What Should We Talk About? What Should We Think About?

This increasingly seems to me like a major and timeless human problem. Human beings need activity-- they need something to do. They need a focus. They also need something to talk about. We require interaction with other human beings, for its own sake as much as for any purpose we might put it too. So what form should those interactions take?

T.S. Eliot famously wrote that modern man is "distracted by distraction from distraction". It's a valid point, but...surely people need some kind of distraction, or at least some kind of occupation. What is it we're supposedly being distracted from, anyway?

The Christian might say "worship". The socialist might say politics, or the improvement of the human species. The hippie (I think that we still have hippies even if they aren't classic hippies) might say "love" or "human connection" or some such thing. Or perhaps we come down to the ideal of pure being-- whatever that is. Whatever anyone might say, people who complain about modern distractions must believe we're being distracted from something.

I'm very sympathetic to the argument made by Wally in the wonderful movie My Dinner with André, when he reacts against his rather hippie-ish friend, who is talking about various workshops he's led and which seem similiar to Sixties "happenings" or modern mindfulness exercises.

Wally says: "The whole point, really, I think, was to enable the people in the workshops, including yourself, to somehow sort of strip away every scrap of purposefulness from certain selected moments. And the point of it was so that you would then all be able to experience, somehow, just pure being. In other words, you were trying to discover what it would be like to live for certain moments without having any particular thing that you were supposed to be doing.

"And I think I just simply object to that. I mean, I just don’t think I accept the idea that there should be moments in which you’re not trying to do anything. I think, uh, it’s our nature, uh, to do things, I think we should do things, I think that, uh, purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure, and…and to say that we ought to be able to live without it is like saying that, uh, a tree ought to be able to live without branches or roots, but…but actually, without branches or roots, it wouldn’t be a tree, I mean, it would just be a log. Do you see what I’m saying?"

I tend to agree with Wally. We all have moments of pure euphoria or contentment or contemplativeness. But...we can't live like that. We have to do something, to think about something, to talk about something.

(And honestly, for me, those moments have been moments of plenitude rather than moments of pure simplicity.)

No matter how much you believe in the primacy of some particular activity, there's still inevitably lots of time left over. It's impressive and moving to read about great Christian saints who could spend hours on end in prayer. But few of us have that kind of purity, and even those saints seemed to have time and energy left over. Similarly, even the purest aesthete can't really live just for art, even the purest workaholic can't live just for work...

Besides, most art needs to be about something, all work needs to be about something...it has purpose inherent to it. So it can't really be its own purpose, ultimately, although it can to some extent.

And then there's the other problem, the one I started with. What do we talk about? And where can that talk go?

It seems reasonable to me to hold this belief: we should organize society and organize our lives in such a way that there's more rather than less to talk about. We should deliberately avoid simplifying and rationalizing things in such a way that there's less to talk about. Or think about.

(One of my personal bugbears in this regard is the "live and let live" philosophy of life. It's tolerant, yes. But it's very boring. Surely there's a happy medium between the Salem witch trials and all those depressing modern proverbs: "You do you", "Whatever floats your boat", "It's all good"...I don't want to be ruled by bigots. But I'd rather have coffee with a bigot than the sort of person who extends the zero aggression principle to not even criticizing anybody else's choices.)

Ironically enough, I have a great deal more to say about this, but that might be enough for now.