Bulletpoint Philosophy
“The man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important message.” — Henry David Thoreau
“Do you think we spend too much time thinking about life instead of living it?”
I’ve always wanted to begin an essay that way. The question raises all kinds of paradoxes. In asking it, am I already guilty of an excess of reflection? In reading my asking it, are you too prioritising thought and reflection over action? For that matter, why do we dichotomise thinking and living—as if to think were to be frozen in time, like Rodin’s sculpture?
I was at a Starbucks in New Haven working on an essay (“Describe the two-component account of moral weakness, and explain what you think is the most serious objection facing that theory.”) It was early morning in New Haven, but therefore early evening on the other side of the world when one of my closest friends sent me a text asking that troubling question. She gave no context, she said nothing else, she simply asked the question and it appeared on my screen in a little blue bubble designed by Apple in California, accompanied by a childish sound suggesting that a pigeon had just flown the question half way around the world.
The short answer—the tl;dr—is: no. No, I don’t think we spend too much time thinking about life instead of living it. The slightly longer version: that seems to be our problem, really.
This essay is, in its entirety, the answer I wanted to give my friend, but felt at the time incapable of. For as much as I wanted to answer her there and then, I felt that to do so—to send messages in glossy bubbles and to fill her ears with those tinny pigeon-noises—would be to belie my lack of thought, whatever I happened to say. I believed then, and I believe more strongly now, that the very form in which we present our thoughts can say almost as much as the thoughts themselves. A truism, perhaps proven by modernism itself. But invert this, and we get another truth: that what we say—and, prior to that, how we think—depends upon the form which we have available to say it. At a time when technology has changed these forms more in the past decade than in the few centuries before, now seems a good time to stop, to assess. Just what are we saying, and how are we saying it?
I propose we call ours the age of the bulletpoint philosophy. It is a time of quick fixes and strange philosophical mixes to life’s pressing problems. I could cherry-pick examples, but I scarcely need to. Websites like LifeHack, LifeHacker, Study Hacks, Zen Habits: as I check them while writing this, I get articles from “Get a Better You: Powerful workouts, easy recipes and wellness tips for an awesome life”, to “The Life-Changing Magic of the Inbox Sort Folder”; “How To Write Every Day” and “All The Passive Aggressive Stuff You Should Never Do In A Relationship”. In such philosophy (and I am one who believes philosophy is naught but counsel in the problems of living) we find Stoicism meeting Buddhism, hippie culture meeting the corporate incarnation of the Protestant ethic. Google is even more helpful. Ask for the meaning of life and I get 86 million answers in 0.76 seconds, with the best answer highlighted in a box at the top, lest I were to feel overwhelmed. (1. Stop Playing by the Rules; 2. Step Outside of Your Comfort Zone; 3. Find Your Joy; 4. Listen to Your Intuition; 5. Appreciate the Individual Moments.)
For some years I have been simultaneously attracted to and revolted by this kind of writing. On the one hand, it seems to help. I’m inspired to change my life, to find my joy. It has persuaded me to be an early riser, and to become vegetarian; to get rid of some of my possessions, and to try meditating. Admitting this, I’m horrified. Surely someone who attends a so-called elite university should be more discerning, taking life lessons from Shakespeare rather than Tim Ferris?
Like an anonymous street artist whose work is soon framed and placed in bourgeois living rooms, this writing first appeared on personal blogs but before long became its own genre with a proud place on major media websites. It has so far remained nameless as a genre. But “to name a sensibility”, wrote Sontag—“to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.”
I have both. Let us examine.
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A simple chronology: first there were philosophers; then came professors of philosophy; now we have the bulletpoint philosophers and those who love to live. First there were those who loved to examine life; then came those who loved to reflect on those who reflected on life; then came those who said screw it all, get on with living by the most simple and immediate means—“Stop Playing By The Rules.”
