A philosopher’s argument against the cult of achievement — Zena Hitz: Full Interview

[00:00:00] Zena Hitz: I'm Zena Hitz. I'm a philosopher and a college professor. I teach at St. John's College in Annapolis, and the title of my book is Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. [00:00:15] Speaker 2: Chapter One: The Journey of a Disillusioned Academic. [00:00:19] Zena Hitz: I grew up in a very bookwormish family, amateur intellectual family. We read books, we talked about ideas, we got in arguments about petty facts. I went to a liberal arts college, I went to the college where I teach now, St. John's, studied totally useless stuff, ancient botany, French poetry, and all kinds of things that don't get you anywhere in the world, supposedly. I went to graduate school in philosophy and classics, and I ended up in very high-powered elite programs, and I was gradually disillusioned with academic life, both with the research and with the teaching. I had a kind of early midlife crisis. I was in my 30s. I guess that's still a midlife crisis. I left, I joined, quit the profession entirely, and lived in a monastery, a Catholic religious community for three years. When I was there, I really tried to encounter myself as a human being, not just a professor, not someone with a certain social status. And I wanted to think about, I didn't set it out this way in advance. This was just me working on my life. I wanted to figure out what, what intellectual life really was. What is this practice of reading and studying and thinking? Is it just a profession? Something that we professors do? Or is it something that really belongs to every human being as a, as sort of our natural heritage? And it was my instinct that was the latter, and I started to see the ways in which that might really work in practice. By living in this community full of ordinary people where I didn't have access to the profession. One of the things I've tried to do in this book is to think about the bad reputation that intellectuals sometimes have and ways in which that bad reputation is deserved. So one of the things people say about people like me, professional intellectuals, is that we're lost in the stars. We're so withdrawn from ordinary features of life that we can't connect with other human beings. We can't connect with our, even our own bodies necessarily. And I think there's something in that. And it generalizes a bit past intellectual life into anyone who works with, uh, their mind and not with materials. There's something about working with materials which, uh, is deeply wholesome. Washing dishes is one example. Building things is another. And I think what's so wholesome about it is this. If you're doing something with your hands, something as simple as washing dishes or laundry, you're going to find things that will not work. You're going to find that reality resists your will. It's a bit easier to see with laundry than with dishwashing because there are those stains. And no matter what you do, the stains are not going to come out. But it's true for dishwashing too. You know, you're like, how am I going to get the grease off this pot? It's endless. It just keeps coming off the pot. Like, what do I need to do to get the grease off of it? There may be a point where you have to say, you know what, we're putting it away with some grease on it because I can't get the grease off. That's a pretty ordinary feature of our encounters with the world. It's the encounter of limitations. Things that won't do what we want them to do. Things that resist our wishes. What happens in the world of the mind that I think is really dangerous and one of the reasons why intellectuals have such a bad reputation and why that bad reputation is sometimes justified is that you work in the realm of language and language doesn't fight back the way that reality does. You can tell yourself something is true and it can be totally false and it can sit there stubbornly for years without responding. In fact, wholesome functioning intellectual activity always involves something like that manual labor feeling of like coming up against reality. You're writing a term paper for your college class and the hours getting later and later. You had started with these grand dreams. You were going to write the best paper that's ever been written. And then finally, it's two in the morning and you're dead and you realize it's just going to be a cruddy paper. That's a moment where like hard reality just cracks your ideas about yourself and what you want it to be. And likewise, I think a scholar who's really trying to find out the truth about something, they can have a pet theory and then they can find a piece of evidence and they just can't. The theory's got to go. That could be very painful. So I think for me, having always been good with words, good with language, I could kind of talk myself out of anything. And for me to spend time doing things like wash dishes or sweeping floors or working with my hands, it forced me to become more accustomed to that resistance of reality. And I think that's a piece of our humanity that's even broader than intellectual life. One sign that anything we're doing is going well is resistance. That means that we've we have hit reality. And that's where we want to be, I think, as human beings, where reality is. So I decided to leave the community. I decided to go back to St. John's to teach, to put teaching more at the center of my intellectual life. And I started to read about what was called the crisis in the humanities, really the collapse of the study of the humanities in universities in the U.S. And I didn't feel that any of them were saying the things