Thought and its vicissitudes

Reflections on some deadlocks in contemporary culture

As an urban dweller with no car, I spend more time in shared social spaces than most people—the sidewalk, the park, the library, the train car, etc. Those are, by definition, spaces in which one’s behavior affects others, and it is inevitable that one will sometimes, even if only through ignorance, negligence, or absent-mindedness, do something that causes discomfort or displeasure to someone in that shared public space. And according to a growing social consensus, when that happens, the absolute worst thing the person experiencing the discomfort or displeasure could possibly do is to ask the culprit to change their behavior.

There are cases, of course, where the sheer fact that someone is behaving in a certain way is evidence that they are unreachable. Part of the adjustment to city life is learning how to tune out random ranting, for example. Confronting that person could only make the situation worse. And I suspect that something like that is what allowed smoking to take root so firmly on public transit in the wake of the pandemic. Smoking indoors was such a shocking violation, such brazen disregard for the comfort and even health of others, that they were presumably unreachable. A confrontation might even seem risky—if they’re willing to break such a firm social taboo as that against smoking indoors, who knows what they might be willing to do if someone dares to confront them? Better to just stay quiet and hope they go away.

What has shifted in the past several years, in my view, is that those situations no longer feel exceptional. Any time one considers confronting a rude or inconsiderate person, one is braced for a fight. As a rule, such confrontations—should anyone be bold enough to risk it—immediately become hearings about standing. Who are you to criticize me? Why should I change my behavior for you? The only thing that has any effect is to tattle to an authority figure, and the behavior often resumes once that authority figure is gone. Even worse is the counteraccusation: get out of my face, you’re harassing me, I feel unsafe.

Like any card-carrying neurotic, I play through hypothetical scenes like this multiple times a day. For instance, once I witnessed a dog walker apparently neglecting to pick up their dog’s poop and wondered if I should say something. Immediately, I thought of the stock retort: who are you to criticize me, what business is it of yours, etc. And I landed on a response that would never occur to me in the moment—every human being has a right to demand of a dog owner that they pick up after their dog. My standing is that I am a person and you owe something to me simply as such. Of course, I did not say anything, and that turned out to be fortunate, as it became clear that the dog had squatted fruitlessly, so no actual infraction had occurred. Score one for the good guys!

People who behave like that simply don’t understand what shared public space is. They are acting like drivers even when on foot, as though they’re carrying around an exoskeleton of inviolable private space that they can use as they please. Their choices are a brute fact that others simply need to adapt to. When I think of asking someone to put on headphones instead of playing their phone out loud in a shared public space, for instance, I can already hear the likely response: I should put on headphones if it bothers me so much. It is as though they’ve “called dibs” on playing their devices out loud. In fact, one day on the train I noticed that I kept having to turn up the music on my own headphones to drown out the ever-increasing volume of an inconsiderate person’s smartphone. And when I finally took off my headphones to get ready to get off the train, I realized that there was a second person playing their phone out loud, also at high volume. Apparently neither was willing to budge and so they both kept turning their phones up more and more, to drown out that asshole who insisted on playing their phone out loud.

It strikes me that you cannot run a society like this. You cannot run a society full of people who are not simply thoughtless or inconsiderate but refuse on principle to take others into account, who find it offensive to think they owe anything to anyone (other than someone with formal authority). You cannot have a shared world with people who are most likely to double down on inconsiderate behavior, believing it to be a righteous and necessary act—people who will spend the next several days complaining to everyone who will listen about the asshole who played their phone too loud when I was trying to listen to my phone out loud, but at a reasonable volume.

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Part of this is obviously the diffusion of social media behaviors into everyday life. That is clearly where people get the idea of a space that is public and yet which exists solely for self-display and self-expression—and more than that, a space that is public and yet in which any unwelcome interaction is not just an annoyance but supposedly a violation of important principles of social justice. Social media habituates us to think of our fellow human beings as a passive audience, whose responses we get to pick and choose based on the degree to which they please or affirm us. The fact that so many of these behaviors involve inconsiderate use of smartphones—not just playing them out loud, but holding unnecessary phone conversations in (just to pick a random example) the fucking library—is kind of a giveaway here.

We were likely always going to arrive at something like this destination from the moment Facebook was created. But the pandemic greatly accelerated it, by simultaneously removing any normal social interaction and making social media our only way of interacting with anyone outside our immediate household. That one-two punch was absolutely deadly. The pandemic also introduced a permanent shift toward home delivery rather than in-person shopping or dining, which decreased the number of spontaneous interactions with in-person peers and increased the number of interactions with hired servants we are in a position to rate—making our “real world” interactions more gamified and social media-like. It’s no wonder, then, that people react so negatively to unwanted feedback or interactions. Their harsh response is their only option in a setting where they lack the ability to block you or give you zero stars.

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There is another phenomenon I also want to discuss today, which initially may seem unrelated: namely, the crisis of curiosity. A common refrain, when someone is asked what they like to do in their free time, is that they “want to turn their brain off.” My Esteemed Partner has experienced this a lot, as she has moved positions within her company and thus has to do a lot of meet-and-greets. When she shares that we have been watching French New Wave films, many colleagues respond that that sounds good in the abstract, but they need to watch something more mindless in their downtime—they need to turn their brain off, which is presented almost as an act of self-care.

In this context, part of the promise of LLMs is the unique ability to gain knowledge with your brain turned off. No longer do you need to dig through someone else’s tedious presentation of important information or (worse) their argumentation—instead, ChatGPT can give you exactly the information you desire, predigested just for you. Unlike cumbersome “books” or “articles,” the AI summary goes down smooth. But the knowledge gained is just as good as that available to so-called “experts”—if not better! For instance, someone on my Facebook wall (since blocked) repeatedly averred to me that my skepticism of AI (read: my implicit criticism of him for using it) was socially unjust because I neglected to take into account that he saved his father’s life by constantly second-guessing his father’s doctors from the literal opposite side of the globe, after overcoming both a serious language barrier and his lack of formal medical qualifications through the use of ChatGPT. Did I want his dad to die?!

Again, you can’t run a society full of people who think that knowledge is more valid the less work was required to attain it. You can’t have democratic debate or scientific research or even a real conversation with someone who refuses to engage with any art or argumentation of any substance and believes they can become an instant expert on every topic with zero effort or thought. And of course this loops back to the prickly defensiveness I diagnosed earlier, because there is absolutely nothing people are more prickly or defensive about than when someone criticizes their favorite new toy, the Emotional Support Chatbot.

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Underlying both dynamics is a refusal to think of or with others. Public space is not something we share with other people who have just as much right to it as we do—it is a forum for us to display and express ourselves. Art and information is not a way to connect to other people or join a shared project of inquiry—it is a vehicle to give us much-needed seratonin hits. In this context, thinking as such becomes a burden and an imposition. It is something we only do when we are forced to (at work and/or by an authority figure). For anyone else, anyone without standing, to demand thought of us, whether explicitly by asking us to take other people’s preferences into account or implicitly by communicating that they themselves have engaged in voluntary thought, is offensive and enraging.

Can you run a society full of people whose overriding goal in life is to avoid thought as much as possible? I don’t think you can—not even a Brave New World-style dystopia. Those type of scenarios presuppose that, behind the scenes, there are still some smart, thoughtful people making sure all the evil runs on time. But in our regime of anti-thought, there is no backstop. The world is run by idiots who reject reality and want nothing but social media clout. Freedom of thought is proverbially dangerous to the forces of domination, but I fear we are about to find out that a total lack of thought is even more dangerous.