The shift, in other words, has been has been away from thought and towards action. It mimics the decline of the public intellectual and the rise of the “hustle”, the latter growing up in Silicon Valley among coders in garages and venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road. Hustling: from the world of gangs and live fast, die young, to the world of t-shirts, computers and “fail fast”. The “hustle” is a response to a world seen as too focused on thought; it is a backlash against a world too intellectual, the world of professors of philosophy who spend their lives reflecting upon others’ reflections upon life. Far better, the hustle imagines, to do, to act, and to “make a difference”. Change the world. In this conception, progress is seen as coming exclusively from action, not thought—if you’re talking you’re not walking, if you’re thinking you’re not winning.
The term “hack”, which has now entered daily language and the titles of numerous blogs I read, has clear origins. Urban Dictionary, ever-accurate, suggests “a clever solution to a tricky problem”. A coder in a garage gets stuck on a tricky problem in an algorithm, but sits up with it long enough, drinks enough Red Bull, and develops a clever solution. The next day his mother dies; but he knows that if he looks for it (or cogitates on it for a moment) there will be a clever solution somewhere, an “elegant” way of dealing with his feelings. LifeHacker matches the coder’s website HackerNews: there is no longer anything to separate life’s problems and those of web development. Two professors recently brought out a book based on their popular Stanford course: Design Your Life: How To Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. Build it, as Jobs and Wozniak once built the Macintosh; design it, as Facebook designs its icons.
Productivity cults sprang up to match the new hustle mentality with the technologies that Silicon Valley was creating. In 2001 we get the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, as if the markets’ failures a year before were simply a failure of productivity. David Allen’s book soon creates “GTD” cults of those committed to squeezing every bit of “value” out of their minutes and seconds (the author boasts of having more than 35 different careers by age 35—a fact to be obscured at all costs anywhere other than in this brave new world).
A drive towards productivity was hardly unique to that era. But what made this something different, something more far-reaching, was how the idea of the “hustle” developed among precisely those people who were building technologies that the rest of the world would soon use. Consumer technologies were developed in their creators’ image—an image of productivity, efficiency and action.
It is tempting to speak of big-brother-like powers and the forces of authority. But the deadening of the philosophical imagination is far more innocent than all that. Paul Starr’s important book The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications sets about showing, very effectively, this: that “The constraints in the architecture of technical systems and social institutions are rarely so clear and overpowering as to compel a single design.” The technologies we end up with are not at all inevitable—they could have taken on multitudes of other forms. And yet “At times of decision—constitutive moments, if you will—ideas and culture come into play… ”
Those directly involved in the creation of technologies are not aware of the ideas and culture that constrict their work, and nor do they see how those restrictions will extend, through their devices, apps and websites, to the minds of all those who use them. Yet through these constitutive moments, Silicon Valley’s hackers have inadvertently shaped our present philosophical imagination.
Why say in 1000 words what you can say in 140 characters? Why keep a commonplace book when you can save everything into Evernote and search it in an instant? Why send letters when email, and nowadays Facebook Messenger, are so freakishly efficient? In a world that believes in action over thought, life over reflection, brevity is the order of the day. Eloquence is for professors condemned to reflect on others who once did.
As Facebook and Twitter became mainstream, so too did the concepts of life that undergird them. We never saw it happen, but in beginning to think in 140 characters the public took on the hustle mindset. In writing emails instead of letters we too came to favour brevity over eloquence. In using an iPhone, productivity and efficiency become our ends rather than our means.
— — — —
There will be no women or men of letters in the age of action. The mundanity of email precludes their existence.
The term always meant something more expansive than the actual letters that those men and women wrote. But correspondence was symptomatic of the minds behind them. To read letters themselves is an experience in seeing the development of a philosophy—the disagreements a mind had with itself, the examination of ideas from many angles, the contradiction of oneself through dialogue. The Waste Land came to us fully formed, and it was only years after Eliot’s death that we could see the fraught years behind the philosophy. For a finished work shows none of its process, none of the internal wrangling and grappling that genuine thought requires—“A line will take us hours maybe;/ Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,/Our stitching and unstitching has been naught,” Yeats put it. The paradox of all genuine philosophy: it must appear fully-formed and complete, yet behind it must stand insecurity and hesitancy.
None of that today; no hesitancy. Philosophies on life’s greatest problems are formed in an instant, and no years of struggle or dialogue stand behind them. The technologies of craft and communication discourage, if not outright prevent it.