that I thought were true. And so I wrote this book in which I tried to communicate this understanding of intellectual life as a human thing that I, that I've learned through my life experiences, as well as through my studies. So I had a personal crisis, which was in some ways related to the other crisis. In 2015, which was when it was being written about, it was beginning to be noticed that contemporary colleges and universities, the study of the humanities was collapsing. So numbers of majors are down, departments are closing. And there's a loss in the common culture of a sense of why these kinds of study matter. And a lot of young people are under a ton of pressure to study pragmatic, in pragmatic fields to get degrees that will get them lucrative or prestigious jobs. And that means that things like philosophy, literature, political theory, they're disappearing honestly from, from our academic institutions. And there's a threat that they'll disappear also from our common life. One possibility is that academic institutions, universities and colleges can reform themselves, can take a good look and see what they need to do to restore and preserve these, these modes of study. So I think that would be good if that happens. I wouldn't depend on that myself. There's a lot of pressures moving the other direction. So the thing I'm interested in right now is really trying to find ways to bring it into ordinary lives of ordinary people so that it's built in, so to speak, into our ways of life. And there's an old tradition of that that goes back to features of the labor movement in Britain and the US in the 19th and 20th century. Working people, people who would not normally have had the opportunities to have an education, formed grassroots organizations, reading groups, reading clubs. They gathered in the evenings. They read very serious books, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, historical books, Eastern classics, you name it. And they educated themselves. They liberated themselves in a certain way, I think, from the diminishment of their surroundings as workers. I've read some of the history of those movements. And I think that something like that is possible now. That is, I think that people can organize together informally within their communities. There's actually a lot of opportunities right now online to connect with others, to read seriously, to think seriously, not for any special practical purpose, not to make more money, not to do some prestigious program or make a big PR splash, but just to grow and develop as human beings, to recover people's sense of their own dignity, connect with others on a deep level, cultivate an inner life, cultivate a practice of looking at the questions that are fundamental to human existence, not as a professional thing, but as an ordinary thing. [00:08:51] Speaker 2: Chapter two, what is an intellectual life? [00:08:54] Zena Hitz: So I define it in a few different ways. One is that it's an inner life. And by that, I mean, it's, it's something that belongs to you in a certain way that's private. It's a part of yourself that really, in principle, no one has access to. It's the space of your own thinking. It's withdrawn from the world. And I mean the world in a very specific sense, a specialized sense, withdrawn from the social world, insofar as it's the locus of status, competition, who's in with who. It's the world where your, your focus is on how you're evaluated, where you fit in, in a certain structure or a hierarchy, whether it's at the top or whether it's at the bottom. So you withdraw from that realm of competition. That's also part of intellectual life. I also think it's a, it's a source of dignity. And it is a way of, a mode of connecting with others. That's all the kind of abstract principles of it, the foundation of it. But it looks like things that are really pretty ordinary to most of us: reading, thinking, speculating about people's motivations and like what makes people tick, birdwatching, walking in nature, mathematics. So it has a very wide range in human activity. And I think when you look at those activities and think about the elements I mentioned, you can start to get a glimmer of the kind of thing that intellectual life is. I think the clearest examples of things that are opposed to it are all of the practices connected with social competition. Advancing in one's career, where that's a matter of status, forming a group, an in-group of people who have, who are in the know, who are superior in some way to those outside of it. It doesn't mean that you don't use your mind when you're pursuing this kind of life. And that, the kind of life I've just described is a life that could belong to all kinds of things. It could belong to a philosophy professor who was interested in getting into the most prestigious institution. It could belong to a stockbroker who had to be, you know, make the biggest trades. So it, it's not exclusive to any specific walk of life, but it is an element that I think is in us and is a threat to all of our basic values. So what I was in the middle of saying is that you can use your intellect in striving for status. You might well be very good at it. There's an art to it, but you're using your mind as a means to an end. You're using it to get something else. You're using it in a way that's acquisitive. And what interests me is an intellectual life that's not acquisitive, that's not trying to get anything else, but just wants to be doing what it's doing. It finds its good in the activity itself. There's a wonderful book by a philosopher named Kiran Setia about the midlife crisis. And what he calls these activities are telic