My friend Hannah Miller has written a fascinating blog post that got me thinking in a little different way about some issues that I’ve been working on for a book I’m slowly finishing. Indeed, I had a two-fold reaction. This is the first. A second is in another post.
Hannah starts by asking why we are so busy documenting our lives, implicitly pointing out how so much of what we do on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Picassa, among other sites, is devoted to putting down a record of what’s happened to us and what we care about. She ends by pointing out that geologists whose focus is on deep time—the changes in the planet that take place over eons–both recognize the extent to which our lives are a mere blip in time but also get a sense of connection to eternity. To see the wonderful way she gets from the beginning to the end, you should go read it and then come back here.
I’m one of those who some of the time likes to, as Hannah says, document my life. And her post got me thinking a bit more than I have in the past about when that is a good practice and when it might be a bad one.
I’m pretty sure I understand where that urge to document one’s life comes from, in my case, and more generally. I’ve been working on a book that develops a Platonic approach to love, sex and politics. Plato argues that the fundamental human inclination—he calls it eros—is to want to possess the good—those things in life that make it worth living—forever. But because we are mortal, we can’t hold on to the good forever. So we are moved to procreate in light of beauty, to leave behind something of ourselves that will last beyond our all too short lives.
Plato thinks, and I agree, that it is this aspiration that leads people to write poems and plays, fictions and philosophies. It’s what lead them to try to have an impact on the world around them through political action. It’s what leads them to be the kind of person that others admire and want to emulate. And, of course, it’s what leads them to have and raise children. All these things, our accomplishments and achievements, what we make of ourselves and what leave for others, is the product of eros. As the poet Philip Larkin puts it in An Arundel Tomb, “what will survive of us is love.”
Of course it is not just survival that is at issue. The demanding expression of love of what we do and think in our work and family life, is Plato believes intrinsically satisfying. It is not just the end that is important but the path to that end, although without the the ideal driving us forward, without stimulation of the beauty we seek to create, the activity of procreating would be pointless and without pleasure.
I strongly suspect that what Hannah calls the urge to document is also an expression of eros. But her post leads me to worry that it may in some way be a false, or ultimately unsatisfactory, expression of it. Hannah points to two things that should concern us. One is that it is the contemporary documentation of our lives is just too easy. Anyone can leave a record of their words and photographs these days. It doesn’t take real achievement to leave something behind. Indeed, it’s not even clear that anyone is paying attention to much that we document. And if no one looks at our paper or electron trail, have we really succeeded in documenting it? It doesn’t take much eros to seem to produce something that looks like, but probably will not, really survive us. And even worse, documentation that is easy, that makes no demands on us, cannot hope to bring us the pleasure of procreation in light of some ideal.
A second worry is that in using our technology to document our lives we are also cooking the books, picking and choosing our friends to comment on and vouch for our lives. And that, again, make real pride in achievement and accomplishment far too easy and thus ultimately impossible.
Contemporary technology allows us to democratize the production of information and, by and large, I think that is a very good thing in politics. But if it leads us to do away with any sense of, appreciation for, or aspiration to achievements that reach for something truly extraordinary and that stand apart from the every day, we will have lost the capacity for finding joy today in action aimed at living forever. If everything is left behind, nothing is, and then we will look at what we produce and say, with Tina Turner, “what’s love got to do with it?”
This is the point in the set of arguments I’ve just been echoing at which conservatives begin to bemoan the lowering of standards and the decline of civilization. I’m not going to go that route, however. I think contemporary technology is, on balance, going to be good for erotic expression. in the broad sense of eros. It will eventually give people all over the world access to wonderful works of art and thought. This access, and the mash-ups they make possible. will spur wonderful achievements. The best of art and thought has always come from clashing cultures and ideas, clashing symbols. And, provided we find ways to search networks so that we can find and report on the gold amidst the rubbish, new technology will give more and more people an opportunity to leave behind true and deep expressions of love to initally a small but hopefully then a wide audience. It won’t happen immediately—anyone who has studied the rise and fall of artistic reputations knows that it never has—but it will happen.
As for the everyday documentation of the internet, the words and pictures that after a day or so are never accessed or heard from again, perhaps we can hope at least for this: that in sharing the erotic aspiration, in trying to put their best selves forward in the records they leave, people will be motivated to be better than they otherwise would be. And maybe if the new tools at our disposal ultimately make the hope to live forever by procreating in light of beauty open to more people at least to some degree, they will share, if only in a limited way, in the enoblement and joy that accompanies that life.