Email, Twitter, Facebook—technologies created by those who came of intellectual age (to give them the benefit of the doubt) during the time and in the place of the hustle, of productivity, of action. As a car drives on roads so our minds move along the tracks society lays. The car can turn any direction we wish—over there, over that grassy field, quick, round the corner, through the first gate, into our first world. But turn that direction it does not; on asphalt it stays. Our minds too are free to leave the tracks laid for us, but they do not. It does not occur to us to turn off, and even if it did, we wouldn’t know where to turn.
The three parts of the development of bulletpoint philosophy: 1. The development of communities and a culture that favour action over thought, productivity over reflection, hustle over cogitation. 2. The extension of that culture into consumer technologies through Starr’s “constitutive choices”. 3. The restriction of minds to those roads that technology lays.
Write me a profound email and I will post you a letter. Profundity seems not to occur to one on a busy screen, sent from an “address” containing the @ of the internet and a corporate logo (I use Gmail). Insight seems difficult when one is interrupted, constantly, by the dings of incoming messages; or when the ‘note’ you are about to send will soon make a swooshing, whooshing noise from your computer’s speakers, as those messenger pigeons take flight. There is something childlike and innocent about these technologies, whether it be the colourful, playful letters of Google staring at you from the upper left-hand corner, or the conversion of brackets and colons into smiling yellow faces. Everywhere there are reminders that the ‘hacker’ who made this tool is the same person who last week published on Medium, “I Lost an Argument with a Vegan. Here’s what I Learned.”
There will be no collected letters published, no record of the growth of great minds. If emails are kept at all, their content will match the mundanity of their form. Instead we get 86 million answers to the meaning of life, each posted immediately and without reflection or correspondence.
Sometimes, it seems, everyone is a philosopher and no one a thinker.
— — — —
Perhaps sensing the debasement of philosophy in the public realm, professors of philosophy have turned inwards. They have tried to re-intellectualise the discipline that now seems so un-intellectual. It is an honest response, perhaps even a noble one. But of course they pulled on the public pendulum slightly too firmly. They overcompensated.
Professors of philosophy killed philosophy, as Thoreau told us, but they now find themselves in the position of trying to resuscitate it. Yet as in politics, so in the academy: as bulletpoint philosophy took over the middle ground, professors of philosophy found themselves retreating far further to the wings, back to a kind of “core base”. If the public’s philosophy was now too easy to understand, professors certainly made it less so. Now no one understands them.
One article, noting upon the death of Derek Parfit, put it: “Parfit was an outstanding philosopher. However, few people outside academic philosophy could name one of his books.” Tellingly, the same article notes the 1950s to the 1990s as the “golden age” of academic philosophy. I have dated the growth of bulletpoint philosophies to the late 1990s.
Academic philosophy is now more impenetrable than ever before. Parfit’s On What Matters was published in 2011, and readers are presented with two volumes of clearly rigorous thinking on… what? Moral philosophy, but what more can a lay-reader say? Academic philosophy has always been written for small circles in the thought that it would in its own way “trickle down”, through those educated at universities, into organisations and public debate. But when academic philosophers write more than ever for themselves, and when the public has shifted away from public intellectuals towards bulletpoint philosophy, those who can stand with a foot in both worlds, able to translate one for the other, are few. (Sontag, where are you?)
We’re now in the old high-brow, low-brow binary. Professors of philosophy don’t read bulletpoint philosophy, and dismiss all those who do, retreating back into their own circles of self-satisfied work. Those who read bulletpoint philosophy don’t understand a word of what those professors write, and so cannot “lift” their intellectual sights. As with politics, so with philosophy: the area of intersection in views is now nowhere to be found. Left and right have never been further apart, never less able to reconcile differences, and philosophy has never before been wrenched to such extremes. This state of affairs is self-perpetuating. Oil and water do not mix.
I hold my iPhone close to my chest when reading bulletpoint philosophy because I do not want to be seen in public reading such stuff. It is a high-brow response to lower-brow work; a philosophical equivalent of Clement Greenberg being seen reading The New Yorker. I am blameworthy for this, I’m sure. Better, these days, to be like Sontag, to embrace all culture. But even she recanted that view. Culture must have some moral depth, she seemed to say in her later work.