and atelic. So they're activities which have their ends in themselves, which are worth doing all on their own, which parts of one's life where that feel like the culmination of one's life, where you're not looking for anything beyond what you're doing. So if you think about some examples, okay, reading or studying, you get lost in what you're doing. You're out in nature. You're not trying to get anything. You're just looking at it. Prayer, religion is a huge resource of this, of this type of activity. Being with one's family or loved ones is probably the most common way it's lived. So there's a certain set of activities which we really seek for their own sake. And then there's a bunch of stuff we do for other reasons, usually to acquire those things. So, you know, you go to the store to get milk. You apply for a job that might introduce you to a person that can get you connected with someone who can help you do the thing that you really want to do. There's a whole range of activities. Most of what we do is instrumental. It's a means to an end. So if you think about it, why do we work? We work for money. What's the money for? Sometimes the money is actually just for the sake of the work you're doing. And then you're caught in a kind of vicious cycle. You're using something as a means to an end as if it's a mean end in itself. And you never, ever get to the thing that your work is really for. And we have a kind of hyperactive workaholic society here in the U.S. and I think also in Europe. So we have a tendency to get locked into this mode where we're acting for the sake of a something else without ever getting to something else. So part of what my work is trying to do is to ask people to reflect on what the something else is. What's the thing that all of your busyness and all your activity is really for? What are the moments that really matter to you where you feel like this is the point? This is why I'm doing what I'm doing? Activities which have their end in themselves and which in some way could count as the culmination of a life. I say that last part because there's something like playing cards, which I love, okay? Playing like card games. You're not usually doing it for any other reason. It's just a fun, relaxing thing to do. If your whole life culminated in playing cards, you might not feel like that was a life you were proud of or that you felt that you'd accomplished something. So I think you want something that's being done for its own sake, but also is the thing which your work culminates in. Without those things, our lives, I think, are pointless. And it's in that area where intellectual life lies. So that's where reading and studying and cultivating an inner life, that's where it is. It's in that realm of things which we pursue for their own sake. We pursue just because they're what they are, because of what they do for us. Aristotle is a philosopher who I've studied a lot and spent some time with. He thought there was a danger of our lives becoming totally focused on these telic activities. He was involved in a definition of human flourishing, which he thought of as being not just the culmination of an individual life, but also something that political community had to aim at. And he has a couple of arguments that contemplation is happiness. So the best life is the contemplative life. And one of his arguments that the contemplative life is the best life is in terms of leisure. And the way he puts it is, work is for the sake of leisure, not the other way around. He also has another analogy, war is for the sake of peace. So he thinks of work as being analogous to war. It's this constant struggle you have just to get into place the conditions that you need for the things that you really care about, which are the works of peace. And leisure is like that. It's the analog of peace in ordinary life, where we work and work and work and work. And then here's this thing, leisure. So he thought that that leisure was contemplation primarily. And he thought that contemplation was really philosophy. So he had a narrower view of what contemplation was than I do. He thought that it was philosophizing in the way that he philosophizes, which to be fair also included natural science, investigations into nature, animals, astronomy, and so on. But even so, it didn't include, say, I don't think, the kind of contemplation that one might have being with one's family and thinking about who they are and seeing them with appreciative love, with loving vision. That, I think, is a form of contemplation also, not one that Aristotle would have recognized. Even though Aristotle's dead, and he's been dead for thousands of years, there's a way in which reading an old book is like having a conversation. You always have to be looking for ways of connecting what you're reading to something that seems true to you. And sometimes you're going to find things that don't feel true to you. In fact, that's going to happen pretty often. So I think with Aristotle, in a way, the best example of this, even better than the expansion of contemplation, is he thought that the contemplative life was something only a few people could do. So he had a definition of human happiness. It was really something for, you know, a handful of rich gentlemen, definitely men, definitely rich, probably Greek. And what to me is interesting is you can look at someone like Aristotle, you can see that feature of his thinking, which is not something most of us would accept these days. But then you can also look at the part of his thinking about leisure and work, and peace and war, and what it means for an activity to be for its own sake. We can think about the questions