James
But this concept of relativity also works in the opposite way of the Pinker/Tuchman experience — as a “trick mirror” (the title of Jia Tolentino’s excellent book about the impact of our media-soaked lives). Tolentino captures in a wonderfully creative fashion the downside that results from our window to the world being a tiny rectangular screen designed primarily to commodity our attention for corporate economic gain.
A portal that presents finely-manicured versions of other people’s lives or hyperbolic content — that ultimately offers a tilted reflection — of what life is, what it should be like, and what it could be. These warped expectations take their toll.
Tolentino writes, “The internet is our collective experiment in living by objective attention rather than by subjective attention, and the results of that experiment reflect a society with different values."
Our subjective attention has been hacked — meaning our ability to choose for ourselves what we pay attention to. Before the rise of the internet, individuals just had more autonomy to select the information and experiences they engaged with consciously.
Our society has moved toward living by objective attention — meaning our collective attention—driven by algorithms, metrics, and the pursuit of virality or popularity — where content is prioritized by what is most likely to capture and retain users' attention — is being determined for us.
In this "experiment" of living with objective attention, the internet has fundamentally changed how we consume and engage with information. Rather than choosing value-based content, we are often guided by what is trending or algorithmically recommended. The goal becomes capturing and sustaining the attention of the masses, often at the expense of what we might choose for ourselves.
The result — our collective attention has shifted toward sensational, click-worthy content designed for instant gratification — and, ultimately, away from content that has depth and nuance and fosters genuine connection.
Is All Experience a Hallucination?
“Attention is less a lens on the world than a mirror for the mind” — Maria Popova
Maria Popova’s newsletter this week also attends to the power of our attention — covering the new work by the philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark, who unpacks his provocative new theory on how the brain operates as a filtration and prediction machine:
“We are never simply seeing what’s ‘really there,’ stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions.” — Clark
What Clark is exploring is also what is at the root of the scientific method — that we should always be suspicious of ourselves — as self-delusion is, in many ways, at the root of being human. Putting our faith in a collective method based on rigorous debate, study, and evidence open to be challenged, supported, or disproven is the way to get closer to some semblance of reality.
One of my friends and frequent correspondents sent me this piece from the New York Times this week: Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything Is Worse, where the psychologist Adam Mastroianni argues that throughout history, leaders have wielded the irresistible power of promising to resurrect a golden age — a nostalgic balm. It seems we have an innate bug in our brains, causing us to perceive a fall from grace even when it's a mere figment of our imagination.
Mastroianni’s research reveals that this belief in a moral decline is a cognitive bias, defying actual evidence. We instinctively gravitate towards negative information while conveniently forgetting the positive, creating the illusion of a worsening world.
This brings me back to Clark and the implications for the information universes we create and then inhabit and how they shape our reality:
“Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world. We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.” — Clark
