During World War II, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed that German-occupied France was never more free, because “every accurate thought” was a conquest over German propaganda. Here’s what Sartre said in 1944:
We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported en masse. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest.
That last phrase will always be true. Every accurate thought is a conquest.
And yet today, in the Machine age, what threatens our ability to think accurately is often different from the threat in Sartre’s time. Our devices are certainly capable of spewing venom; but they also spew a type of vanity. […]
The limitation of the digital world is that it isn’t directly connected to the real one. There’s no earth and soil behind our screens, no raindrops falling, no tree roots sucking up moisture, no muddy footsteps made by human feet. It is a digital representation, a shadow mimicking reality.
This separation from the real gives the online world a certain latitude, a certain stretchiness. […]
[O]nline experiences can coddle our view of the world, even if it is fantasy. This happens not just because people are trying to spread “fake news”. It happens because we have an urge to make sense of the world we live in. But digital content, being so easy to manipulate, can turn the search for real understanding into a search for whatever satisfies us.
So we can end up with blancmange understanding, like a blancmange pastry: a high-sugar trans-fat blob of tasty ideas, without much basis in fact, and with no great nutritional value.
Such distorted ideas become possible because they remain separated from the corrective friction of reality. It will always be easier to stay in the virtual world and keep our distortions…
Naturally, this comes at the cost of the world and of truth.
And what is truth?
What is truth? is also the question that Pontius Pilate asks shortly before sending Jesus to be crucified. It’s a very modern question, but it’s fitting that it was asked by a Roman, because it shows it’s also an eternal question. What is truth? How do we know that we aren’t all living in a dream right now?
Before the crucifixion, Jesus is scourged, leaving him wounded and bloody before the final execution. Jesus is supposed to be God, this infinite power “out there”, but at that moment in the story, he is embodied in physical reality. Even if you are not a religious person, there’s something here that speaks to a question we face in our age.
You see it in the Book of Genesis too. Let there be light. Let there be land. Let there be creatures. God speaks, and words become physical reality. According to this worldview, reality is not a dream, not a virtual simulation. Our consciousness is connected to a body and a physical world where there are aches, sufferings, and even death, but also the beauty of summer skies, raindrops, and the feeling of mud under our feet.
If, as Sartre suggests, every accurate thought is a conquest, then every embodied experience can support that conquest through the corrective friction of life itself.
“We’ll never be able to build an accurate and lifegiving worldview out of stretchy digital goop,” says Peco. “But we don’t have to play the puzzling game, not if we’re determined to seek out the corrective friction of the real world—through our embodiment, agency, connection, and the other spheres shown in the Visual Human Creed.”
Peco refers to these eight spheres as “battlegrounds,” but “not because we are urging you to some kind of militancy. Rather, it’s to point out that there is no neutral ground.” And he adds that you don’t need to take on all eight of them; it can be enough to focus, really focus, on one. “Defend even one sphere thoroughly, and you will save many of the others.”
In the link above, Ruth Gaskovski follows this up with “the 3Rs of Unmachining”: “Recognize the damaging impact of technology wherever it happens, Remove it, and Return to the real world.”
And adds, sharply: “We can read as much Mumford, Kingsnorth, Crawford, Berry, Newport, Carr, Haidt, or any number other tech-critical writers as we will, but if all these insights do not actually translate into our lives, we are only moving mind furniture.”
And, hope-filled-ly: “What we need to focus on is how to live a fully human life. The individuals and families who commit themselves fully to remaining grounded in reality, and on being fully human, have already won the war.”