that he's asking and think about about the structures of his thinking. And then we can ask ourselves, well, what does that mean for all of us? Not just for the rich, not just for Greeks, not just for men. And it actually, in this case, I think it's not so difficult. So I don't think he imagined a world where so many people were literate, were able to read and to write. But now we know, and we, that's one of the reasons why I love these histories of working people and their intellectual movements. It's for people that worked full time, they worked with their hands. They were the kind of people that Aristotle would have thought were good only for producing food or producing shelter. And he might have really thought of them as being means to an end. But they find a way within their work, after their work, around their work, through their work, to think about things in a way that I think he might have understood. Can't be confident of that, but he might have. And then you have an insight. The big historical change is the thing that I alluded to namely, just mass literacy and the economy of book production and other kinds of film and other kinds of media where very difficult, sophisticated, high level thoughts and ideas are now very, very broadly available. So that's the first move that I think breaks what you might have thought was a historical necessity about intellectual life belonging only to a few people. We don't have the excuse anymore of literacy not being available. We don't have the excuse of books not being available. What we have instead is incredibly fierce, ruthless social competition and a sense in our schooling that achievement is the end of an education, which if you just translate into other words, that means being at the top of your class is the end of an education. If you think that through, that makes zero sense. Okay, you can't set up a whole educational system or a whole school so that some people end up at the top of the heap on some ranking. I think that this feature of today's young people, which is something which a number of other people have observed, it's not unique to me, and it comes with a regular qualification. So older people always have ideas about what the younger people are like. But it does seem that they are more fearful about uncertainty, about not knowing, about sitting in the space where they really don't know what the answer is going to be. They really don't know what's going to come out of their mouths. That's very uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable by nature, but it's particularly uncomfortable for these young people. I think there are two reasons for that. We have this relentless achievement culture, which I think has only gotten worse with time in our schools. So there's a sense that if you make a mistake, you're kicked off the totem pole. Everything's got to be perfect. Every flaw is going to be held against you and it's going to affect your future in a dramatic way. So it's all happening under the guise of anxiety about the future, anxiety about what kind of lives they're going to lead, what kind of success is going to be possible for them, where they're going to be able to get in the kind of schools that they want to do and into the kinds of professions they want to be in, and the intense competition that leads up to that. So the sense that any mistake is is sudden death. The other reason, which is more general is and to me more frightening in a certain way, is the internet has taught us to think of learning as information retrieval. So you have a question, you ask the internet, it tells you the answer. And that leaves to the side the question of where real learning takes place, which is how did that person, and there's always a person, who put that answer into the internet from which you retrieved it? How did they know that thing? What was their evidence? What were their sources? How did they reach that conclusion so that they could put it in a place where you could go and retrieve it as information? And I think if you look, pull back the curtain on even pretty garden variety pieces of information, you find that there's a result of a thinking process, which is open-ended, which is messy, which has stops at starts. And I think it's, it's just the feature of any serious learning that to me gives it its authenticity. The sense that there's real learning taking place is that sense of open-endedness and being lost, and you don't know where the answer is coming from. You get totally befuddled, you don't know what to do. Sometimes you're in that condition for quite a long time. You might be there for an hour, a week, a month, years, and then suddenly the thing you were looking for is present to you. This is a very ordinary, uh, intellectual experience once you become accustomed to that uncertainty and that discomfort of not knowing what's going to happen. It's one of my concerns in my writing and talking about intellectual life to try to recover it as something which is open-ended, where we put ourselves in a space where we don't know the answers. In a way, if we know the answers, that's a sign we don't need to learn. So we should be moving always to the spaces where we don't know the answer, where the, the information isn't retrievable because it doesn't exist or it's not really information. What learning really is, what education really is, is the movement from one place to another. It's something I try to explain to my students pretty often actually. It's not about getting to point Z. It's about starting from wherever you are and getting to some point that's further on. That's learning. So we have this very achievement-oriented, uh, educational