— — — —
I should be pleased by the simplification of philosophy, by its return to more direct intervention in people’s lives. The academicism of philosophy has frustrated me deeply—my college philosophy classes are notable only for how removed they were from anything resembling wisdom and life (I’ve not had a Cavell). I’ve been drawn to stoicism for its directness, its sincerityin helping with the problems of life. Stoicism was (is) my youthful overcompensation to what I saw as the irrelevance of academic philosophy. Bulletpoint philosophy is similarly direct, and similarly earnest. (Seneca would write on Medium should he write today). So why do I resist it?
Partly it is having read enough philosophy to know the difference, and to know that bulletpoint philosophies do not deserve a claim to philosophy at all. But again, that is just a high-brow response. The contradiction in it is that if the test of real philosophy is its helpfulness in living life, then bulletpoint philosophies can indeed claim that. And yet still I resist; still I look for some genuine reasons to justify my aversion. I shall hazard some:
- Form, more than content, contains powerful lessons. And life is shown to be simple by the simplicity of the bulletpoint form. (The bulletpoint is the essence of simple form: it merely posits, while eschewing any regard for order or argumentative development.) We are therefore led astray, simplifying life when what we need most is to understand its complexity—to understand that we may not understand it all.
- The subtextual lesson we learn from bulletpoint philosophies is that there is a simple, external answer for all of our problems. That the sole difficulty is in finding the right answer; as if application did not matter.
- Philosophy is turned into statements of certainty via bulletpoints. It comes here strangely close to science. In a weird way this is continuous with at the other extreme the pre-eminence of analytic philosophy (intended to produce rigour and a degree of certainty unknown to the continental tradition—to move philosophy closer to science, in other words). But philosophy’s necessity is in answering all those human concerns that science can never answer. Science tells how to do, not what should be done. Our age is in dire need of the latter; our problem is too much of the former.
- Value is placed on information over understanding. Find the bulletpoints, the logic says, and your problems will be solved. Philosophy of old knew that the challenge lay in understanding philosophy in terms of one’s own life. Its form, leading us along in prose and metaphor and ideas, aids the business of understanding. It thereby leads to real wisdom—wisdom being applied knowledge. Bulletpoint philosophy is readily understood in terms of its words, but this paradoxically hinders us from application.
- There is no philosophical dialogue. We do not enter into the great debate. We simply consume tenuous self-help, as we consume the news, needing our next fix the following morning.
- Complexity is seen as deficiency. Simplicity is the order of the day. But some ideas are complex, and can only be expressed as such.
- We are given no sense of philosophical categories or oppositions. We are simply given a worldview without any understanding of what else might exist, or what the counterarguments are.
- Genuine philosophy is often complex because human lives are so complex. We cannot solve the problems of life like we can solve a blocked drain, by searching Google for a local plumber.
— — — —
Bulletpoint philosophy proves this, if little else: that life’s problems are keenly felt. In its proliferation, questions of the soul have been directly asked, and directly answered.
In history political turbulence has often been met with a turning inwards, and the inwards-looking world of philosophy is both a challenge and an answer to dictators and fascists. The period of the Warring States in China gave us Confucianism and Mohism, Legalism and Daoism. French existentialism grew out of the carnage of the Second World War. Philosophy says to tyrants: you can challenge my possessions and my material existence, but I have another life which you cannot see nor understand nor diminish.
What I’m getting at is that philosophy laughs at Trump. Bulletpoint philosophy, however, is understood by him.
Suddenly cynicism of sincerity seems outdated. Postmodernism mocked questions of the meaning of life, but Trump mocks the postmodern. If it was a politics that took itself too seriously that led to the ironic mode, it is a politics that embarrasses itself that draws us back to earnestness.
Academic philosophy takes itself so seriously to the point of impenetrability. Bulletpoint philosophy sees itself with an ironic expression, and thinks that more than 1000 words on the meaning of life were to risk sincerity. An age as fraught as ours will turn back into philosophy as a kind of spirituality. Let us hope, then, that the philosophy it encounters is a genuine philosophy, and not one built on the flawed poles of equations and bulletpoints.
What can I say? Alain de Botton seems to have it right after all.