Free Thinking for Me, But Not for Thee
Why is it we're so sure that it's always other people who need correction?
A little meme-analysis this week.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve notice this meme being shared around Facebook.
This is one of those memes that cycles around every so often, and it’s easy to understand why: it has the effect of validating how everyone sees themselves, no matter where they rest in the political spectrum.
I think that the source of the meme’s popularity can be traced to two distinct features.
First, Feynman’s statement (which I assume is really from him — wouldn’t that be embarrassing) is something that, on the surface, would be agreed to by everyone who reads it. So by sharing it, you get all the validation that social media offers with none of the agita that often comes with taking a stand.
Second, the sentiment that Feynman is expressing is expertly suited for our human tendency to apply convicting, prophetic wisdom to other people. I find it interesting that the meme frequently gets shared by two distinct groups.
The first is meritocratic liberals who either exist in or are devoted to elite institutions. The “trust science” voices in our collective claptrap.
The second stands as their opposite, the “do your own research” voices in said claptrap.
It’s both odd and utterly predictable that these furious foes can both trace their ideological roots to the same general sentiments about intelligence and the fabric of society. But like I said, it’s probably why the meme is so annoyingly evergreen. Everyone thinks it’s a mic drop for their side, a closing argument aimed at someone else.
Let me be clear that I too agree with the meme’s assertion. I just think that anyone who uses it has an ethical obligation to say it out loud into a mirror five times like they’re conjuring Candyman.
In other words, everyone believes this until it’s their answers that get questioned.
What Would Matthew Arnold Do?
I’m visiting Great Britain next month and I will most definitely be making a stop at Matthew Arnold’s grave. Arnold has been my intellectual North Star for a very long time. I sometimes refer to him as my spirit-animal and when I read biographies about him, I see an alarming amount of myself in his personality and ideas. I don’t believe in reincarnation, but I do believe that people across time can be wired in similar ways and that is the case with me and Arnold. And so my upcoming trip has me diving back into his work again. Sidebar: I do know that Arnold has been embarrassingly out-of-fashion for about 100 years, so me outing myself as a fanboy here will not impress anybody, but I’ve long accepted that the margins of society are my happy place.
Maybe it’s Arnold’s influence that makes me roll my eyes at the memeification of Feynman’s proclamation. But for whatever reason, I do think that the case is a handy example of a pattern of thought that prevails among people of all political stripes in our time.
I’m actually not sure if “pattern” is exactly the right word here; it’s more of an attitude, a stance one takes as they encounter the world. The attitude I’m referring to is one of absolute self-confidence and a nearly absolute absence of intellectual humility.
In our time, this attitude is rooted in identity. We claim identities for ourselves and defend them to the death. If one has built one’s house in the land of Team Libertarian or Team Progressive or Team Conservative, then one operates as if everything is a defense of the homeland. The use of the Feynman meme, in this case, is a weapon to be lobbied across borders, pointing out a weakness in the other side. Again, that’s why it’s so popular.
Recently,
wrote about an aspect of this cultural style, naming it “knowingness.” I highly recommend his piece on this (and all his work, for that matter. He also has a Substack. It’s called Burnout Culture and it’s wonderful).But I’ll be ancient and use terms that Arnold used, most famously in Culture and Anarchy, to frame how I see it: Hebraism and Hellenism.
Arnold was a person of his time and it’s unfortunate that he landed on these particular terms (they were part of the intellectual zeitgeist of his day). They seem odd and vaguely cringy to modern sensibilities, no doubt. I don’t want to belabor it here, but I’m sure Arnold meant no offense. He didn’t even necessarily favor one of these attitudes over the other — he argued that both were needed, two necessary sides of a dialectic.
Arnold defines Hebraism as “strictness of conscience,” and Hellenism as “spontaneity of conscience.”
In other words, Hebraism compels the subject to rigidly follow the rules of their beliefs and put them into action in the world, with full confidence, like the rabbis that kept Judaism going for millennia in diaspora. It’s about duty and action.
Hellenism is more about pure, reflective thought; playing with ideas, testing them, and resisting rigidness. It’s a necessary attitude if one is to see the world as it actually is, another ethos Arnold espoused. (And incidentally, just to head off complaints, one can definitely describe the rabbinic tradition in this same way. A topic for another day).
In his day, Arnold felt the English mind was too complacent and confident in its traditions and social structures. And it was too willing (liberal and Tory alike) to submit to one form or another of the creeping mechanization of life. The machines of life were dictating culture’s course and everyone was just blindly following along. It was too Hebraistic and needed an injection of the Hellenism he saw driving progress and Culture on the European continent.
I wonder if the bleak divisiveness we suffer from today can be traced to our own mechanically rigid devotion to our beliefs, which we’ve distilled into our very identities. We don’t exist without them.
Above all, Arnold detested machinery in all its forms, mechanical, economic, and social. It squeezes the “spontaneity of conscience” out of people and society. It renders them unable to see the world as it actually is.
My favorite quote from Arnold is from Culture and Anarchy and it speaks to the importance of having a bit of freedom from the rigidity of your own beliefs:
“Where was the hope of making reason and the will of God prevail among people who had a routine which they had christened reason and the will of God, in which they were inextricably bound, and beyond which they had no power of looking?” (Emphasis mine).
We have good intentions and good sentiments about the world. Then we put some form to those ideas to bring them to life, to put them into action. Then those practices become routine. Then the routine replaces the spirit of the good thing. And we become bound to the mechanical devotion to our routines. And where is the hope of making reason and the will of God prevail in such a situation?
This speaks to the great blind spot I see in the mechanical sharing of the Feynman meme. It shows the depth of our temptation to think of ourselves as Hellenists when we are really Hebraists.
It justifies us, but in doing so, it has lost the power to convict us.
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I read this several years ago in the Philokalia, a collection of Orthodox monastic writings, and it has stuck with me since: "When reading the Holy Scriptures, he who is humble and engaged in spiritual work will apply everything to himself and not to someone else."
Well I’ll out myself as my intellectual North Star being George Orwell, 60-70 years out of fashion, if he ever truly was. I appreciate your point here; I grow increasingly frustrated with the intransigence of peoples positions. It’s oddly old-fashioned, like we’re back in days where people lived in villages their whole lives and never traveled anywhere else and thus had purely assumed views of the world. The weird part is we’re all doing this with the internet 🤪