system. Um, and with all of the, uh, all the social economic biases that are built into that, it's an achievement system that disadvantages the poor, disadvantages anyone who's different in any way, who stands out in any way from the people who, uh, govern things. And, uh, that creates, I think, a sense that achievement and intellectual life are coextensive. And in fact, the way I understand it, not only is that not strictly true, it's in a way the opposite of what's true. Because if you're chasing after achievement, you're not actually living an intellectual life. So you have a situation that I think is really perverse nowadays where you might have a really high prestige professor, professional academic, professional intellectual, who's really not actually living an intellectual life. Because all they're thinking about is, you know, advancing on these incredibly arcane ladders of status distinctions that academics make up. And I assure you they exist. Whereas you might have a taxi driver who, you know, reads like crazy, thinks about everything, has all kinds of very profound thoughts, and does it all for its own sake. That person's living an intellectual life and, and more than the professor is. We might have been more used to that idea maybe a hundred years ago. For some time we haven't been accustomed to thinking that way about learning or about intellectual life. That it's something which has to do with the attitude of the individual to what they're doing. And not, uh, somehow that person's social standing, that person's wealth, that person's race, that person's gender, that person's whatever it is. Uh, it's, it's something much more basic than that. The fact is, I think, even if you're at the top of the heap, even if you're in a, at a high status position, that's not really where your value is coming from. That same judgment, which arbitrarily rejected all these other people, has put you on the top. What does that have to do with who you really are? Nothing. I was a very successful academic for a time. I, um, you know, looked to be at the beginning of a really accomplished career. And it felt somehow off to me. And I, it took me some years to untangle why. And I think it was something like this, that is that in my restlessness as a young per, as a younger person, my attempt to kind of, um, feel like I was worth something, I was just climbing whatever ladder I could find to get up. Now I was a natural intellectual, so academia was a natural place for me. And I always had, I think somewhere in me, a real love of learning. But I, there were points where I think I was really just thinking about, you know, where I was on the totem pole. And that took over the way I was doing things, uh, in a certain way. I think that's an old story. I think that many people can tell stories like that. They, uh, achieve a kind of success and it, there's an emptiness that comes with it and a sense of diminishment. And it's a little mysterious because, uh, you're so fortunate, you're so lucky, you know, there's so many people who, who want what you have and, and don't have it. On the other hand, what your real value is, is something much lower down. So for me, leaving my career, leaving my profession, going to a community where I was really no one special, like everyone else. You know, I washed the dishes, I swept the floors like everyone else did. And some people knew I had this fancy philosophy background and other people didn't. I had to recover my value as a human being, uh, independently of what, uh, that status that I was getting from the outside previously. That's what a refuge from the world is. Um, it's a place that everyone, winners and losers of the status game need, a place where your real value as a human being comes through. And it's on the one hand, less than you ever thought it was. You know, you can find your value as a human being washing dishes. I mean, what's more banal than that? Anyone can wash dishes. On the other hand, it's also more than anything you would have thought it would be because it's, it's, um, something you have regardless of, of what other people think of you. Uh, you have a kind of a freedom and a depth to yourself and resources within yourself that, that no one can touch. We think of being human as being a kind of biological fact given to us from birth, but it is, uh, something which has the capacity to grow. We can always become more human. And I think the ways in which we become more human are, my thought is very traditional. It's nothing original to me. It's, it's knowledge and it's love. And these things are connected to one another. The more we see, the more we appreciate, uh, the more we appreciate, the more we want to keep seeing. The mind is an engine for growth, for us becoming more who we are, more human. [00:29:15] Speaker 2: Chapter three, unlikely intellectuals from Einstein to MC Hammer. [00:29:20] Zena Hitz: Dr. In the book, I give a lot, I tell a lot of stories. I love these stories. Stories of people from, uh, in diminished social circumstances, in poverty, people who, with disabilities, people with abusive families, all kinds of people who are really under the, the enormous pain and pressure of social contempt. And those people find in books, or in studying, or in thinking, or in looking at nature, they find a different way of looking at themselves than what they're being told from the outside. And they turn to poetry, to art, to thinking, to anything, anything in themselves that feels like a weapon against that diminishment that they're getting from the outside. And they have a dignity as human beings, which is inalienable. It's, it can't be taken away. I, uh, did