Words&Dirt

“The brain, as far as Richard could determine from haphazard skimming of whatever came up on Google, was sort of like the electrical system of Mogadishu.  A whole lot was going on in Mogadishu that required copper wire for conveyance of power and information, but there was only so much copper to go around, and so what wasn’t being actively used tended to get pulled down by militias and taken crosstown to beef up some power-hungry warlord’s private, improvised power network.  As with copper in Mogadishu, so with neurons in the brain.  The brains of people who did unbelievably boring shit for a living showed dark patches in the zones responsible for job-related processes, since all those almost-never-exercised neurons got pulled down and trucked somewhere else and used to beef up the circuits used to keep track of NCAA tournament brackets and celebrity makeovers.”

––Reamde, by Neil Stephenson, pg. 132-3

“Most Enlightenment and liberal thinkers gave only limited endorsement to individualism and privatism, insisting that these traits must be modified by universal reason.  Hence the emphasis on education in Enlightenment philosophy: not, originally, as a means to personal mobility and economic success, as parents tend to justify education today, but as a way of reconciling individual liberty with social cohesion.  Early political economists believed that critical reason, nurtured by careful education, would lead ‘enlightened’ individuals to reject shortsighted definitions of self-interest.  In eighteenth-century thought––including that of Adam Smith, the supposed father of laissez-faire economics–– ‘enlightened self-interest’ meant not ‘taking care of number one’ but supporting the extension of mass education, vigorously opposing financial speculation, and fully accepting political obligations.  Laws, regulations, and due process provisions were seen as enhancing individual rights by providing a secure framework for social cooperation, competition, and negotiation.

But since most theorists of rational egoism deduced rationality from people’s ability to calculate and pursue their own needs, there was a strong instrumental aspect to definitions of reason and, especially in the nineteenth century, a tendency to drop the word enlightened in discussions of how to protect self-interest.  As humans came to be defined as solitary island dwellers rather than as gregarious collaborators, regulation of social and economic intercourse came to be considered an unwarranted interference with the individual’s right to pursue self-interest.  Liberty ceased to be conceptualized as a particular set of social relationships among humans, protected by careful regulation.  It became, instead, an entirely individual quality or personality trait, independent of social relationships and therefore to be defended against regulation.”

––The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Stephanie Coontz, pg. 51