some volunteering in jails and prisons some time ago. I taught a couple of philosophy classes to prisoners. Again, these are very low status characters in our community. These are not people who are, have won the, the game of, of society, but they, they're full of thoughts, uh, and reflections. And the fact that they're confined and unable to pursue the things that a normal person can do in some way nurtures that. That's not to defend the prison system, which I think has all kinds of problems. It's just that there's a strange, uh, recovery of, of humanity that's possible there. And in a way it's because you're pressed, I think, to the limit. So the examples historically are Malcolm X, you know, Malcolm X's father was murdered by clan members. His family's after that broken up by the welfare office. So his brothers and sisters are scattered into different families. He's the smartest kid in his class and his teacher doesn't think he should be anything more than a carpenter. So he's kind of under the brunt of, uh, the weight of, uh, American racism in a way that, uh, was, you know, I think about as bad as it gets. He got into selling drugs, uh, running numbers, running gambling operations. He had a lot of involvement with the musical scene in Harlem also. So he also did some things connected to music, but he ended up getting arrested for burglary. He gets thrown in prison and he reads the entire prison library when he's there. He changes his name. That's when he becomes Malcolm X. He has a religious conversion to Islam. He joins this group, the nation of Islam. And he, he comes out of there a different, uh, this focused person who kind of looms for me in the, in American history in a special way. A person of incredible strength and honesty and what seems to me like inner depth. He never stopped thinking about things and never stopped responding to realities as they revealed themselves. To me, it's a perfect example of, uh, that inner refuge, what the inner refuge really looks like and its possibilities for us. The other stories are a bit less dramatic. People think being a graduate student and not getting a job, it's the worst thing that could happen to you. And they don't remember that this happened to Albert Einstein. You have, uh, a weird kid, very absorbed in his own things, a member of an ethnic group. He's Jewish. It's not particularly high status. It's object of hatred, uh, and fear in the environment he's in. He, uh, goes to graduate school in physics, uh, and he can't get a job afterwards. He has a family, so he has a wife and a child. He has to support the family somehow and he can't get an academic job. So he gets this job in a patent office. He does his work and then he sits and thinks about physics. He's doing that really in some isolation at that point from any academic community. He's been denied any serious prospect of advancement through doing it. And he's left just with his way of looking at the world, his mathematical training. And he calls in a letter he writes, uh, later in life, he calls the patent office the worldly cloister where he hatched all his most beautiful ideas. And it's where he wrote, these three 1905 papers, which totally transformative for physics. So it was a place for him where, despite being denied, um, a place in the world that he aspired to, he was able to find himself space where he could be who he was and think about what he wanted to. The Virgin Mary is in medieval and Renaissance art, often depicted reading. Sometimes she has a huge stack of books. And usually the scene is the Annunciation, which is when the angel Gabriel comes and tells her that she's going to be the mother of God, mother of Christ. And, uh, I wanted to know why she was reading and what it meant for the, the painters, people that were receiving this, that she read. What I discovered was in fact, there's an very old tradition of thinking of her as being a reader, as someone who knew the Hebrew scriptures backwards and forwards, who had read the prophets. So she's read Isaiah, where it says, according to tradition, that a virgin will conceive. And then this angel turns up and he's like, you're going to conceive a child. She's like, oh yeah, I know what you're talking about. That's the thing I read in Isaiah. That's just part of the tradition that she's fully aware of what's going on because of her study of, of the scriptures. Here's this teenage girl, uh, not a high status character, not someone with a lot of power. Through her study, through her intellectual work, she, um, gets into a different kind of space, a sense of her value, a sense of the way the world works. That's not the way that people tell her it is. The result of the angel's visit is that she's pregnant. She's engaged to someone else. A woman in that time, if you're pregnant without being married, you could be stoned and thrown outside the city. So she's undertaking this huge risk. And where does she get that strength? Where does she get that fortitude to choose this? And, uh, I think that part of the books is they're trying to give an account of that. That is, she reads, um, and that inwardness, that walled refuge from the world. That's what gives her the, the strength and the fortitude to, to make choices which are really radical and strange and countercultural and dangerous. I don't watch a lot of sports, but when I do, I, uh, it tends to be a big game and often I see spectacular things that I remember for a long time. So I saw, I think, a playoff game against the Yankees. This must have been 2004. And, uh, his leg was bleeding from sutures. So he had some injury that was literally bleeding while he's pitching. And he's pitching the game of his life, like just unbelievable athletic abilities. Yeah. So, so it's just the kind of thing where even if you're not a sports fan, you're just transfixed by this human excellence, this person who is resisting their physical pain, their physical weakness, and exercising their abilities to the highest degree. There's a way in which an inner refuge or inner strength could be seen as a kind of athletic achievement of the kind of Curt Schilling has. So, you know, you just, you discipline yourself, you know, you just don't care about surroundings. You just, you know, you, you, you fight for your dignity and you just exercise it like a sport. And there's something about that that seems right. Um, that is there's part of having a refuge from the world is having a kind of discipline where you give up some things in order to achieve other things, very typical kind of thing. You see it everywhere. You see it in sports, you see it in art, you see it in finance, anything, anything that you care about involves restricting yourself in order for a higher goal. But I suppose I wanted intellectual life to be a bit different. It can look like that, but I wanted it to be a kind of dignity that wasn't, that didn't depend on our achieving things. So, you know, you think about Curt Schilling or you think about the ancient Spartans who, you know, like 300 of them stand against the invading army of Persians. And you think, wow, human beings are amazing. They can do all kinds of stuff. But you're, you're hearing about extraordinary people. You're hearing about exceptional people. You're hearing about people who have trained for this. I use all these examples of famous people, but I'm really interested in ordinary people. I want to know what's available to anybody. What kind of inner refuge is available to anybody that isn't just a matter of I'm a, I'm a high achiever in the inner life. If I hear someone say something like that, I think, ah, there can't be a high achiever on the inner life. Inner life is something which is for everyone and achievement is not the right standard. But that's anyway, the tension that, that, that I was struggling with when I was thinking about Curt Schilling. So John Baker was a office worker in Essex. He worked at the British equivalent of AAA, so the Automobile Association. I read his biography. I'm not clear exactly what the work was, but I think it was probably about as boring as work gets, like paperwork, a pretty boring kind, pretty pedestrian kind. He never went to university, but he loved literature. And at some point he got interested in peregrine falcons. He spent 10 years in his spare time, on top of his full-time job, chasing them by bicycle through the countryside near where he lived. So 10 years, voluminous maps, scrupulous notes, counted how many birds he saw peregrines kill, kept track of particular birds in particular locations, just absorbed everything within the reach of his bicycle about peregrine falcons that he could get. And then he writes, he boils down all of his journals and diaries into this incredible, short, 200-page book called The Peregrine, which is a kind of poetic exploration of what it means to look at an animal and what it means to look at a violent animal, an animal that lives by killing, and why, uh, what happens to a human being when we, when we look at an animal that likes to kill, and what tensions does that bring about in a, in, in the person watching? Anyway, it's an incredible book, and it's also yet another example of someone who, not a professional intellectual, not an academic, not a, someone moving in the sphere, in the, uh, literary circles of his day. And it is a testament to the capacity that, uh, ordinary working people have to reach out into reality and really make something with their surroundings. It's an incredible book. It's an incredible book. I went on Twitter initially to promote my book, although I've actually met all kinds of amazing people there. M.C. Hammer is one, is definitely one of the more remarkable. And I discovered at some point that he was posting scientific articles. Sometimes they were more popular scientific, but sometimes they were journal articles. And that he had a clearly particular interest, which he'd studied to some depth into the nature of life and the nature of consciousness. So I started to, to look at what he was doing because it's, uh, another kind of example of the thing I'm talking about. Intellectual life, we think of it as being this contained academic thing. And in fact, it's something that everyone does. Now, M.C. Hammer's not just anyone. He's an extremely accomplished artist, producer, an entrepreneur. Uh, but the things which he's famous for have nothing to do with the scientific or philosophical account of consciousness or the nature of life. I was on Twitter too late, as always happens. He put up a video of, uh, the regeneration of planaria, which are these flatworms that regenerate very quickly. So if you're interested in what a living organism is, it's independence, it's, uh, capacity to maintain itself. It's, I would put it in a kind of poetic way. It's dominion over material things. Uh, planaria, a perfect example. There's something that we study at, uh, St. John's. So he put up a video with no explanation and I said, I got very excited. And then, uh, we started to have some conversations that we've had since then. So anyway, it's, to me, it's a, it's a fabulous, uh, witness to, uh, the kinds of things that, uh, are available through our, you know, through the internet, you know, through anything to think about questions that are fundamental, that are serious, that are complex, and that there's nothing about them that's shut off from, you don't need to go get a degree in life sciences to think about why life matters or what consciousness is. And you don't need to produce an article yourself. I mean, he may, but I don't think it would matter if he did or he didn't. Uh, his understanding of this stuff is, is what matters, just as it matters for all of us. Sam C. Hammer is an example. And because of his fame, he's even a kind of emblem of the kind of intellectual life I'm talking about. That's for its own sake. Uh, it doesn't result necessarily in scientific papers. It doesn't come out of a graduate degree. It's just done because someone wanted to understand something about who they were in the world they lived in. All kinds of people can live in intellectual life. So carpenters, factory workers, taxi drivers, famous hip hop artists. We can't see that because we're kind of enchanted by a mystique, which we have from a sort of Hollywood picture of an intellectual. That film, A Beautiful Mind is a perfect example. You have this mathematician who's, he's a genius. He sees things no one else can see. He's in a class apart. He's not like you and me. And I think that that's a distortion of, of what it, what an intellectual really is. And you can see that through an example, I think it was being intermediary, someone like Albert Einstein, who has that huge profile, who has the mystique of the genius, who has the puffy hair and the million quotes that none of us could have come up with on our own. But if you think of him as, uh, a young man in his late twenties with a wife and a kid and no job because he's too weird and he's too, uh, disrespectful of authority, he can't get work. And he has this job in a patent office. He's a bureaucrat. And he thinks about things. He looks at the clock tower. He, uh, looks at trains going by and he starts to really have insights into the way the world is. You can see that someone like that is not that different from John Baker, the Essex office worker who gets preoccupied with peregrines. And John Baker in turn, he, now he wrote a wonderful book. So he's very famous. But how many birdwatchers are there out there who are just looking at birds, taking them in, learning about them. Where does that knowledge go? Um, maybe it gets passed on to their family or their friends or their, their fellow birdwatchers. Maybe it's lost when they die, but it's, it has that value in and of itself. And if you train yourself as I have through the, um, these strange experiences that I've had and how to enforce or reflect on, you start to see its ordinary forms as being more real, more, more emblematic, more central, more authentic than even the famous versions. And something like the image of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind starts to seem really fake. Something that we imagine, but that doesn't really exist. It's a fantasy of an intellectual. Whereas the real thing is something, uh, more extraordinary, but also more available to us in all kinds of surprising ways. And it, it, and I really encourage people who are listening to us now or who are reading the book or listening to the book, just start to look for it in your daily life. Think about those weird relatives, you know, who lived, uh, you know, behind your grandparents and worked in the factory and, uh, had this memorized all of Victorian poetry or whatever it was. Some years ago when I, my first essay on this came out, I got a letter from someone who I'd been in college with who had grown up in Nigeria. And he told me about growing up and capturing bugs and reading encyclopedias and studying the bugs. And I was thinking about this biography of Darwin that I read some time ago where that's what Darwin did as a kid. He, he catalogued the rocks in his yard. He did chemistry, you know, messed around with chemistry he found around the house, collected bugs and looked at bugs. And if you looked at what these people were actually doing, it's the same thing. I hope that that, uh, starts to break down some of the, the pedestals and the fantasies and our false ideas of what an intellectual is helps us to see it in our own lives. You can't leave to specialists your, your basic humanity. And if I'm right that intellectual life, thinking, reflecting, asking fundamental questions about yourself and your relation to the world, I think those are really just part of what it means to be alive, what it means to be human, what it means to be a member of a community. And we can't pretend that somehow only smart people get to do that, or only rich people get to do that, or only the winners get to do that. On the one hand, I want to say it should be for everyone. Another way I want to say, I don't need to argue for that because it's already taking place all the time. We just don't pay attention to it. There's in fact a wealth of intellectual activity that's going on all around us in very ordinary places. And, uh, it has, because of its littleness, its humbleness and authenticity for us, it can help us recover something. Those of us who are like myself, uh, winners, who have a relatively high social status, who are, you know, professional intellectuals, academics, what have you, can help remind us of what the point is of what we're doing. The point of what we're doing is not to, to, um, add lines to the CV. Uh, it's not to get a slightly more high prestige job so that we can slightly diminish our teaching. It's to cultivate and practice ourselves this, this human activity, this thing that makes us who we are. Want to support the channel? Join the BigThink members community where you get access to videos early, [00:48:56] Speaker 2: ad-free.